A more mature novel from
Aravind Adiga than his previous The White Tiger, Last Man In Tower drills into the personalities and
introspections of each resident of Tower A in the district of Vakola in Mumbai
as they wrestle with the option of receiving (each) 150 lakhs ($330,000) as the offer from a hard-line
developer intent on building one of the many posh condos sprouting in the city
like cement dreams. Now a third of a million might sound like a nice spread of
cash, but not a necessity from which to retire. Not so in India, where, as
Adiga points out, the average per capita annual income is $800. So, where and
when can I sign, and when do you tear down this creaky old rat-trap?
Adiga takes great care in
detailing the back stories and presenting travails of his characters, and the
result is a sometimes bewildering exploration of depth and ambiguity,
interfamilial drama and isolation. The residents here are middle class, but
Mumbai’s rapidly upward mobile construction hopes are ahead of the economic
realities by a generation or two. Deepak Vij, Ramesh Ajwani, Ms. Meenakshi and
others still harden themselves to the long, filthy work commute while existing
in a dilapidated building. So when the offer comes to take the money and
resettle, it’s not a dilemma for most of the residents.
Except one. Yogesh Murthy
(Masterji), a retired schoolteacher, stubborn, not influenced by wealth or
comfort, rejects the offer, and the remainder of the novel accelerates into a
dramatic and heartbreaking series of events between him, his ambiguously loyal
friend, and the rest of his neighbours trying to convince him of his “error”.
It’s a terrific set-up,
and Adiga delivers. Gone is much of the sarcastic humour of The White Tower,
replaced by the ironic, shaded humour in this more accomplished novel. But the
biggest difference between the two books is in Adiga’s astonishing growth in
how he sees his characters. The ridiculous terms some insist on – “good” and
“bad” – to describe these people, vanish. And Mumbai is the greatest character
of all, a sprawling, noisy, corrupt juggernaut nevertheless inflected with
nooks of beauty and colour.
Another novel set in
Mumbai rolled out in 2007, Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games, at 900
densely-packed pages a structural paean to the city’s excess. At first take, an
epic would seem to be a faulty tactic for the usually terse detective thriller,
but Chandra uses the genre as a dramatic ploy to play off contemporary and
historical problems, while subverting expectations. The good police inspector,
Sikh Sartaj Singh, is set against the bad Hindu criminal don, Ganesh Gaitonde,
but the reader knows the outcome on page 45 or so, the two meet only twice in
the novel (a total of about 15 pages), morals are presented as circumstantial
necessities rather than religious absolutes, and the climax is the most banal
conclusion to the weight of a frozen
zinc block of a book you’d never predict. (One reviewer, the usually astute
Jonathan Yardley, went so far as to complain about the main plot final tie-up,
as if Chandra didn’t know what he was doing).
Not many serious novels,
never mind epics, have the dramatic insistence ordered here. Chandra’s pace is
masterful, scenes of brutal violence interspersed with interior and spiritual
anguish. The architecture of juggling so many plots is handled with amazing
selection and transition. Characters, all of them, are lively and striking,
both in personality and unexpected action. The many scenes of detailed description
are meshed with action and character analysis (self- and other-directed). The
many dialects are frequently rendered in the original, and it’s entertaining to
read a crime book filled with repetitive swearing, casual or angry, that dares
the reader to either guess or peek at the partial glossary at the novel’s
addenda. The emotional scale one endures is both exhausting and worthwhile. The
tone is magnificent – there’s just the right amount of self-irony (the many references
to writing and filmmaking make intelligent and humorous points without rubbing
the reader’s face in dull games).
And with that last word, “games”,
it’s worth a mention that the novel’s title refers to “leela”, the Hindu
concept of divine play, an infinite cosmic dance without purpose. It supersedes
the Western notion of fixed moral assessment, and it’s here that Chandra takes
the biggest risk in an already ambitious novel, since about half the text is a
first-person memoir of the gangster, and it’s a tribute to the author that
Gaitonde – multiple murderer (including faithful employees), thief, defiler of
a young boy, serial user of randis (whores), egomaniac – is given lots of space
to wrestle with his demons, and to come out, occasionally, on top. There’s lots
of detail here, but to say more would kill the surprise. I’ll just say that
Chandra’s bold step of having Gaitonde challenge his guru’s ultimate game,
after all we already know of the warlord, is surprising and affecting.
Like Adiga’s Last Man
In Tower, Sacred Games jumps into teeming Mumbai with both feet and
all senses.
No comments:
Post a Comment