Blessed By Shakyamuni

Near the end of this fractured fairy tale of a novel, there is a scene where Anguli, who is a long distance taxi-driver and serial killer and named after the Buddhist murderer-turned-monk Angulimala, arrives on camelback to pick up someone in the badlands of central India. Having reached the spot, Anguli tries to stop the animal and unmount but the camel goes on, first at a canter then slowly, in circles around the other person. Exasperated, he threatens the animal with a knife, coaxes, kicks, taps its head but to no avail. Finally, he “sang the opening phrase of Jana Gana Mana. The last half worked, for it made the beast pause to half-turn its head in intelligent enquiry”.

Laced with humour which is irreverent, dark and sometimes off-colour, Upa­­­manyu Chatterjee’s sixth novel is a tour de force that welds together myths, folklore and realist storytelling to shine a hard light on the pervasiveness of evil in our times. It opens with the story of Anguli who drives a green Ambassador, ferrying passengers acr­oss the country and killing at random. Anguli soon reali­ses that “he didn’t like leaving alive those whom he loved”. But does he find his Shakyamuni in this tale set in Bombay, Delhi and the dacoit-­ridden dust bowl of central India?

We are soon introduced to the character of Nirip, “the impotent prince” with one kidney, son of Pashupati—a shady business tycoon who employs body snatchers, exports human skeletons, runs a blood farm, gets blowjobs from his maids and is a cannibal to boot. Nirip tries his best to maintain a distance from the evil embodied by his father. He escapes into drug-addled stupors with his testosterone injecting half-sister Magnum or goes slumming with his friend Vinayak, while his mother Manasa spends her days in a flat with a retinue of servants who believe she is a witch.

While Pashupati aims for respectability by setting up a hospital and aiming for public office, Nirip plans his own kidnapping, which catapults the story to the dacoit-ridden ravines of central India. After the first 40 pages, the reader might begin to miss the tautness of Anguli’s story, but now in the badlands near Jhansi, the narrative again picks up pace. Dacoits, caste wars, a blood farm and a cricket match between rival gangs of bandits, played amidst minefields and lit up by automobile headlamps, morphs this twisted fairy tale into a crossover between a surreal masterpiece and Bollywood blockbusters like Gangs of Wasseypur.

The novel does have gory details, mus­ings on decrepitude, violence and crue­lty. In the hands of another writer this mindful fornication with evil, this loading with violence, might have see­med gratuitous but Chatterjee’s rapier wit, surreal flights and dark humour couched in a sophisticated diction militate against any such eventuality. Fractured fairytale as a genre is seldom attempted by Indian writers of literary fiction. Rana Dasgu­pta’s short story The Billionaire’s Sleep which takes off from Rapunzel, comes to mind, but now with Chatterjee’s foray, we can expect more action.

The bats of English August are back in this novel, guiding Nirip through the darkness as he turns 50, while we navigate the hairpin bends of the plot, expecting Anguli to come charging back into the frame. They say that the darkest hour is just before dawn but will there be a redemptive dawn for Anguli and the others? To find out, you have to read Chatterjee’s fairy tale, liberally spiked with evil.