Live Specimens

here is a war raging in the Institute of Theory and Research, Mumbai. Careers, reputations, the answer to life on earth, funds are at stake. There are those, like Jana Nambodri, who want to listen to alien signals using radio-telescopes. And there is Arvind Acharya, the head of the institute, whose life’s aim is to prove that alien lifeforms are falling to Earth by sending up balloons to collect air samples 41 km into the stratosphere.

The ‘serious men’ of Manu Joseph’s debut novel are scholars, Brahmins. Big men whose world is upturned by Ayyan Mani, a lower caste clerk, and Acharya’s personal assistant, Dr Oparna Goshmaulik, a beautiful woman who is head of astrobiology and, coincidentally, total babe. “She was an event”, “a commotion”, a head-turner.

It is clear from the outset that we’re in the hands of a masterful storyteller. Manu Joseph does not so much describe someone as nail them. Jana Nambodri is described as having “a long benevolent face that clever women usually mistrusted”. And instead of giving a sociological break-up of the inhabitants of the chawl where Ayyan lives, he simply writes, “People who knew what bdd stood for were not the kind who lived there”.

Married to this economy of expression is a pacy plot, believable characters, sound science and a sharp satirical eye. It is also strangely prescient. As the affair between Acharya and Oparna progresses from consensual flirtation to something much darker, one cannot help but superimpose on them the faces of David Davidar and Lisa Rundle.

Manu Joseph’s ability to get under his characters’ skin nearly overcomes his latent misogyny. From the men’s point of view, Oparna—desirable and wronged—wanders the corridors of power like a ticking bomb. Her own point of view, however, disappears once she has served her purpose in the plot.

Self-obsessed men not coping with life is more or less the norm, at least in ‘serious fiction’ today. The heroes, I suspect, have been banished to the genres—historical romance, sci-fi, crime. Manu Joseph’s triumph is not in offering up any new perspective on caste conflict or sexual politics, or writing about science, but in creating characters whom it’s impossible not to care about, in a plot which it’s impossible not to enjoy. The themes may be serious, this is ultimately a wonderfully comic first book, and one that will have readers eagerly awaiting his next.