Climate man R.K. Pachauri’s debut novel is a randy ride
If rising temperatures are the basis for the climate debate, sex is the basis for Pachauri’s novel. In the very first chapter, an American woman undresses and slips under the sheets and demands of Dr Sanjay Nath, the protagonist, “It’s cold, Sandy. Come and keep me warm.” And so he does. Then on, there is scarcely a chapter that does not contain a steamy scene. For example: “He removed his clothes and began to feel Sajni’s body, caressing her voluptuous breasts. He felt very excited, but wanted to enjoy exploring her body before he attempted to enter her. But suddenly, it was all over.” And later, when Sanjay is teaching women yoga, he enjoys “the sensation of gently pushing Susan’s shoulders back a few inches, an action that served to lift her breasts even higher”.
When the sex is not graphic, it is almost comically euphemistic. After Sanjay pretends to be impotent in order to reject the advances of a married woman, he thinks gleefully, “Now that the dessert she had been hoping to savour after dinner had gone limp in the unheated oven....” But in the context of Pachauri’s book, such passages are only an appetiser. The author has said, in the acknowledgements, that much of the 402-page book was written far above the earth, during long inter-continental flights. Yet another instance, some might say, of aviation causing climate change!
As far as literary heroes go, Sanjay Nath can only be compared to such rakes as Don Juan or Casanova. Every place he goes, no matter how remote, some woman or the other throws herself at him. In the absence of women, the author has his protagonist masturbating, stealing a red hankerchief from a passenger on a train for the purpose: “He pulled it out gently, imagined Pooja naked and ready by his side, and got busy with his right hand.”
Like Sanjay, Pachauri was 15 in 1955, and like Sanjay, he spent his early years in Nainital. But Sanjay is a character no author would want to resemble beyond a point. And his friends, for sure, don’t make role models either. After he participates in a gangbang, his ‘spiritual master’ lets him off the hook with the following line: “You only took liberty physically with a girl who needed no coercion or deception.” Sanjay’s dead girlfriend appears to him whenever he is with another woman. After he has had sex with a woman in her 50s, the voice in his head says, “It’s a good thing you waited so long. It’s totally safe now. She can’t be pregnant.”
Fittingly, given the current controversy over Himalayan glaciers, the book keeps returning to the Himalayan region. There are other echoes: one of the key characters just happens to be an environmental journalist, a psychic specialises in the geology of the Himalayan range, and Sanjay happens to check into a room at the India Habitat Centre, which, incidentally, is home to Pachauri’s TERI office. But this raunchy piece of fiction is clearly no dry-as-dust ipcc assessment report. And rather than a Nobel, what it might get Pachauri, at most, is the Bad Sex award.