Spake The Gunslinger's Gita

The Barrett M107 automatic rifle is one of the deadliest firearms in the world. “The M107 had the accuracy to take out a 12 cm target from a range of 2000 metres.... The bullet travels between Mach 1.5 and Mach 3, so the victim falls dead a few instants before the shot is heard. It was a weapon worthy to be fired at Yash Bauji, Jeet thought.” Yash Bauji is none other than Bhishma in this latest incarnation of the Mahabharata where bullets fly thick and fast as characters flounder in the smoky haze of a slippery dharma in the backdrop of the Mumbai underworld.

The weaponry on display is the wet dream of a struggling terror outfit’s boss. There is the Kriss super V sub-machine-gun, there are grenade launchers aplenty, there is the ubiquitous Kalashnikov, the nifty Ruger LCR for young boys like Abhi (Abhimanyu), and then there is Gandu—a Smith & Wesson 586—which Jeet (Arjun) fina­lly uses to finish off Yash Bauji and others in the bloody internecine war fought between twin phalanges of the powerful Pestonjee organisation that rules Mumbai’s gangland.

This is the Mahabharata teleported to a time of cricket betting, gang wars and murky politician-criminal nexuses. So don’t look for faithfulness to originals. While significant plot points of the epic, like the game of dice, Draupadi’s (Jahn) humiliation, the exile, the great war of Kurukshetra, Krishna’s (Kishenbhai) instructions to Jeet and the slaying of heroes like Karna (Karl), Bhis­hma (Yash Bauji) and Dronacharya (B.K. Acharya) are covered, everything is done differently in the interests of the new setting and  verisimilitude. So in Deb’s novel the ‘Pandavas’ are three bro­thers (not counting Karna or Karl) and the ‘Kauravas’ just two, plus one sister. Here bootleggers and hitmen bathe the pages in blood while cold-blooded sharpshooters lean out from speeding SUVs, spraying bullets at men of the rival gang.

Deb’s lean and powerful voice, punctuated by deadpan humour, is pitch perfect for describing this state of affairs. Some of the action scenes with cars and trained killers are executed with such mastery that a sense of deja vu crept up on this reviewer. In fact The Last War is a story ripe for celluloid.

One obvious issue with reimagining an epic has to do with readers’ expectations. Unless you are making a clean break from the original or harvesting hazy myths, as in Amish’s Shiva Tril­ogy, you need to have an obsessive attention to detail to make the reinvented characters and settings plausible. Here it happens most of the time though a few scenes might seem slightly contrived. However, Deb’s crackling prose takes such small burdens off the readers back.

The characters of Kishenbhai, Karl and Vikram (Bhima) will endure. There is a recurring image of Kishenbhai, underworld don turned social worker, sipping Glenmorangie while instructing Jeet on dharma and the need to fight. His whisky-soaked discourse on dharma, which is a frame story for the novel’s four sections, his shrewdness and steely det­e­­r­­mination to wipe out the enemy, merit the greatest number of curtain calls.

The Last War is a power-packed, edge-of-your-seat thriller with Vyasa’s epic engine confidently chugging away in the background. It’s simply irresistible!

(Rajat Chaudhuri is the author of the novels Hotel Calcutta and Amber Dusk)