Terror Cutout

he best thing you can say about Omair Ahmad’s new novel is that it shows a few glimmers of potential. The ambition to capture something of the spirit of small-town Muslim north India is worthy. The attempt to telescope the phenomenon of Islamic terrorism into a single life, while hardly new, carries a political urgency often lacking in Indian writing in English. The grasp of history that must underlie such a venture appears firm.

On occasion, Ahmad serves up a nugget of insight. The haphazard bylanes of the novel’s fictional setting, a town called Moazzamabad in Uttar Pradesh, make it “not a place of numbers, but names”. A geography-teacher-turned-mullah is the sort of person whose closest brush with romance was likely to be “copying Rajesh Khanna’s hairstyle”. The chatter about riots and forced sterilisation that fills the local mosque illustrates the texture of political disaffection in India.

But worthy ambition and the occasional insight cannot keep this slim novel afloat. The supposed protagonist, Jamaal Ansari or Jimmy the Terrorist, never makes the transition from cardboard cutout to fully formed character. The plotting is amateurish and jumpy: the story unfolds as a series of blind turns and sudden slamming of brakes. The dialogue rarely rises above the pedestrian. The underlying politics carries a tedious predictability: murderous Hindutva supporters, sadistic cops, innocent Muslims forced to violence by the weight of history and circumstances.

In the end, Ahmad’s effort reads less as a work of the imagination, and more as a newspaper op-ed hastily dressed in the garb of fiction.