Book Review: 'The Remains Of The Body' By Saikat Majumdar

Saikat Majumdar’s latest novel ‘The Remains of the Body’ (Penguin 2024) underpins the interpersonal dynamics of intimacy in unravelling the physical and psycho-emotional angst in a hetero-normative social order. What ‘remains’ is the truth of humans as drifters in the pursuit of their loving selves. What ‘remains’ is the elusive truth of the body, the trigger of conscious and unconscious sensory perceptions. What ‘remains’ is the human behaviour that is astoundingly complex and at times too deep to be fathomed in seeking a unified experience. What ‘remains’ is the truth that the reality of homoerotic experience is a pulsating rhythm of memory in response to physiological events unveiling reams of associations.

The novel explores the ‘queer’ plight of Kaustav who struggles with the instability of his sexual desire to map out the existence of his sexual identity. The affective power of the novel resides in its visceral and psychological representation of torment that ails Kaustav as he feels saddled by the norms of heteronormative identities.

For Kaustav, his friend Avik is the reservoir of amorous love breeding disquiet and anguish. Without Avik, Kaustav is agonised by his fear of dependence and clinginess. His commitment phobia is a deterrent to his moral responsibility to define himself and determine his own values. From this existential point of view, Kaustav’s obsessive male gaze on Avik’s body impedes his ‘existence’ and is a foil to his ‘essence’. Kaustav’s existential anxiety is further confounded by his forbidden desire for Sunetra, Avik’s wife. Kaustav’s inability to shed his inner clutter keeps him imprisoned in his fantasies and he is doomed to live a cloistered existence.

Being drunk on romantic fantasies about Avik, Kaustav’s sense of irrationality is bent on razing his moral world into ruins. Kaustav reels under a pervasive emptiness as he believes his happiness is the cornerstone of Avik’s reciprocity to his sexual cravings and polymorphous pleasures. Paradoxically, his psychic life is sacrificed on the altar of his sexual partnership with Avik though Avik proves to be a rather less sexually apt partner as he seems to be oblivious to Kaustav’s unspeakable desires. Kaustav’s aspiration to create a sort of hermetic seal crumbles down as he is caught between Avik’s body and Sunetra’s body. This split of self into Avik and Sunetra is the chapter of narcissistic fantasy and self-possession, the tragic flaw in Kaustav’s character, that Kaustav fails to read between the lines or reads with a flawed logic of all-encompassing control on Avik’s body. Kaustav has no solutions to its body-as-riddle problem. He is entangled in the split of self that renders his existence enigmatic and irreducible.

The fractured life of Avik and Sunetra, who do not share a reciprocal matrimonial belonging, makes Kaustav fanaticize Sunetra with whom he has no qualms about sharing an intimate relationship behind Avik’s back. The novel provokes questions about the implications of ethical living, married loving, dependent loving, and the lofty ideal of Kierkegaard’s unconditional love.

The novel offers a compelling landscape of the secret and uncanny world of intimacy. It evokes the purely intimate and animalistic in the heart of sensual darkness that nurtures erotic longings lending to a strange mise-en-scène where uncharted libidinal senses are inflamed but partially consummated keeping the embers of desires with subdued intensity to burn aflame. The characters are tantalised by the unbridled permissive pleasures of intimacy. The seductiveness of bodily experience is manifested in multiple ways.

The water trope in the novel is a telling reminder of human-nature symbiosis, the organic relationship that calls for an unconditional renewal for libidinal fulfilment where fulfilment remains an enigma breeding an eternal feeling of emptiness. The water is also a trigger for desire, the unbounded and sporadic desire for physical proximity regardless of the sense of morality being violated.

The use of diction like ‘pool’, ‘water’ at the beginning of the novel in the chapter ‘Invisible Skin’ recalls Mary Oliver’s poem ‘Pink Moon – The Pond’ where she writes: “So you relax, you don’t fight it anymore, /the darkness coming down called water,/called spring,/called the green leaf, called/a woman’s body/as it turns into mud and leaves,/as it beats in its cage of water,”. The water is a sexual stimulus creating an affective response pattern where the dominant emotion is love or call it the captivating intensity of an ‘unrequited’ union. The fluidity of the relationship is evoked through the symbolic intent of the motif of water. This fluidity poses questions about the nature of togetherness and intimacy.

It would not be out of place to recall R.S.Thomas’ poem ‘ApHuw’s Testament’ where the bliss of companionship in married life is potently evident in the stanza :“Nineteen years now/Under the same roof /Eating our bread,/Using the same air;/Sighing, if one sighs,/Meeting the other’s/Words with a look/That thaws suspicion.”

By contrast, the married life depicted in the novel is terrifyingly stifled by sneaking suspicion, fear, and betrayal. Who is the ‘real’ culprit? Is it Kaustav’s narcissist’s relationship with his self-serving needs? Is it his cold apathy to conscience and falling prey to dysthymic disorder? Is Kaustav a compulsive monogamist by his acute penchant for promiscuous desires or a compulsive libertine by his overdependence on Avik or a pervert who is given to sexual stalking where the love-sick Sunetra becomes his partner in the plenitude of wanton sexcapades? Doesn’t Kaustav get a fictitious sense of control and a fillip to his erotic imagination by desiring Sunetra who walks along the self-blinded paths of the betrayal of conjugal relationship? Doesn’t Kaustav’s imaginative leap into Avik’s sexual world allow him to experience moments of empathic epiphany and its consequent happiness? The discerning novelist seems to throw these loaded questions at readers.

Water recurs as an open-ended close to the narrative circle in the novel. The statement ‘Human beings were forms etched on water’ brings out the paradox of love and conjures up Sartre who contends that “…the lover demands a pledge yet is irritated by the pledge. He wants to be loved by a freedom but demands that this freedom as freedom should no longer be free”. The novel ends with an ironic recognition of love’s elusiveness as Kaustav looks at his friend Avik: ‘Shapeless, slippery forms you were stupid enough to love.’

The ending is a new beginning leaving readers with some probing questions: does this ironic recognition break the spell of self-deception? Isn’t love a life-long quest for the unattainable or unknowable? Is this internal battle between acceptance and denial an inevitable part of human existence? The concluding statement of the novel ‘That’s how you knew you were still alive.’ is epigrammatic in identifying the truths of this elusiveness that humans strive for. It is this pervasiveness of love, the aches and pains of homoerotic and beyond, that lends depths to the realms of sexual freedom and relationship, the understanding of mind/body binary, and the vagaries of human desire in affecting interpersonal relationships.

Saikat Majumdar’s ‘The Remains of the Body’ seems to aim at harnessing the worldview of pan-sexuality that radiates the beauty of inclusion, empathy, and love; it is the worldview where the body never ceases to intrigue in unravelling the intimate texture of queer homoerotic sensibilities against the domineering hierarchy of heteronormativity.