Out tumbles a sordid saga of child molesters, drunks, dacoits, teenage prostitutes, ageing masochist Bollywood stars, heartless provincial princesses and Australian espionage agents who have crossed the boy’s path since he was dumped as an orphan outside a church in Delhi. It’s almost too bad to be true. Still, if the success of novels is to be measured by their galloping pace and sheer readability, you can’t put this one down. I gulped it down with great relish in a few hours.
Q and A is being heralded as the big fiction debut of the year—big advance, rights sold in 15 countries and a film in the offing—so the question is: is the hype justified? The author is an Indian diplomat, one of the growing tribe of foreign ministry types with a tendency to burst into print at the end of the day’s press briefing. Given the ingenious simplicity of the plot’s framework—at once a comment on how TV contests pander to audiences in the age of avarice—Swarup has got most things right.
He is also pointing at obvious ethical dilemmas in a country where divisions of caste, class and, above all, the wide abyss between the rich and the poor, nags at any notion of equality, education and social justice. Observing the hard luck of a maidservant who gets caught despite a well-planned theft, the narrator says that she had "made the cardinal mistake of trying to cross the dividing line which separates the existence of the rich from that of the poor".
After all, an 18-year-old from the right background and school would instantly have been hailed as a genius for his grand slam in Who Will Win a Billion. A more unnerving idea, given Ram Mohammad Thomas’ misfortunes that add up to his good fortune, is whether the sum of life’s experience, however wretched, holds the right answers than the best education? For his own part, the protagonist laments: "I had information, but no knowledge," and that "I treated money...like I treated my life—as an expendable commodity."
Even if read as pure entertainment, Q and A introduces you to a cast of memorable, madcap characters, some better-drawn than others: the geeky, spy-mad Australian diplomat in Delhi who loses his wife and his job, or the autistic boy Shankar, Lajwanti the thieving maid and other residents of the princess’ outhouse in her mansion in Agra. Where characters were cliche-ridden, rather like a Dickensian dramatis personae recast in contemporary India, there were enough slick twists to redeem their implausibility.
For all his virtuosity, Swarup is unable to resolve a couple of problems. One is that of finding a convincing and consistent voice for his young hero. Ram Mohammad Thomas at one point admits that he is "no better than a parrot who faithfully recited what he heard, without really understanding a word". Yet as an Artful Dodger whirling through the underbelly of Indian life, he speaks in too many tongues, from the urbane and sophisticated to the unlettered and autistic. Listen to this: "Is an existence without desire very desirable? And is the poverty of desire rank poverty itself?" You could dismiss that as twaddle emanating from a doodling MEA mandarin but it’s laughable issuing from Thomas’ lips.
Inevitably, the lack of convincing voices leads to some absurd dialogue. "Don’t tell me you wanted someone even younger. You yourself don’t look a tad over 16 to me," says the teenage prostitute during her first encounter with the hero in Agra’s red-light district. Shortly afterwards, the hero responds with a line of startling idiocy: "I may have entered her body, but now I want to enter her mind."
And just one more thing: The American cigarette is spelt Marlboro not Marlborough. How could a worldly diplomat get that wrong?
