The novel sets the tone in the dedication page, “For all ghuspetiyas everywhere…” reflecting on one of the major narratives in contemporary India. The book traverses different topographies and the lines interconnecting them become clear at the end. The opening chapter, ‘City of Brume’, speaks of endless waiting in Delhi—queuing up before ATMs during the days of demonetisation; stories of brutal violence against women and minorities; Bibi, the chief protagonist, dreaming of strangers, seeking love; walking through endless corridors. She is disillusioned by her work as a journalist at Amidala. She wonders whether when she is gone from Amidala, “will they miss something fundamental about her.”
A man breaks into Vimana Energy Enterprises, one of Amidala’s important clients. Some witnesses mention that they saw a ‘‘monkey’’ leaping from ledge to ledge and then disappear. In the ensuing melee, a USB stick was left behind which contained articles written by Bibi much before she had joined Amidala. It revolved around detention centres and the Union Carbide story. Naturally, Bibi’s present employers think her ‘‘past’’ is too threatening. One of her colleagues, Sanjit, whose write-ups are also part of the USB, has gone underground. Bibi has to find him. Her job gets more muddled with the arrival of mysterious texts and messages.
A hitman is the chief player in the second section, ‘Claustropolis: 1984’. He works for the factory owner who wants to eliminate an operator who might expose the misdeeds which led to the worst industrial disaster in human history. Like Bibi, the hitman also wonders if the chemical leak has affected his senses as he too is experiencing bizarre phenomena. The Brahmastra being developed by Ombani Laboratory blends fiction and reality. The action moves on to Calcutta in the third section titled ‘Paranoir: 1947’ and the ensuing violence during the time of independence. Here, the chief actor is Das, a veterinary student who is under the illusion that he has been handpicked to do some special tasks. He dreams of driving a special vimana ‘‘that will ferry people from one world to another.’’
The cityscape is peppered with savage Freud clinics, an allegory on nation-building and skeletal figures—the victims of the devastating Bengal famine. The agony of the populace is poignantly captured. “The word starvation was now censored and could no longer be printed in newspapers” “…the earth itself having transformed into a gaping mouth and an empty stomach.” A British regiment chasing a mutineer, Magadh Rai, into the Himalayas is the focus of the last section, ‘The Line of Faith: 1859’. The setting is the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857. Sykes is confronted by a mysterious White Mughal who lives in a crumbling palace called ‘White Castle’ where again, strange phenomena occur and threaten the sanity of the regiment.
The plot seems disparate but there is a strange continuity in the story line aided by similar names and tropes. In the epilogue which shares the title of the book, Bibi, searching for her comrade—Sanjit—ends up in the Andaman Islands which were once a penal colony for the British. Bibi struggles to make sense of myriad clues. She realises that “the truth is sometimes everywhere…It is in the stories you choose to read, the places you are drawn to.” Social and political disasters are visualised through novel characters—the 1984 riots in Delhi and the Bhopal disaster through the hitman—and the topography is aptly named ‘Claustropolis’.
It is difficult to categorise this book. Is it a thriller, political fiction or a book on contemporary history? The author poses a satirical question, “Who asked me what I was smoking when I wrote this?”, presumably to his editor. The book is dedicated to ghuspetiyas (infiltrators) against whom the state wants to take punitive action and detention camps are being set up. Is that why in the final section, the action shifts to the Andamans, the most notorious detention centre in our history?
Muscular nationalism finds an apt metaphor in Bibi’s description of the fog in Delhi, “A paintbrush, erasing the marks of an old, much-used canvas…the malice of the glossy-haired anchor, the banal evil of the masklike prime minister, erasing the ruins from the 20th century, the ruins from the 16th century, the ruins from the 11th century and the ruins from the third century B.C.E., erasing a countryside already erased and erasing a nation that has failed by every measure.” The sentence contains several ideas within its folds. The fog conceals the landscape and also the nation’s memory. ‘‘Banal evil’’ seems to reflect Hannah Arendt’s classic, Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Banality of Evil, the consequence of non-thinking which leads to genocidal crimes. The idea of the ‘‘monkey man’’ is also an interesting plot device. It borrows from Aditya Nigam’s essay ‘Theatre of the Urban: The Strange Case of the Monkeyman’. Deb says, “a sociologist at JNU suggested that the New Delhi Monkey Man was a case of the return of the repressed, an eruption of the uncanny, an embodiment of all those marginalised people...feared by urban, upwardly mobile India.”
However, some phrases like ‘‘step by stepstep’’ seem like a deliberate ploy to garner attention. A certain condescending tone is evident when speaking of characters like Moi who wishes to marry a rich man from the West.
In the web of intrigue and conspiracy theories, one can glimpse a majoritarian nation taking shape and citizens being rendered clueless as to how to negotiate this new ‘‘normal.’’
(This appeared in the print as 'Multiple Realities')
Shailaja Menon teaches History at the School of Liberal Studies, Ambedkar University, Delhi
