What does one say of an author who has the following comments to make about his writing: For me, writing is like a wave. Almost like nausea. You never know what food is inside you, or when it's going to come out. But it does. Slowly, but surely, bits of stale meat rise up to choke you, and you release them into the sink. Words are exactly like that. They just keep pouring directly out of the hand, and you never know when they'll stop. That he's read Trainspotting? That he is digestively challenged?
A Short History of Everything is in august company in that it is titled provocatively like A Short History of Time by Stephen Hawkins or A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters by Julian Barnes. The author also owes a self-confessed debt to The Catcher in the Rye. That is not enough to absolve the book of its adolescent awkwardness, its pomposity, its appalling cuteness.
Ever since Arundhati Roy (like Gautam Bhatia an architect by discipline) wrote The God of Small Things, adolescent incest has become a rite of passage for aspiring bestsellers. The plot of this inane and juvenile narrative is a reductive chalta hai melange of memory and desire. The Holden Caulfield look-alike lives in a New Delhi bureaucratic colony in the sixties. India's age of innocence coincides with the protagonist's, and we journey with him through the uncrowded roads and bylanes of a saner, kinder Delhi, Lodhi Road, Khan Market, Janpath, watching our pasts unfold. This portion of the book is an effectively realised, sepia-tinted nostalgia byte, with some hilarious adolescent pornographic pastiches thrown in. Sarita had heavy full buttocks. As her eyes fell on Suresh, she eased them out, one by one, from 30 per cent nylon, 70 per cent terricot, cotton bra and let them fall provocatively across her chest. Heavy stuff, man.
The trouble begins with the plot, or the lack of it. At some stage the hero abandons his healthy and acutely normal pornographic urges, his love for Anita and sundry other fantasy figures, and in faux-tragic passages gets down to humping his sister Sita. The original B.C., as it were. However, it is never really clarified whether this portion is sibling fantasy, as with the brother Shiv, or an integral part of the narrative. A snivelling young lovechild called Gita makes a few random and mysterious appearances, and then that's it. Time's up.
The publishing boom and the surfeit of manuscripts which make little distinction between self-expression and literary discipline have led to much lazy and complacent writing and publishing. With the correct editing inputs, this good-natured and well-meaning book might well have been knocked into shape. There is surely room in the market for sly and funny books, in the traditions of vintage Anurag Mathur. However, finely-honed slapstick is quite different from slipshod laugh routines. A Short History of Everything is a hyped-up, pretentious smatter of clever words. Given the state of things, it would be no surprise if the book became a bestseller. As they say, where there's hype there's hope.
