The story is fairly straightforward in its meandering: at the turn of the last century, in a forest somewhere UP-ish, an Englishman drunk on trees collides carnally with a young Indian bride-to-be high on opium. Englishman dies posthaste. Bride-to-be ditto, but not before marrying a Kashmiri Pandit and giving him a fair-skinned son that he imagines is his own. The son, Pran Nath, is a nasty piece of teenage work who gets his comeuppance when his genealogy is revealed by the late bride’s servant woman. In a twist of plot that belongs nowhere in a realist novel, (and thank god, this isn’t one), Pran is then slung out to begin his journey in the big bad world.
Each section is titled after the different personas the boy assumes in his journey to adulthood—Pran Nath the not-Kashmiri scion; Rukshana the fake Hijra, who becomes a sexual pawn in a palace intrigue; White Boy who stumbles through Amritsar in the aftermath of Jallianwala Bagh; Pretty Bobby who is adopted by a Scottish missionary couple in Bombay and who then becomes an errand boy for pimps and prostitutes around Falkland Road; Jonathan Bridgeman, a dead young man, from whose corpse our hero acquires an English passport, a liner ticket to the ‘Home’ country and an inheritance; the same impostor Bridgeman in England, in public school; then in Oxford; and finally, as a reluctant anthropologist in deepest, darkest, Africa.
The idea graph of the book is pretty neatly tucked in, and you figure it out by the time you’re one-third through, but that doesn’t stop you from reading on. Under the over-arching British Empire, Pran-Rukshana-Bobby-Johnny, unhappy with his ‘blackie-whiteness’, wants to be a pukka gora; the more he buries his ‘colour’, the further P-R-B-J gets into the mask and power of pinkness, the more problematic it becomes till, in a sweet but not entirely unexpected twist towards the end, he suddenly finds himself screaming that he is not as white as people think.
Given that the plot twists are surprising but not startling, and the idea-underpinnings interesting but hardly shatteringly original, what keeps you reading?
The Reverend Macfarlane, the missionary who adopts ‘Bobby’, is a man obsessed with craniometry—the pseudo-science of measuring people’s skulls and arriving at conclusions about their character and intelligence that we first encountered fictionally in Amitav Ghosh’s Circle of Reason. If one took the literary equivalent of the Reverend’s skull-callipers and applied them to Kunzru’s book, filling its projected brain cavity with fine critical lead-shot and measuring its volume, the results are illuminating. While different parts resemble several other books, the frontal lobe of the novel definitely comes from early Narrativicus Salmanus, a fine lineage if there ever was one. The story is in turns fantastical and funny and tragi-comic, and given that old Salmanus hasn’t given us his best for a while, we can be thankful that someone else has provided our long overdue fix of the magical-subcontinental.
Secondly, despite odd pockets of cheerfully workman-like prose, overall, Kunzru can write—and here is where the bones part company—write quite un-Salmanistically at that. Not only does he tell a good yarn, the language is often effortlessly beautiful: "She spares nothing; no surmise is left unfloated, no nasty insinuation unslithered into the long grass of the master’s mind."
Thirdly—well, there isn’t a thirdly. To the inevitable question that is Siamese-twinned with contemporary big hype fiction releases—is this a ‘great’ book?—one must answer ‘no’. The book fails to deliver the deeper development it promises. We never witness how Pran’s experiences affect Rukshana or Bobby, there is no trace of the vicious street-rat Bobby in the Jonathan Bridgeman whimpering over his love Astarte in Paris, there is no sense of the doubting viewpoint from inside Rukshana’s burkha in the anthropologist’s gaze from under the sola topee in the final chapter. Each section brings with it its own rules and, ultimately, that is too easy a trick.
Putting unfair demands of first-shot masterpieces aside, will one still want to go back to this book in 10 years’ time, when everyone’s forgotten the hype? Yes, probably; next, take away the unfortunate Orientalist petticoat—in 10 years the cover is bound to have changed for the better, there is no escape; and then last question—is this someone you want to hear from again? Yes, the answer is yes, definitely.
