In fits and starts, this story about a dysfunctional Bengali family is almost funny. The protagonist is a forty-year-old depressive called Jamun. He has an older brother, Burfi, who went to jail for battering his wife. Jamun’s failed relationship with Kasturi, the mother of his child, is turned by her into a hugely popular TV soap opera called ‘Cheers Zindagi’. Then there’s Kasibai, the lascivious ex-cook; Madhumati, the Czech tenant with shaggy underarms and urine-drinking habits; Monga, the builder with villainy oozing from every slimy pore; plus frisky rats, dead cats, morgues, garbage dumps—in short, all the typical horror-comedy elements of a modern Indian novel.
Death and departure are, as the title suggests, central to the book. One of the neighbours commits suicide and another dies of natural causes. But the focus of the story is unexplained disappearances rather than plain old mortality. There are three unexplained absences, starting with the boys’ 85-year-old father, Shyamanand. He was partially paralysed by a stroke twenty years ago and can scarcely hobble around the house, leave alone run away from it. Nevertheless, he vanishes without a trace one day and, after some weeks, so does the neighbour, Naina Kapur. Finally Jamun himself succumbs to vanishment, leaving his brother to perform the laborious task of filling out yet another Missing Person form at the local police station.
Of the three, only one will return. Though we’re not given a straightforward account of what exactly happened to who, it isn’t difficult to guess. The story proceeds through a series of fragmented episodes, moving back and forth through time so that we have to pay close attention as we read. I continue to be uncertain about exactly which city it’s been set in. I’m guessing it’s Calcutta, but I don’t have enough (or any) familiarity with that city to tell from the names of the bit players whether or not they represent authentic local fauna. Bombay and Bangalore are mentioned as if they were far away and Noida makes an appearance as the place where Burfi lives, though Delhi remains unnamed. Not that it really matters: the story is set in a surreal AnySpace, where the glue that holds people together is really only their interpretation of obligation and need.
Chatterjee writes with the fine cool flair of someone who thinks in whole sentences all the time, even in his sleep. However, for all his mastery of language, his book just didn’t do it for me. There’s a quality of coldness—is it from fury or self-loathing? Hard to tell. It so overwhelms the narrative that the effort of wading through the mountain of sewage that forms the bulk of the book is just never going to be justified.
The author’s hallmark acerbic wit is certainly entertaining: “The member before the mirror closest to Jamun was in a crouch, busy powdering his balls with the love of a mother tending to her infant after having given it a nice warm bath. Jamun could almost hear the balls gurgle with contentment.” And: “The wisps of hair that remained rose like the tendrils of some primitive plant form groping about for the right conditions for some quick photosynthesis.”
This may appear to be, but emphatically is not, a light-hearted book about senile fathers and morose neighbours. Instead it’s about the humdrum atrocities with which the cloth of modern India is woven, where no one is innocent and where the use of the word “corruption” to describe what goes on between the land mafia, the police and ordinary citizens is to reduce reality to a nonsense rhyme. It’s about succumbing to the horror, not attempting to fight it. It’s about ignoring everything you ever knew or thought you knew about dignity, culture and civilisation and just...well...just finding something to do that isn’t synonymous with suicide.
Perhaps there are readers for whom a slender thread of black humour is reason enough to read a book, but I am not one of them. I need something more robust: an interesting plot, a captivating character, insights that go beyond describing what I can find in the newspapers every day, or see outside the windows of my own life.
