There is something to be said of a 200-page book that holds one’s interest with unwavering intensity.
In Krishna BaldevVaid’s book None Other (a compilation of two novellas) the protagonist is an old man living in a two-storey house, and contemplating death and bodily deterioration. Hardly any characters appear in this long convoluted soliloquy save an old woman neighbour with whom the protagonist has a torrid affair; a wistful mention of a long-lost son wafts through the pages just once. And then there is the “other” who appears in the house abruptly and disappears with equal suddenness and with whom the protagonist appears to be having a lifelong existential argument.
The visitor constantly riles the old man urging him to leave the house and stand on the edge of a deserted road squarely facing his own inadequacies. Referred to as a friend, foe or devil, the reader can’t shake off the lurking suspicion that this ‘other’ is nothing but the protagonist’s alter-ego. This hallucinatory mindscape is played out in a country left unnamed till the end but we are told that it snows there and that elms grow down the lane. Frequent mention is made of the old man’s home country.
The protagonist spends his days dragging and crawling from upstairs to downstairs, his lower half left bare to tackle the problem of incontinence. Surrounded by an old man’s usual paraphernalia, he frequently mistakes droppings for pills and water for much worse.
From time to time, he beats his head on a wall just the way his parents had done when alive. He spends his days spying on the old woman (when she was alive) and gazing acidly at the sliver of the world visible from his upstairs window. Words pour out sporadically and he puts them on paper while lying on the floor in contorted positions. Awaiting death yet dreading it, lonely yet cringing at the thought of human contact, denouncing writing yet hungering to have his words engraved in the annals of literature, the protagonist is a man ravaged by many paradoxes.
In the second novella, Here I Am if I Am, the protagonist is once again an old man standing on the edge of a deserted road staring straight ahead and racked by aches and pains, moaning incessantly. We have no way of being sure if he is the same old man from the previous novella. The road is once again situated in a nameless place, the time, year and century unspecified and in the lack of sturdy spatial and temporal moorings, the novella takes on a nebulous feel. The old man contemplates approaching death from multiple angles; there is evidence of a complete breakdown of coherence, logic and language. Words and sentences cannon and meld into one another as he puts forth arguments and then pulverises his own arguments. The old man frequently looks back at the past referring repeatedly to a ‘world of ordinary tears’. Just as the reader is beginning to ache for his dreary loneliness, the old man does a volte face and announces that there is no yearning for company and is perfectly content in himself. At one point he is sure that he is a hunchback, at another he is convinced he is not.
The presence/absence of God comes into the narrative but is deflected by the old man’s philosophical theories most of which twine into an impossible snarl; there is an enigmatic dialogue with another person/voice/entity who describes himself as his ‘painmate’. Death is imminent and the protagonist mulls over it with ill-concealed relish; the love of words, as before,is omnipresent.
Krishna Baldev Vaid etches a terrifyingly bleak and surrealistic world where sanity, logic and every kind of argument come crumbling down. So compelling is the prose that one is swept clean into the old man’s stream of consciousness. Old age, abandonment, deterioration of body and mind and the mischief of human memory are portrayed vividly, even as both the novellas leave the physical plane to inhabit the metaphysical. Powerful, edgy and dazzlingly brilliant, None Other towers as a work of writing.