In Our Mad and Furious City by Guy Gunaratne; Tinder Press: 292 Pages; Rs 699
Nig-nog! Nig-nog!’ lisped two little boys trailing my daughter Tania, a tough Soho newsperson, as she walked home. She was on a private visit to meet up with her extended family in London.
‘Horrid!’ she says, adding: ‘It was menacing as the white boys followed me, swinging their hips, from side to side, with that single refrain of Nig-nog! Nig-nog!’
Another place. Another time. At the legendary Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong, my wife Abha and I found ourselves popping by to see a friend staying there. We waited for the lift. Alongside stood an elderly English couple.
‘Ah!’ I thought to myself. ‘Strictly upper drawer folks! The kind seen during the Raj!’ But the joke was on us. As the doors of the cavernous lift opened, out of courtesy, we waited for them to step in. They looked us up. They looked us down. The man looked at his wife saying: ‘Shall we take the next one, I think! Shall we?’
I could have puked. I had never felt browner in my life. Alienation is the common feeling uniting people: Jamaicans, Irish pikeys, Nigerians, Ghanaians, South Indians, Algerians. Even the Arabs from the UAE. All of them strung together with one string—the pigment of your skin. The abyss opens up to reveal its darkness, from that point on it can only be a rapid slide downwards. The flash point is the gruesome cleaver attack that hacks to death a young British soldier in uniform.
‘Why was it that when we saw the eyes of the black boy with the dripping blade, we felt closer to him than that soldier boy slain in the street.’
Guy Gunaratne’s debut novel takes us through the paces of a single mad, monstrous and lunatic city, where everyone seems to be caught up in the swirl of violence. It hangs in the air like smog, threatening to explode into riots at the drop of a hat. Left to themselves, Selvon and Ardan would have been happier to focus on their own obsession, girls and grime. Then there’s their friend Yusuf caught up to the gills in the rising tide of radicalism, sweeping the local mosque. He will go the whole hog to protect his troubled older brother Irfan from the storm of hatred looming large on the horizon.
Of course there are other voices: Nelson and Caroline, echoing like a symphony given the last generation’s experience of violence and its handmaid, extremism. The result? It can only be a devastating conclusion.
Watch out. Here’s a talented author. After this compelling tale, I wonder what Guy is going to do with the next.