In their Jhalak Prize-winning book, None of the Above: Reflections on Life Beyond the Binary, British artist and writer Travis Alabanza enumerates the violent implications of living a category-defying life. Non-conformity often invites boring questions like: “So, when did you know?” Or: “How does it feel like being a nonbinary—are you both, more one than the other?” To that end, Alabanza writes, “You often become a place to hold other people’s confusion. You become a site for their internal process to become external. Your lack of ability to fit into the boxes they are trying to place you in, provokes an almost word-vomit response.”
This confusion—to be sure, violence of a kind—seems to dominate the life of one of the two childhood friends—Kaustav—in Saikat Majumdar’s latest novel The Remains of the Body. The other friend, Avik, meets all the requirements of a middle-aged Indian male—married with a kid, has a paunch, invites friends and colleagues for a get-together often, travels to kill the boredom that comes with printing truckloads of money, and is indifferent to his wife’s desires, be it physical or emotional. And Sunetra, Avik’s wife, appears to be an everyday woman—effortlessly playing wife, friend and host. Ambitious and intelligent, her career becomes a “live wire of a subject” in the marriage.
In an obscenely sparse prose, Majumdar manages to influence enquiries into human belonging, hinged on bodily experiences primarily. He illuminates desires, considered too complicated but fairly natural, if one isn’t dishonest to oneself. Examples are plentiful. Kaustav, a postdoc student in North America, seems to know “things about both their bodies, Avik’s and Sunetra’s, even skin that he had never seen”. Thinking of his childhood days—as always, everything noteworthy happened in the past—back in Calcutta, he also feels that Avik and he “shared a body”.
Let’s deliberate on these two words—share and body. Share is an interesting choice. It can be both a noun and a verb. In the context of Kaustav and Avik’s relationship, it is a verb. The mere act of naming anything between them would’ve solidified things—made them one in a way—and a patriarchal, gendered upbringing rarely promotes that among people of the same sex.
The word body is strictly a noun. That’s what impinges Avik and Sunetra’s marriage because while the latter looks like a “gawky teenager” in her mid-thirties—a “toxic beauty” by some standards, the former’s body is showing signs of lethargy, alluding to diminishing promises of a sexually satisfying life. On the other hand, we have Kaustav, for whom Majumdar writes: “Once in a while, women forgot he was a man.” Why? Because there “was no real manliness, nothing steel-sure, no serious odour or habit, but something airlike, almost ethereal”.
These descriptions appear to foreground the “confusion” Alabanza reflects on. Though the treatment isn’t as complex as one would’ve liked, it’s functional. But the drama manufactured to support the elemental exploration of gender and desire suffocates the narrative itself as the characters end up in a never-ending loop of validation. One could call them flawed—that ubiquitous word supplied for everything—but they’re not fully realised.
Majumdar, who teaches English and Creative Writing at Ashoka University, has often explored the queerness of his characters and contours of desire in his previous works. This is, however, his most daring one for it investigates the slippery connection between gender and sexuality—a porous space of possibilities, which has helped him mine the atypical nature of sexual attraction. Interestingly, he juxtaposes it with a dwindling heterosexual marriage, where one can’t surmise its future. In a sense, it is a classic pitting of two worlds—one that has societal acceptance, and the other that invites its fury.
But, ‘to be or not to be’ isn’t the question that drives this novel. It’s the potential to become that which this breezy book attempts to explore, and where it’s at its most powerful—the allusion of subversion of the body itself. For example: “Because you’re like me, a true loser. The real thing,” Sunetra says to Kaustav, uniting them in the failed pursuit to be with Avik, allowing him access to his old friend in a way that was forbidden erstwhile. As the novel progresses, there’s something circumstantial that unites Sunetra and Kaustav, but it’s a dishonest union, like marriage, for Kaustav’s heart knew what he desired from the start—Avik. So, in some measure, both Sunetra and Kaustav are reaching for something. For one of them, everything seems to slip away but freedom awaits. The other, however, will remain entrapped in the structures that apparently hold society together, but unmask its hypocrisy every day.
And this hypocrisy is rooted in gender. It doesn’t disappear in this novel, as novelist Vivek Shanbhag declares in praise of the book. While it surely edges around an unravelling that doesn’t materialise and teases the reader with highbrow intellectualism, it fails to escape the question of gender, as Shanbhag thinks it does, because that’s the very thing that binds it; makes it work. Ultimately, gender remains, not body, at least in this narrative.
The Remains of the Body
By: Saikat Majumdar
Publisher: Penguin
Pages: 184
Price: Rs 499