The great dilemmas facing our species today are nothing but transformed versions of old grievances. They are consequences of choices made advertently or inadvertently in the face of events, fuelled and informed by morality and societal conditioning. And, they occupy the grand stage of the Man Booker Prize-shortlisted author Neel Mukherjee’s latest novel Choice.
Shortlisted for the 2024 Goldsmiths Prize, Mukherjee’s novel is divided into three distinct parts. They are neither bounded forcibly nor inchoate in their construction. As such, they can be considered three standalone novellas, too, and each is a pioneering attempt at presenting conflicts in a neoliberal, late-capitalist world.
The first part begins with Ayush, a publisher at Sennett and Brewer, showing a movie depicting the cruel reality of the pork industry instead of following the bedtime ritual of reading a book to his children. His husband, Luke, is an economist, who often uses the word ‘costly’ not only literally, but also “for anything that is inconvenient”.
As Luke earns more, the responsibility of caregiving is often shouldered by Ayush, for whom it’s crucial to “teach [children] about choices and their consequences”. Though their same-sex marriage offers a respite from the cishet-centric narratives, it appears Mukherjee wanted to establish how even such unions aren’t immune to the hypocrisies of coupledom.
The professions of the protagonists are leveraged to critique their respective industries. Mukherjee points out the virtue-signalling that’s performed in the name of diversity and inclusion in publishing. And how data-obsessed economists are to the point of overlooking intuitive interrogation of the situation at hand.
Often this criticism is extremely insightful. On the usage of ‘pay attention’, Mukherjee writes, “How funny, that the verb for the only agency we have, the only thing left to us, the act of noticing, should be one of cost, as if you’re buying something in exchange.”
While Luke wants the status quo to prevail, Ayush feels everyone should exercise their individual choices with care, because while most of us vociferously want solutions to climate change yet on the flip side contribute nothing to lessen its impact, even by an infinitesimally small effort. Luke’s concern about Ayush’s obsession towards climate change reaches a confrontational stage when the latter donates the funds kept aside for their children’s education to charity organisations.
As the story progresses, readers find Ayush occupied with working on a submission by M N Opie—a Ferrante-like figure. This keeps the narration interesting, which is also peppered with not-so-subtle philosophical meditations on time. But the story takes a different turn when Ayush meets Ritika Santosh at an academic event that Luke asks him to be a part of.
They immediately click as both of them are conscience-keeping citizens surrounded by profit-mongers. In a conversation later, Ritika informs Ayush how cows help generate income when donated to a poverty-stricken family. “But the experiment has to be set up carefully and, most importantly, has to be randomized,” she submits.
The impacts of this experiment are clear in the third part of Choice, where a domestic help Sabita and her two children— Mira and Sahadeb—find it difficult to provide for the cow to reap benefits out of it. Pulak, her husband, works elsewhere and returns once in a while with money. He thinks that their cow, Gauri, will turn their fortunes, but doesn’t have an answer when Sabita asks where the hay to feed Gauri will come from.
Tending to the animal makes it impossible for the children to continue their education. They eventually help Sabita with Gauri so that the former can continue working in bigger houses in Majharsharif. The conduct of Sabita’s employers is typical, showcasing the inhumane inequality and divide in society.
The cow is strategically placed in the narrative. Not only does the setting of the story (Bengal) help present the issue of trafficking across the borders deftly, but it also helps weave in mob lynchings by cow vigilante groups that frequently feature in newspapers in the hyper-nationalist India of the present day.
If there’s anything called fictional reality then it’s championed in the middle part of this book, featuring an author Rohan and her friend Emily. The latter is involved in an accident that she finds hard to ascertain if it actually took place. Then, it’s the colonial strand of her family history that makes her want to write a book on it: “on the fiction that was memory but played out in the domain of oral family history”.
But it’s her meeting with Salim—the cabbie from the accident—that alters the course of her life. Nothing obvious informs this part, underneath which lies the fundamental concern of all storytellers: Is it my story to write? Powerful, wondrous, and relevant, Choice is Mukherjee’s most distinctive achievement as a storyteller.