Ramjee Chandran’s debut fiction contains a cracker of a story. Written in the most elegant manner, infused with generous doses of wit, guile, dash, and daring, the story is set in New Delhi when Rajiv Gandhi was the prime minister of India and when scams came under the unforgiving lens of journalists with spine.
But first, we are taken to the nondescript town of Mettur in Tamil Nadu. We become privy to an inhouse discovery in a chemical factory there, run by RV Ramani. The factory has the capacity and the ability to produce silicon metal. Silicon is vital to the defence interests of the country. Though India at the time used silicon metal for making solar panels while the world used it for electronics-grade applications. To put it into perspective, this is quite an atmanirbhar achievement for the newly set up Metkem. But there’s a problem of course. The Department of Electronics is headed by a gasbag named Anand Seshadri. He intends to put a big spanner in the Metkem works. And so starts the silicon metal controversy. Enter a dashing but curiously casual James Bond-type of espionage agent, whose day job is that of lobbyist for Metkem and a host of other industries. Our hero goes by the decidedly unusual name of Solly Nilla, drives a beat-up Fiat with starting trouble.
The cast of characters makes for an interesting lineup. There’s Ramani with his penchant for tired jokes. Dr Dayal from the DNES with his manic laughter, and two Tweedledee-Tweedledum scientists from IISC Bangalore. There’s Rajiv Gandhi’s chief of intel, Praveen Jain, and there’s Dr Angela Britto at Seshadri’s unit, as well as her hapless colleague Vinod Pandey, whose homosexuality is the least of his problems. All of these people have been written up so divertingly that the reader quickly starts to form a picture of them.
At the heart of the story is Metkem’s bid to make and supply silicon all over the country and Seshadri’s determination to stop them from doing so. Seshadri’s audacious acts quite make the reader’s jaw drop, even as the aforementioned reader is pretty sure that our Man in Delhi, Solly Nilla, will definitely throw a monkey wrench into Seshadri’s work. The snark is delicious, as when we get a description of Seshadri admiring his profile just when a ray of sunlight crept in through the window and framed his reflection in a halo, and he felt a rush of messianic delight.
Or Pandey looking like a troubled character in a dimly lit Shakespearean tragedy asking himself, “What’s loyalty? Loyalty is such a shifting target, so elusive and so enigmatic.”
The question arises whether Seshadri is discrediting Metkem at the behest of a foreign power. But Seshadri’s character is so well delineated that the reader fully understands the bloated sense of pride that drives the bombastic man to do what he does.
Much attention is given to amusing little details, like the archaic English used by the scientists, Seshadri’s Montblanc Meisterstück pen, and the frequent use of ‘my dear’ in Delhi’s business and political circles. Babudom is wittily explained: the powers invested in PAs, in the people who controlled the photocopy machines, the stranglehold of the IAS on virtually everything, the cunning strategy behind post-facto approvals, the suave PM who is actually anything but a Gucci Prime Minister, pondering on how exactly to pronounce ‘behemoth,’ then losing his cool at a meeting and barking, “It occurs to me you have been ham-handed about this…what are you, some technology savant?” to a scientist.
Ramjee Chandran is known to Bangaloreans as the host of two popular podcasts: The Literary City and The History of Bangalore. With this intelligently written book that thoroughly entertains the reader, he should soon be known across India for his dexterous and effective prose.