Bombay or Mumbai has drawn many writers to locate their stories there. If the slew of Mumbai novels is any indication, it is fertile terrain for the imagination. The underbelly of Mumbai has thrown up many characters in modern fiction that have won our admiration. Cinema has benefited most from this inspiration but fiction has not been far behind. For ex-poet C P Surendran, the underbelly of Mumbai is familiar terrain. He trawled its mean streets and laid it bare for us through his columns in The Times of India some years back. It was only a matter of time before he enlarged that canvas with a double click and, presto, here before us is a novel of rare intensity.
Absurdist, sarcastic, downright hilarious, angry, poetically constructed and simmering with political undercurrents, Lost and Found is a major addition to the top shelf of IWE. Set in the backdrop of 26/11, it subverts that well-known narrative and uses it to look at the jihadi philosophy, religion and violence, hatred and love, and holds a mirror to the absurdity of it all. Nothing escapes the vitriolic and dark humour of Surendran. Though there is a sting in the tail of the narrative, it is the poetic turns that captivates the reader and not the narrative twists.
Lakshmi the anti-heroine, starts off with a kidnapping. She works for a porn company (maybe that’s why she drinks a lot), claims she was raped in a late night local (but the description sounds like it was consensual sex) and sells the twins that are the product of the rape. One of them returns to Mumbai as the terrorist, the other meets him by sheer coincidence. Salim is made aware of the truth while the terror attack is on and he has collected together a few hostages. After all that, even on the eve of his hanging, terrorist Salim does not acknowledge Lakshmi as the mother but tells his newly-discovered twin brother: “Tell Amma, I am sorry.” There are poignant scenes in the novel, especially the last meeting between Salim and Nirmal before the hanging, but it is not the story that interests the author. Surendran uses it to look at the larger realities of life and death and religion and then the very absurdity of beliefs. Salim tells his brother the day before the hanging, “I should have got killed that day. Fought the cops and got killed. The bastards killed my spirit, Nirmal. Took my God out of me,” Salim’s voice breaks. It is in exploring the relationship between man, god and religion that Surendran is at his best. “Terror is a career for you, Abdul Razak, I understand that. How does it matter to Allah?” Fatima, who brought up Salim, tells the terrorist trainer who is in love with her. She demands that he recall Salim from the Mumbai operation. And again this conversation between Salim and Nirmal: “How did your mother let you go (for the terrorist mission)? “You don’t ask permission for this sort of thing. You are lucky if you have been chosen for the mission. You just go along and become God’s good soldier.’ And again: “You kill people who may not believe in your god and you go straight to heaven?” All religion in a way teaches to kill because intense love for one religion can only breed hatred for the other. Surendran does not skirt the harsh truth of life and takes everything head on. In his characters are embedded the virus of religion, superstition and most of what is wrong with the world today. That is where the significance of the novel comes from. Though not all characters are drawn out well enough, its desire to stay away from the cosy middle-class drawing rooms filled with inanities makes the work significant and contemporary.
The Shiv Sena is caricatured brilliantly here as the Cow Sena, with a slapstick cameo as part of the climax. So Lost and Found is rightly placed to get banned from the college campuses of Mumbai where everything that is torn apart in the novel is worshipped and feared. There is no redemption for Mumbai here. Only another story that helps us marvel at life in that impossible but vivacious metropolis.
