Going by the preface, Annu Subramanian’s second novel Another Heaven is well intentioned and sets out to address “the horrors of human trafficking and terrorism”. It starts literally with a bang, as the first scene ends with a 19-year-old blowing herself up before an approaching train in Tamil Nadu. But by the end of the book, the figure of the villain — an elderly terror mastermind named Usman — the workings of whose mind the protagonist seeks to unravel only mouths platitudes to defend his communally driven vendetta.
Tina Matthew, a Pennsylvania-based half-Indian doctoral student of psychology researching the terrorist’s psyche, visits Chennai on an internship soon after the bomb blast and has a chance encounter with a victim of human trafficking (Maya) who is being moulded into a suicide bomber by Usman. Tina’s uncle and aunt and guide (Shaker) in India are well connected. So when she realises that Maya is an acquaintance’s lover who is officially known to have been killed in the blast, thanks to the machinations of Usman, the latter and his seemingly all-powerful outfit are rather easily nailed.
Subramanian’s lucid prose pits a grimy, discomfiting picture of India against the cold, autumnal comfort of Pennsylvania. Granted, the places the characters venture into in India — or any of this rising economy’s shining nooks for that matter — cannot be ideal bets for sanitary claims. But the novel only glosses over the complex problem of terrorism (in India) by presenting victims of glaring poverty mixed with mindless fundamentalist dogma as a sure-fire recipe for disaster. During interrogation, Usman clams up and doesn’t reveal his sponsors. A scribe and a cop guess the hand of who else but LeT! In reply to Shaker once, the bearded, tagiyah-wearing Usman only voices his hatred for Hindu radicals and Christian fundamentals alike, without a word on his own background.
Creditably, there is no rosy ending to this novel, though it tries to lend hope with Tina starting a “crusade against human rights abuse” by forming a Center for Human Rights and Counter-Terrorism. Now, that’s an ambitious task, given her trite observation at the end: “violence is born of lies”. It is, as we know in an increasingly polarised country, a lot more complicated.