The Orient is sought by the Occident
Not by mere accident.
It’s ordained, it’s fated.
The plot, however, is dated.
There’s been a long twentieth-century tradition of James Bonds and Indiana Joneses, with the well-meaning white guy trying to avert a disaster that the bad guys are intent on pulling off in some exotic land. The tradition’s of course been revved up with a Hollywood tradition of the world coming to an end, and the ‘chosen one’ fighting the devil.
Raghu Srinivasan seeks entry into this tradition with his ambitious novel The Avatari. The name is suggestive, and the reader at the outset expects ‘the chosen one’, and an Oriental setting. It is the time and space that have to be decided. Srinivasan chooses the war-ravaged twentieth century, with the pursuit for Burqan Qaldun—the name used by Kublai Khan for what is now known as ‘Shangri-La’ or ‘Lost Paradise’. A renowned teacher and Master is poisoned in a monastery in Laos, and a treasure stolen from his safe. This could have dangerous ramifications—for the thieves are seeking to get to ‘Kalachakra’ itself, that holds the secret of time, and therefore immortality. They must be stopped, and the Master names retired Colonel Henry Ashton as the ‘chosen one’.
The messenger to Ashton—an ‘Oriental ‘ man—is pursued by other ‘Oriental’ men. When the chasers get too close, the messenger immolates himself, but in his death, he holds his hand close to his heart to prevent a tattoo from being burnt—a sign for Ashton. While the novel begins in this hot-blooded fashion, it retreats back to Ashton making up his mind for the mission for a good hundred pages. The novel takes a long time to build up the party that would go on this mission. His housekeeper and ex-sergeant Durga Bhadadur alias Duggy has been with him since his army days. Susan Hamilton, a PhD in mathematics joins him, for her now dead boyfriend had written a thesis about Burqan Qaldun that was junked as a result of which he had committed suicide. Peter is a mercenary, now operating in the war-torn nether world of Africa.
Being from the Army, Srinivasan has a grip on the war narratives, and some of the scenes are poignant. For example, when Ashton as a young army officer shoots an ambusher, and it turns out to be a young woman with a baby who had escaped just the same morning from an ambush that Ashton had laid on the rebels in Far East, in the 1950s, one sees how the army, in fact, knows best the futility and waste of war.
The novel gets far too ambitious in trying to cover conflicts across the world—in Africa, Colombia, Afghanistan, Pakistan etc. Also, the background where Temur, Kublai Khan and Marco Polo are invoked gets too laborious, with the writer playing them as characters. In this age of information overload, unless history is woven seamlessly into fiction, it can get tedious. Srinivasan tries to dabble into Eastern mysticism, legend of Kublai Khan, Shangri-La, wars of the 20th century, espionage, treasure hunt all together, and loses his pace somewhere.
Also, the novel abounds with stereotypes—of the ‘Oriental’ man, of the bravery and undying loyalty of Gurkha soldiers, or even the sensuousness of Italians, or the white man as the ‘chosen man’ even though the writer is Indian. Stereotypes are indeed a staple of this genre.
It is a commendable effort, nonetheless, with the writer operating only with non-Indian characters and being able to hold the narrative with a vast expanse of history. The book could have done better with crisper editing. A thriller, mystical or otherwise, should be a page turner, and the book would have done well to have been a hundred pages shorter. And as already stated, the Oriental immortality chalice is a very old tale, and now almost jaded, unless it’s given a unique and a new spin.