Are we always already intertwined,
Are our elective affinities pre-destined?
We’re destined to walk on that track
Through which the ruins beckon us back.
Nitasha Kaul’s novel Residue reminds one of the epigraph with which Marquez’s novel Chronicle of a Death Foretold, opens. The epigraph of that novel is a line by 14th century Portugese poet Gil Vicente – “The hunt for love is haughty falconry.” All the characters of Residue seem to inhabit a lonely planet of their own—hunting for that iota of love that touched them and passed them by in a moment.
Leon Ali’s father died before he was born, and he grew up with all the prejudices that come with being triply odd—fatherless, Kashmiri, Muslim. He chooses to go back to his place of birth—England—after his undergraduate degree, not to work, but to escape. His mother, having fulfilled her duty towards her son, goes off to an ashram to contribute to social work, to find her own meanings. Keya Raina is also an odd one out—a Kashmiri Pandit whose rituals do not match with those of the people of Delhi where she grows up. She sees her father dying, and that image lingers and haunts her through her adulthood. The fatherless Keya also immigrates to Britain. Then there’s Agnes aka Agni—an ex-film-star who made it big in the 1950s in Bombay cinema. She gets charmed by a German, moves with him to Berlin. They get divorced and she has to reinvent herself as a dancer—Agnes for acquaintances, Agni for friends and for her own spiritual energy. Then there’s the lonely Mir, who deserts his wife. Late in the novel appears Shula Farid, who turns out to be the prime mover of the plot, who also has had a broken marriage and who teams up with a Communist activist. To reiterate, all lonely planets, wandering around according to some universal principle. Goethe’s Elective Affinities appears as a fleeting symbol every now and then. Goethe’s work, later used by Max Weber, is a seminal work of the 19th century that probes whether human bonds are also like chemical bonds—do we react to, are we drawn to certain kind of people? Are the reactions that entail such magnetism profoundly pre-destined? Residue probes this and much more.
One of the key elements of the novel is that it traces back all the key protagonists to their parents. The stories of the parents, in some cases, even of the grandparents are vividly told. This is where the title justifies itself —the residue probing its origins, or the residue that lingers on the ‘elective affinities’ that produced them. The father looms large, almost in a Kafka-esque, and in a lesser degree Freudian sense. Kafka in his diary, writes about the father as a colossus striding across two worlds with little space left for the son. Leon Ali, named after Leon Trotsky by his revolutionary father, must exorcise the father’s ghost to know who he himself is, as also to know to the person whose absence created his identity. It is the lacuna, the rupture in relationships that is being explored by Kaul. In a self-reflexive manner, Keya speaks of Derrida and deconstruction to Leon on their first date.
Another interesting feature of the novel is the ghosts of the pasts who come and speak to the protagonists, and walk off. There’s a man in the art gallery that Keya and Leon go to see, who harps on the second world war; there’s a Bangladeshi rose-seller who also contextualizes South Asian migration to Europe; Agnes dwells on her stardom years. The novel is set in the present time, and the decade before, and so we see the Gujarat riots, 9/11 etc having a profound bearing on the lives of the protagonists. Another key feature is the lack of religion in all the characters—their identities and circumstances are decided by their names. They struggle with the brands destiny has bestowed on them.
Kaul’s novel is a refreshing read, for it approaches politics through very personal struggles. One of the flipsides, however, is the slow pace of the novel in the first half, and an almost formulaic love making scene midway. In all 300-page Indian English novels, one finds this trope around the 140 page mark—almost as if it needs to be right there. It’s interesting to see a first person narration of a man by a woman writer. However, it creates jumps as Leon and Shula have first person narrations, and the others have a third person narrator to speak for them, and it is not the first person narrator of Leon who is doing it. Narrative can have more cohesion with carefully choosing voices.