Going through Aatish Taseer’s tome is like wandering through an abandoned ancient monument in indulgent prose, full of arches and ventilators but without any windows or doors. Contemporary history comes in fits and starts. Partition, Emergency, return of Indira Gandhi in 1977 polls, Golden Temple and Bhindranwale, Mrs Gandhi’s assassination, Bhopal Gas tragedy, Rajiv Gandhi’s killing, Kashmir crisis, the 1990 Rath Yatra, “men in saffron cracking open, like an egg, the dome of an old Mosque in Ayodhya”. And going back in time, the feudal system and its remnants: the way things were, and the way they continue to be: “India has this way of distracting one, of luring one into her little problems, so that you forget the big ones, the ones you could see easily… .”
A narrative full of “labyrinthine corridors” in which people come and go without “talking of Michelangelo”—to quote TS Eliot. By the time one is through with the epicycle one is confused—who was whose what?
Taseer does not “let history be what it was” though “without wanting to ram it into a frame.” He brings in a situation, or a character, or an event, grazes through it leisurely and then moves on to “encounter the great mysteries of Indian history.” There are moments when it seems the narrative is intended to be a tutorial on how to use language elegantly though not necessarily to serve an exercise in storytelling. There is no pattern to the chapters—they start from anywhere and end without one either. This seems to be deliberately fragmented narrative in which situations shuttle back and forth without leading to an end game.
There are also doses of mythology: Sanskrit epics and the universality of the language of these epics. The protagonist Skanda, sired by a half-Scottish princeling passionate about the language of the ancient Hindu texts, Toby, with ample help from a Scotch-gulping Sikh woman inappropriately named Uma.
Taseer does not hold himself back when it comes to describing living and imagined characters and Indira Gandhi in particular: “a paranoid vindictive despot…who had broken treaty with the princes…invaded defenceless Himalayan kingdoms…introduced crime and sycophancy… . ”
The trouble is Aatish Taseer has consciously or otherwise become a victim of his own ambition by trying to encapsulate almost everything under the sun in a single narrative that despite the brilliance of the language tires the reader because of inadvertence. Then there are veiled references to the RSS and the BJP: “The new order—the Bania century that is upon us—they will use the things of Toby’s world—the epics, the poets, Manu, Ayodhya, whatever—and they will hollow them out of meaning.” The elaboration of which comes towards the end when Skanda goes to submerge his father Toby’s ashes in the holy waters.
And having done his duty, he feels a sense of “relief from the completion of the rite”. What better way than to veer “off in the direction of bar.”