The late English writer Martin Amis, in his 1998 Art of Fiction interview for The Paris Review, noted that in a novel, “if the voice doesn’t work, you’re screwed”. Writer, playwright, actor and filmmaker Manav Kaul evidently knew what Amis was talking about. His new novel, Rooh, is proof.
At the centre of the story is Kashmir, and the narrator’s relationship with the land he calls home. He says, “Hiding Kashmir is nobody else’s issue but (his)”. Like Kaul, he is a middle-aged Kashmiri man, and a self-proclaimed compulsive and escapist traveller.
Throughout the book, he talks about the stories of people, both alive and dead, who he met on his journeys, but the spotlight is on two—Roohi and Roohani, both of whom he calls Rooh. The former, he ran into at a New York bar. Reciting verses by Kashmiri mystic Lal Ded, the narrator feels she is more Kashmiri than him.
Interestingly, it is through Roohi that we learn about him. She challenges him to face his past and articulate his innate desires freely—both in his writing and everyday life. And, when he manages to follow the path Roohi had shown him, he notes, “Maybe someday this book will be translated into English, and Rooh will get to know that I had come to Kashmir and that I wrote this here.”
Roohani, on the other hand, takes the narrator to the finish line, allowing him to look inwards and face his deepest insecurities. Funny and direct, she calls him out on his male gaze.
It is the blurring of the seeker and the seeking, the real and imaginary, the forgotten and the remembered, the funny and the tragic that lends the novel its readability. Its prose thrives in the paradox that is life. Sample this: “When we go far away, a kind of wait begins. We are looking for something that we can’t find in the place we had been living in. We have to leave our homes to touch the old roots on which this tree stands. We are not trees, though; we can wander.” Though the first few sentences are burdened with introspection, the final one signals the freedom from any obligation.
Describing the ‘situation’ in Kashmir through multiple perspectives, the narrator acknowledges, “Just like time is different in different places, similarly the past is also different for each.” The idea and purpose of this novel, therefore, is not to project any image of Kashmir. Nor is it to eulogise its beauty. All that the author does is share a deeply personal experience, and then leaves his readers with open-ended questions. With them, he’s co-creating a space where time is no longer unidirectional.
Nobel Laureate in Literature (2020), Louise Glück, noted that “we look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory”. Rooh relives and recounts that memory in its stream-of-consciousness narration. Credit goes to the translator, Pooja Priyamvada, who has rendered it effectively in English while preserving Kaul’s voice. Amis would have agreed that it works.