A society novel

Some novels cultivate an air of playful deception about them and can hoodwink the readers into believing what’s on the surface is all there is. The Way Things Were , Aatish Taseer’s ambitious exploration of language, identity and politics — the confluence of the three — wears every disguise of the “big novel”. The narrative spans some three generations and takes well over 550 pages to conclude. The novel also appoints three of the most definitive events in Indian postcolonial history as its chronological markers — the Emergency of 1975; the Sikh pogrom of 1984; and the Babri Masjid demolition of 1992. And finally, it’s that most complex of languages, Sanskrit — “a language of the super elite,” according to one character — that forms the core of this novel, lending thematic unity to the stories told here.

So the use of words like ‘panoramic’, ‘thrilling’ or the inevitable ‘epic’ on the novel’s jacket copy surely seems justified, if off-putting, at first. But looking at it closely, The Way Things Were comes across as really a big book with small concerns, which is just the way things should be when it comes to literature. This isn’t so much a social novel as a society novel, following the life and times of “the drawing room set” of Delhi, whose members are seen compulsively attending or organising parties, regardless of the personal or political crises besetting them. Barely pages after one of the central characters of the book, Skanda, has given his father a Hindu cremation — “…watched as the flames, overcoming their initial reluctance, coaxed the flesh off his father’s body” — we read the following: “Skanda is invited to a party. The price one pays for venturing out in a city such as this!”

The other focal point of The Way Things Were is Skanda’s father, Toby (born to the Raja of Kalasuryaketu and a Scottish mother). Toby is a renowned scholar of Sanskrit who suffers from an Orientalist’s high regard for the ancient language — he is able to perceive, “under a thick encroachment of slum and shanty” of modern India, “a far grander city” belonging to the Sanskritic past. And Skanda, according to his aunt, “is his father reborn”, which is both his privilege and his curse. Like Toby, Skanda too is a gifted student of Sanskrit. But his feelings towards his father, and his father’s worldview, are conflicted, not least because Skanda — along with his mother and sister — was long ago abandoned by Toby. The novel starts with Toby’s death and Skanda’s journey to India with his father’s remains, the journey home marking a son’s attempts to understand, and come to terms with, the past of his embittered and broken family.

We are told that the word for history in Sanskrit, itihasa , literally translates to “the way things were”, which speaks of a more nuanced, informal — look at the word “things” — and personal view of the past, which is exactly what we get in The Way Things Were . Interestingly, Sanskrit, with its etymological roots spreading to various Western languages, broadens this book’s cultural perspective rather than restricting it.

The interconnectedness of the world is never more evident than when we study languages (and the two Sanskritists in this novel never tire of drawing our attention to cognates). However, to extend this approach to the study of history is not without its flaws. The narrator draws a number of silly historical parallels. A Sikh man who helps his co-religionists affected by the Delhi riots is absurdly compared to Oscar Schindler. At another point, the coinage ‘Dreyfusian’ is used out of context.

When the gossip gets literary in The Way Things Were , as it often does, it centres on two major figures, looming large both in literary history and in Taseer’s novel — Salman Rushdie and VS Naipaul. The latter is quoted at length, and even makes a brief appearance in these pages in the garb of a Naipaulian alter ego called Vijaipal. The anxieties expressed by Naipaul in his India books are very similar to those expressed by Taseer’s novel. Namely, that this country lacks a historical sense except when it manifests in a revivalist, sectarian and meaningless form.

For the most part, The Way Things Were is composed of dialogue — reams and reams of it. It comes to a point where one begins to wish Taseer shared Nabokov’s disdain for words falling within quotation marks (the maestro once compared dialogue to “automatic typewriting”).

Besides, Taseer’s ear evidently isn’t well-tuned enough for realistic dialogue, which is all the more difficult to pull off when you’re trying to portray a multi-lingual society. Thus we get, on one hand, characters making cartoonish utterances like “Colonial-shalonial” or “Hebrew-shebrew”, and on the other, saying highfalutin bosh like “Don’t give me this involved inside-academia cant”. Often, it’s the same person speaking in both the registers.

The experience of reading this book is not unlike walking into a dinner party and overhearing the guests conversing with each other. Their chatter is likeable, dull, enlightening and dispiriting, all in quick phases. But there comes a time in every social gathering when one switches off mentally, still pretending to follow the conversation, while the eyes helplessly try to locate the bar.

(Vineet Gill is a freelance writer based in Delhi)

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