Long before IIT and IIM graduates started to keep literary manuscripts in their top drawers, the ‘Great Indian Novel’ remained a tag much coveted. Books that successfully earned this badge — Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance , Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children , Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things — were seen to have a few traits in common. They were all set in the backdrop of some great social or political upheaval. These books often spoke in a polyphony of voices and their narratives explored the private lives of its characters in order to better evoke the tumult that is a changing India. Mahesh Rao’s The Smoke is Rising ticks many of these boxes, but also brings to your table a contemporary freshness. With a gaze that can only be described as binocular, the book helps prove that to write a Great Indian Novel, you first need hearty empathy, and not a hackneyed formula.

By starting his novel amidst the excitement surrounding the launch of India’s first unmanned lunar mission, Chandrayaan-1, Rao provides a context and scale for the larger aspirations of an emerging power. Mysore, “India’s eleventh-fastest growing small city”, has ambitions of its own. Developers are busy selling the dream of HeritageLand, a theme park, which once completed would give visitors the chance to wage war against Ravan’s army and fight battles in a virtual Kurukshetra. But even though venture capitalists in Hong Kong are ready with finances, Asia’s largest proposed theme park has to face hostility closer home. Several farmers are reluctant to give up their land for paltry compensations and, as they take their protest to the streets, the smoke literally begins to rise.

If credible realism were indeed the criterion, Rao seems to have mastered that delicate art with descriptions that are always instantly familiar. He writes about a cramped cyber cafe and the intrigues of a soap opera with an exacting precision. Some of his conversations convince you that you have eavesdropped on them before. A senior bank official, for instance, tells his junior, “We are the mother of invention, you know. Algebra, buttons, snakes and ladders, all invented here. Also, ₹1 shampoo sachets and idli manchurian.” But more than dialogue and detail, it’s Rao’s characters that are vividly recognisable.

Despite being divided by class and status, the three principal characters of The Smoke is Rising have much in common. Susheela, an aging widow, Uma, her domestic help, and Mala, a physically abused wife, are all women who are confronted by solitude. They are forced to live their lives under a burden of secrets, continuously questioning the limits of a patriarchal and rumour-hungry society. As Susheela and Uma seek to invest their individual lives with a greater intimacy, Rao handles their seeming transgressions with a deft hand that is compassionate, but never claustrophobically sentimental. In the case of Mala, her experience of domestic violence is described with an economical restraint that only exacerbates its horror — “Girish’s clothes for the day were laid out on the bed, a familiar form that seemed to want to grab at her but lacked the flesh or bones to support its desire.” Though some turns in their narratives might be deemed somewhat predictable, Rao’s three protagonists help suffuse The Smoke is Rising with a sense of female agency that one can only cheer. It is surprising that despite an aura of bleakness, the book never seems to lose its sense of humour. Rao gives Krishna devotees the kind of lip that would put adolescent ruffians to shame and he then compares spiritual pamphlets to honeymooning guides with an equal and disarming ease. While facilitators of creative writing workshops could well cite such instances when explaining the importance of undercutting grim subject matter, they might perhaps take issue with Rao’s rampant use of adjectives. The colour of the ocean on a computer’s screen saver is said to be an “impossible” blue, while the shell of an incinerated bus is believed to have a “macabre” gaze. It isn’t so much the aptness of these qualifiers that proves troubling, just their proliferation that’s seemingly excessive.

Having finished The Smoke is Rising , you might end up hoping that the book was longer. You would be justified in wishing that rather than assigning peripheral characters the roles of walk-on cameos, Rao had fleshed them out more. You may even find yourself yearning for happier closures, but it would certainly be hard for you to not claim a greater contentment.

Like all those other Great Indian Novels, Rao’s book enlightens as much as it entertains. Never pedantic in its observations, it offers a vision of India that is both honest and urgent. Though Rao joins a vast army of debutant Indian novelists with this book, the author appears to have found a rare voice of his own. His arrival should give the country’s literary enthusiasts some cause to stop and take notice. All that smoke apart, this first novel marks the rise of a very able raconteur.

( Shreevatsa Nevatia is a freelance writer currently based in Kolkata )

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