As he got older, the British novelist Kingsley Amis began to equate literary flair and intellectual depth in novels of a certain kind with pretentious hokum. We have his son Martin’s word that Kingsley once semi-facetiously resolved never to read novels that didn’t begin with the phrase, “A shot rang out”. Kiran Nagarkar’s latest offering, Rest in Peace — the third Ravan and Eddie book that completes and, by the looks of it, concludes the trilogy — doesn’t quite begin with this phrase, but the narrative does seem to lead up to it (not to mention the many equivalents of the phrase that are strewn about all through the dizzying span of these 300-plus pages).

“A gun went off,” on page 337; “the bullets and hand grenades zinging around,” on page 229; “the bullets were not merely criss-crossing but...exploding,” on page 359; and yes, finally, “a shot rang out,” on page 226. The shadow of death looms over Rest in Peace . The book’s title, of course, is an obvious tipoff, but mortality as a theme is woven into the narrative in subtler ways than the trigger-happy and ordnance-heavy language cited above would seem to indicate.

The story itself begins at the very end. “Falling…falling…falling,” the first three words— also the last three — are used as a refrain, recurring every few pages and returning us to the original image of our protagonist duo, R&E or E&R, plummeting from a Bombay skyscraper to their deaths. How did things come to this pass? Well, you can always trust Ravan and Eddie to concoct a fiasco so immense that it surpasses their previous misadventures.

Is it really happening? Are they really dying? These are questions not restricted merely to the reader’s imagination; even the author is grappling with them. Nagarkar’s final words in his novel, after the dramatic postscript “THE END”, are an echo of the reader’s sentiment: “You’ve got to be kidding.”

So when Ravan convinces Eddie to “go over the edge” and “feel like a bird in the skies”, assuring him that they won’t die, since, as he says, “I’ve done this before”, are we to take him at his word, just as Eddie did while they both leaped “into the unknown”? Did they, through some miraculous sleight of hand, survive the fall? Or indeed, did they manage to dodge the bullets from the semi-automatic that Three Point One — nom de guerre of a big-time local mobster, Bashir Akhtar — fires at them in the concluding paragraph?

Well, we don’t know the answers to these questions, but the prospects of survival for our two heroes, who have spent the latter half of the novel running a successful cremation service (again the morbid leitmotif), seem thin. So it may be time to bid the two most popular characters in Indian literature goodbye. And to mumble under our breaths, along with the author, the hallowed words of final farewell: rest in peace.

We pay our respects, but in Nagarkar’s novel and his style of black comedy, there’s scarcely any room for sympathy. The French philosopher and theorist Henri Bergson argued that compassion is antithetical to comedy and that sympathy can hamper a good laugh. But the rebuttal to Bergson’s theory of comedy, according to the literary critic James Wood, came in the form of the modern novel. In his book of essays, entitled The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel , Wood draws a distinction between “laughing at” and “laughing with” someone, characterising the latter as “comedy of forgiveness”, which, Wood believes, is something that the best of novels excel in.

The more subsidiary kind of comedy is the ha-ha variety of unfeeling slapstick that a novel like Rest in Peace feeds on. The shtick involving Ravan and Eddie and their comic inability to properly handle a court clerk’s dead body bound for the crematorium, for example, is funny only for a bit. Until, that is, we recall the words of the old man’s grieving son, Anant: “My father’s very light. He had TB, you know.” Hearing this, Eddie responds with “dramatic overkill”; while Ravan, the more introspective of the two — who, by the way, has also attempted suicide once (remember his words to Eddie before jumping off the building: “I’ve done this before”) — tells Anant, pointing at the corpse, that his “father’s rotting…and stinking worse than a dead rat.”

But perhaps the author would tell you that this negation of a compassionate viewpoint that his characters sometimes exhibit is precisely his point. Nagarkar’s Bombay — a city of scoundrels who either live in intimidating skyscrapers or suffocating chawls — is a proper dystopia. Here, poverty inures us to the harsher realities of life, and sympathy is a privilege not granted even to the rich. Is this what this novel and the previous two much-acclaimed instalments to the Ravan and Eddie series are trying to tell us?

Novels, however, are not written to convey messages or worldviews. So the world of Ravan and Eddie is just what it happens to be — replete with Bollywood dreams and con jobs and gangland wars. It’s a novelist’s offering: take it or leave it. It’s a world where the sound of laughter can sometimes be a little jarring, where a joke is often a response to adversity, and where death becomes a downward route — falling, falling, falling — towards salvation. And whenever the comedy gets too dark, and a tad unfunny for the average taste, there is, thank goodness, this recurring bullet shot that rings out loud and clear.

(Vineet Gill is a journalist with The Sunday Guardian)

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