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
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 )