Allan Sealy’s latest genre-busting book may be literary non-fiction, but it is not without a plot. Well, 433 square yards to be precise. The Sealy family house stands on this piece of land in Dehradun. On the portico of the house, he builds a pagoda he had seen in the Chinese city of Xi’an. The book is a masonry almanac in which Sealy, the mason’s apprentice, records the construction of the pagoda and leaps from this plot into the past to narrate family history. Trust Sealy to invent a form that allows easy indirection for his roving imagination.

In cities, construction sites are walled off with tin sheets to contain the flying dirt, grating sounds and jarring visual detail. By choosing construction as a theme, Sealy sets himself a challenge to craft high art out of a banal, dreary activity few writers would find promising. With his geometrical prose and polished thought, he proves that bricklaying is not as remote to his lapidary art as it may seem: “There is a gesture in bricklaying when the mason is filling in the gap between two bricks and needs to stop the mortar from spilling out. It’s made with the back of two fingers, sometimes just one. It’s a preemptive gesture, a closing off that’s half philosophical (at that moment the universe is divided between that gap and everything else) half aesthetic (ballerinas use it). It’s a gesture of great beauty, and I have seen Habilis make it in a reverie. You can’t do it yourself; it has to be witnessed side-on. Perhaps, the only time a dancer sees it is when she is beside herself.”

Sealy writes in the present tense so that the reader is not distracted from his delightful prose by the conventional promises of a story: what happened and what happens next. Taking away the benefit of holding the reader to a future promise or a past revelation, the present tense puts the burden of writing entirely on the moment. And every moment in this book is still and vivid like a painting: “A little frog, the first of the monsoon. At the monsoon’s end. It hops onto the shingle and sits very still. So still it’s there at the end of breakfast. I go out and see whether it’s not a dead leaf after all, must lean right over it till the morning glitters in its eye.” Even amidst the dirty disarray of the shingle and the shuttering, Sealy can situate a daily world of luminous discoveries.

Sealy’s prose is so astonishingly smooth and level that it seems he has written it with a mason’s trowel. Since he has so painstakingly plastered the cement, you can miss the brickwork and the building blocks of the book that purports to be “a natural and social history of 433 square yards of India”. The pedantic description provides Sealy the advantage of a literary rattlebag in which he can stuff all his narrative odds and ends and stylistic playthings. So this natural and social history also has poems and drawings and dialogues with his other selves such as the Housedweller and the Ascetic (the grihastha and the vanaprastha from the Hindu life of man).

By refusing to write a novel about a man who builds a pagoda in a north Indian small town, Sealy is playing a hermeneutic trick. In the form of an almanac, he is providing the reader the bare bones of a novel, the rough notes, so that as he builds the pagoda in the book, the reader is building a novel in his mind with Sealy as its protagonist. The cunning so typical of postmodern fiction comes effortlessly to him.

He has admitted the influence of Laurence Sterne, the father of the quirky, shapeless postmodern novel. But his relationship with the West is not as direct as Arundhati Roy’s borrowing from James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov. In The Trotter-Nama , by merging the postmodern with the Mughal narrative style, Sealy holds a mirror to western fiction.

While masonry in the book is also an extended metaphor for writing, one asks if a meta novel lurks within this book? He indeed compares The Trotter-Nama to the great wild goose pagoda and the present book to the small pagoda. He even likens his 433 square yards to the map of India, describing the neighbouring plots as Pakistan, Bangladesh, etc. Is mason Dhani, bent double with age, under whom Sealy apprentices, a symbol of native narrative tradition? And is the errant mason Habilis (after Homo Habilis, the dexterous man) the modern stylist? Pagoda is a writer’s vision and masonry the messy hard work he must put in day after day to realise it. The romantic reverie and the tedium of word-making come together in this allegory of writing. Sealy estranges the fanciful by bringing the exotic pagoda to a mofussil of power cuts, hardware shops and the Atlas cycle, while he embellishes the earthy routine of masonry with his marvellous description.

In any case, Sealy does seem to speak to the pagoda builders who belong to the Indian writing in English or IWE, the acronym so evocative of the shrivelling of Indian literary style. Few are willing to get sand in their eyes and grit in their ears. Sealy’s message to them: be good apprentices and dirty your hands.

(Dharminder Kumar is a Delhi-based journalist )

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