All for a headline

Raj Kamal Jha’s first novel, The Blue Bedspread , published 15 years ago, received such rapturous notices that readers (of newspapers and magazines, at least) would have been convinced that here, finally, was the next great, homegrown Indian novelist in English. Arundhati Roy had apparently given up on novels. Amitav Ghosh was getting on a bit. Amit Chaudhuri has no interest in ‘great’ novels; ‘great’ meaning grand or largeness of scale in this instance, Chaudhuri being a savant of the small.

But Jha, admirably, has taken Fleetwood Mac’s advice and chosen to go his own way. He is that rare novelist, in this fortunate age of sinecures for less-than-bestselling literary novelists at university creative writing programmes, who has a day job. He is the chief editor of a national newspaper and novel-writing appears to be something he does when he can’t sleep, accounting perhaps for the crepuscular, in-between quality of his work — stories that are half-dreams, oddly vivid, unsettling, only half-understood; characters who are half-seen through a cataract of incomprehension; language that shrouds as much as it clarifies, that seeks to make mysterious what might be considered ordinary.

Of course, this last is one of the things art seeks to do, to offer new, singular ways of seeing. Jha’s position, not a new one for a writer to adopt, is that we tell each other stories to survive, the only way we mortals have of leaving something of ourselves. Well, not the only way. We could have children. Not by chance, then, children and storytelling are central to Jha’s novels, to his first as much as to his fourth and latest, She Will Build Him a City .

In one of the last chapters of the novel, a character, Woman — most characters have no name in the novel, and the chapters are divided between ‘Man’, ‘Woman’ and ‘Child’ — invokes her reading of the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, the quoted lines serving as a sort of manifesto for Jha, a schema by which to read She Will Build Him a City . ‘People’, writes Mistral, as quoted in the novel, ‘who are chewing the forest / and those who break stone / want stories at bedtime.’ Or ‘Women looking for lost children who don’t return / and women who think they’re alive / and don’t know that they’re dead / ask for stories every night / and I spend myself telling and telling.’

Stories can offer consolation, a way of restoring in our imaginations what is lost in the world, or a way of creating an unsatisfactory world anew, a way of hoping. The clue is in the title — She Will Build Him a City . Who the ‘she’ and ‘him’ are is open to question but that is Jha’s way, to prompt the reader to come up with his own answers (half-answers, naturally). The lost city, bereft is more the mot juste, is ‘New City’, a version of Gurgaon.

In New City is a Woman whose husband is run over by a bus, whose daughter runs away from home and who later returns, damaged, wary, closeted in her old room. The Woman tells the story of her life, of her love for her daughter, of her daughter’s love for her, of losing a husband, of finding tentative new love. It is her way of reforging a bond with her daughter, of healing both herself and her child. In New City is a Man seeking his own consolation. Straight out of Bret Easton Ellis, this man is our very own Indian psycho, a man inoculated by wealth, a man who fantasises about doing terrible things, a man who does terrible things, a man held in sexual thrall by violence. The manifestation of his fantasies, of his guilt, is Balloon Girl, a destitute waif he spies holding a red balloon. In New City is a Child, an orphan named ‘Orphan’, left by his mother outside an orphanage and later rescued by a dog, Bhow, who sees the mother drop the boy off on a baking, summer night and feels a responsibility for the boy, a duty towards him. Man, Woman and Child are linked, a distorted, twisted link. Child is also a product of the imagination, part of the redemption, the consolation Jha’s characters seek through the telling of stories.

She Will Build Him a City is distinctly a Jha novel: cinematic, elliptical and, above all, sentimental. Jha’s predilection for sentimentality, for hokiness, is what prevents me from reposing my trust in him as a novelist. The menace of New City, its contemporary urban cruelty, is familiar. Fritz Lang made a film 80 years ago about a dystopic metropolis ruled from skyscrapers by unfeeling plutocrats. Reviewers often bring up films and filmmakers when discussing Jha: Blade Runner , say, or Bunuel, or David Lynch. In She Will Build Him a City , Balloon Girl’s red balloon is a nod to Albert Lamorisse. In an early scene, boys who torture and kill a dog during Diwali reference Amores Perros — indeed, fans of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, the film’s director, will recognise a fellow traveller in Jha and will feel at home with the book’s structure. Here lives interleave however briefly or glancingly, so that a scheduled caste boy devastated at seeing the girl he loves at a protest about reservations still manages to notice a central character in the book running into a morgue, a handkerchief clasped to his mouth. It is as if Jha introduces this boy and his love into the novel just so that he can glimpse Man entering the morgue, the subject of a fabulously creepy scene.

The protest about reservations, the miniature story about unrequited love, is tacked on, but it is illustrative. Jha cannot resist headlines — he is a newspaperman — and he cannot resist superfluous tricksiness. Much of what happens in She Will Build Him a City , most conspicuously a gang rape, is news. This is not a bad thing — read Charles Dickens, for instance (Jha uses a passage from Oliver Twist as the epigraph). But Dickens is morally exercised by events of the day, he is indignant about the news. Jha’s prose, by contrast, has a deadening effect, or affect rather, all the passion of the headlines glazed over by anomie, and by the strain evident in each paragraph, each sentence, of Jha’s need to write exquisitely. The news, the horror and degradation of too much of life in India, in Jha’s writing can sometimes feel a little like backdrop, like mise en scene.

Perhaps this is unfair. Perhaps I am prejudiced by the irritation I feel at his self-conscious flights of fancy. By a sentence like this: ‘He steps out of the car, out of the fierce noon day on the highway in New City into early morning, breakfast time, in Paris.’ Or this: ‘Red Balloon sees itself reflected in the man’s empty eyes.’ Irritated by the twee sentimentality of: ‘Because take my name, she says, take all the letters in it, mix them up, throw them up in the air, look where they land, pick them up, one by one, and rearrange them to change my name. Violets Rose. Love Stories.’ If only my name were Emgag Noopaswith. I could throw the letters up in the air, thereby forcing myself to pick them all up, and rearrange them to read ‘gag me with a spoon’.

Parts of She Will Build Him a City , mostly the parts titled ‘Woman’ with a couple of excursions into the lives of peripheral characters, are full of tenderness. Jha writes with profound feeling about small children, about mothers and fathers, about lovers. If only there was more tenderness and less portentous sentimentality disguised as empathy.

(Shougat Dasgupta is a Delhi-based freelance writer.)

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