It is, or at least should be, standard reviewing practice to read or re-read a writer’s back catalogue to offer an intelligent opinion on the writer’s latest work. How else to note patterns, the ideas that move a writer, to discern the shape of a career? So it is with some shame that I confess I haven’t read Kaushik Barua’s debut novel, Windhorse — published just over a year ago and winner of the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar award for 2014. But, to the relief of derelict reviewers, it appears that Barua’s second novel, No Direction Rome , is wholly different from his first in setting, tone and preoccupation. Nothing, I gather, in Windhorse would have prepared me for No Direction Rome .

Although, there is one thing. (There always is.) Windhorse is about Tibetan revolutionaries engaged in doomed armed resistance against China. For the Tibetan in exile, as for the Palestinian or any exiled people, the lost home, at once real and chimerical, becomes defining, even for generations that know only statelessness, whose knowledge and experience of ‘home’ is at best secondhand.

Krantik, in whose sardonic, antic voice No Direction Rome is told, is found early in the novel at a bar telling a woman that his name means ‘the fighter’: “Fighting against what? Against oneself, against the universe, I think. Wow, that’s so profound.” If the Tibetan revolutionaries in Windhorse had an obvious purpose and foe, Krantik is a revolutionary in search of revolution, a fighter not even lucky enough to be fighting for a lost cause. It is that flailing for purpose, as the novel’s title suggests, that directionless drifting, that defines Krantik as clearly as the loss of home might define an exile.

Krantik’s is a voice I haven’t heard before in Indian writing in English. He is related to Agastya Sen of Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English August , and shares his urban disaffection, his scatological humour. But Agastya, for all his alienation, is mired to India. Krantik has left India behind: “Don’t ask me about that stuff, find someone else. They’ll tell you about their Indian mother’s spices and mangoes and elephant dung and shit.” This is a literary statement of intent. Barua’s Krantik is uninterested in romanticising India from New York or London. Neither is he interested in contemporary India, its inequalities, its ugly, unlivable cities or its moribund villages. India intrudes into his life only in the form of guilt over his mother, and the vague menace of an arranged marriage. The book begins with Krantik’s betrothed, the daughter of a politician, attempting suicide in Amsterdam.

Uninterested in evoking India from afar, Krantik is also uninterested in the immigrant narrative, in telling the story of leaving India to find material success, if spiritual confusion, in New York or London. Krantik is not a migrant. Instead he is that privileged species — the expatriate, a label hitherto reserved for Westerners condescending to work in the third world. “And I’m not a stupid foreigner anyway,” Krantik sneers, “I’m the overpaid expat.” He is part of a globalised technocracy, a protean, mobile class of well-educated, well-compensated white-collar workers for whom the world blends into a succession of airport lounges, coffee shops and office lobbies. Wherever in the world they are from they speak an Americanised English and share an air of gilded imperviousness.

Changez in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist is such a technocrat, as are the protagonists in Zia Haider Rahman’s ambitious debut In The Light of What We Know . But these novels teeter on the fault lines that trace a jagged path between that imperviousness and the political realities of being Muslim in the West after 9/11. In Krantik’s case there is nothing, political or religious, to obtrude on the good life, the casual hedonism of those who take recreational drugs and go to clubs while the world burns around them.

Still, as they carefully curate another album of pictures on Facebook of a recent island holiday, an existential panic occasionally sets in. Ever get the feeling, as Johnny Rotten once asked, you’ve been cheated? “Sometimes my anger is fake,” Krantik observes. “Often my sorrow is fake too. If I don’t fill my soul with wind and bluster, the world may know it’s empty and crush it like a Coke can.”

Krantik, a whiny hypochondriac, is not a likeable protagonist but he is funny. Barua has described him in interviews as Holden Caulfield in his thirties, but this is to sell Krantik short. Caulfield is sentimental about childhood innocence, terrified that adulthood means becoming a phony. Krantik knows he is ludicrous, knows that he is already a phony. He understands that even his alienation is not original but an attitude, a pose — like much of contemporary life it is, as Barua writes, “an image of an image”.

Krantik is vividly drawn, an appropriately shallow example of a particularly shallow class of persons, the “overpaid expat”. It’s unfortunate that Barua felt it necessary to fill the rest of the novel with so much contrived ‘zaniness’. Chiara, with whom Krantik carries on a desultory affair, is a nerd-boy fantasy, a wild-haired bohemian with an open marriage and a penchant for cutting herself; she’s a stock character, as Barua himself acknowledges in the text, out of a Woody Allen film, the alluring, damaged Charlotte Rampling in Stardust Memories , for example. Some of the slapstick comedy, a prolonged scene with sleeping gas, for instance, is out of kilter with the blacker comedy, the social satire No Direction Rome gestures towards without fully committing to.

Rome itself, where Barua works for an international aid agency, is an inspired setting, mouldering and falling apart albeit with far more grace than poor Krantik can muster.

Shougat Dasgupta is a freelance journalist

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