What they said about
THE ALCHEMY OF DESIRE
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‘At last - a new and brilliantly original novel from India.’
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— V S Naipaul |
‘The Alchemy of Desire puts Tarun in the front rank of Indian novelists. I am inclined to agree with Naipaul: his book is a masterpiece.’ |
— Khushwant Singh |
‘One of the most attractive Indian writers in English of his generation, he writes with a great deal of raw energy, inventively employing images which are at once sad, haunting, horrendously comic and beautiful.’ |
— Times Literary Supplement
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IN MAIL TODAY
A big-theme
novel on the
violence of
our times
In his second
novel, Tarun
Tejpal brings
together the
India that lives in
the cities and one
that survives in
villages. Pillage,
violence and
torture link
his two Indias - Suresh Menon
EARLY IN the book – and
once towards the end too –
there is the sentence: “The
world is what it is.” This is
not so much a nod to V. S.
Naipaul (who began A
Bend in the River with precisely
those words), but a hint that this
is not a prescriptive book. It does
not contain solutions. It is a book
of acceptance. The first time, that
line refers to broken love affairs
when “she too understood, like
cops and doctors do, that the
world is what it is, ephemeral,
uneven, to be squarely dealt
with, and not to be conjured
out of weak romantic novels.
But few seemed to possess the
gift of leaving the room while
the laughter was still in the air
and the spirits high. For the
most, everyone seemed to be
committed to creating a heap
of debris before walking away
from it.”
The protagonist, an investigative
journalist, might have been speaking
of the bigger picture as revealed later
on. This is a world where assassinations
are all in a day’s work, where
those with power rearrange reality,
where the guilty are as clueless as the
innocent, where the symbolism of the
sphincter muscle is all-pervading.
The journalist wakes up one morning
to see on television (‘breaking news’)
that he is the target of an assassination
bid, and that five would-be
assassins have been arrested. He is
then given police protection round
the clock.
His lover Sara says he is suffering
from “the illusion of normalcy”, and
that “the worst horrors take place
around us while we go happily about
our everyday lives”. What she does
not tell him, and he has to find out
for himself is that you can use an
upheaval to reconnect with family
and normalcy.
This is the season for discovering
the Real India – a quest that Aravind
Adiga and Vikas Swarup both
undertook with remarkable lack of
imagination and remarkable success
– as if it is a single entity outside
the everyday life of “those who
curse in Hindi with an accent.”
Tejpal’s quest has taken him deeper,
his language is sharper and he
has brought together the India that
lives in the cities and the one that
survives in villages. Surprisingly,
they resemble each other. What is
commonplace in one – the rape, pillage,
torture, casual violence stems
from the self-deception, compromise,
greed that is routine in the
other. The poet Gerard Manley
Hopkins has written somewhere
that “Sorrow’s springs are the
same.” So are the springs of violence,
Tejpal seems to be saying.
THE REAL divide is not along
lines of class or caste, but in
spirit. Thus, the leader of the
assassins is noted for his “courage,
loyalty and asceticism”. This evenhandedness
serves the novel well,
for the protagonist is neither heroic
enough nor villainous enough to be
attractive. If he garners the reader’s
sympathy it is because he is like
most of us, with just the right mix of
heroism and villainy to be normal.
The assassins are far more interesting,
far more complex and far more
committed even if morally, there is
little to choose between the good
guys and the bad guys.
Sara takes lovers, quotes Auden
and listens to the life stories of the
assassins. The two Indias exist comfortably
within her. Or perhaps this
is an oversimplification. After all, it
is only Indians who are obsessed by
the Real India. Tejpal uses the
theme while avoiding the cliché.
The narrative swings between the
journalist’s own somewhat insipid
life and the stories of his five assassins
– Chaaku, Kabir M, Kaaliya,
Chini, and Hathoda Tyagi – who
have emerged from a system where
rape is a weapon of mass destruction,
where the sensitive learn to
stick knives into or hammer the
brains out of those who cross their
paths, and where forgiveness comes
with the successful murder or with
settling of scores.
Tejpal’s skill lies teasing out the
ambiguity of guilt, and the uncertainty
of victimhood. What lifts the
novel above the ordinary is the confusion
in the minds of the killers
who, like the characters in a Beckett
play, have no idea why they have
been chosen for the task, whom they are beholden to or indeed what
they are waiting for.
The absurdity of the great emotions
– love, hatred, passion, patriotism
– is delineated with a sure
touch, and it is the underlying humour
of the human situations that
gives the novel its power.
The generation of Vikram Seth,
Rushdie, Amitava Ghosh, Rohinton
Mistry, Arundhati Roy is still writing
and at the top of its form. But the
literary equivalent of the cricketing
question, “Who after the Fab Four?”
continues to be asked with the same
frequency.
No clear answers have emerged
yet. One problem has been a reluctance
of the writers to attempt the
big themes, to take on difficult subjects
and wring out narratives. Tejpal’s
second novel is not perfect;
better editing would have flattened
out some of the over-written, over descriptive
prose. But by taking on
a big theme and finding in it a commentary
on India – neither dark nor
shining, but merely a world that is
what it is – Tejpal has staked a claim
to being taken more seriously than
most others.
This is a book of multiple roads to
brutality, of multiple explanations
for the central event (or non-event).
Policemen, crooks, village elders,
journalists, venture capitalists, businessmen,
lawyers, street children,
whores – no one escapes Tejpal’s
sharp pen which he sometimes uses
like a caricaturist, at other times like
a poet.
“The world is what it is,” wrote
Naipaul, “men who are nothing, who
allow themselves to become nothing,
have no place in it.”
Tejpal stands that cynicism on its
head. It is the men who are nothing
who often display the qualities of
humanism and understanding that
separate us from the animals.
Or indeed from the politicians and
policemen who can be animals in
human form.
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