Fiction
Reassembled identities
ARVIND SIVARAMAKRISHNAN
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Kapur handles the tale adeptly, with twist following turn rapidly and unpredictably.
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This captivating story, for all its accessibility, asks Indians some pointed questions about our links, and those of our parents, with the past...
The Wages of Life, Vikram Kapur, Srishti, 2004, p.239, Rs. 250.
VIKRAM KAPUR'S second novel, which, like his first, is set in a political context, repeatedly undermines the familiar with the implausible, which rapidly becomes all too probable. Kapur, in deliberate contrast to many other contemporary Indian novelists, develops the narrative quickly, and sustains the pace in a sharp contemporary idiom. His Ravi Malhotra is, if not a familiar character, certainly a recognisable one. A computer engineer aged 32, he works in Seattle, where he also has an apartment. He comes of a good family too; his father Ashish Malhotra, now nearly 80, is the highly-respected former editor of the national newspaper The Republic.
Tension and pain
There are tensions, of course, and there is pain. His father has flatly refused to move to Seattle, which only deepens Ravi's sorrow that he himself had not been with his mother during her last days; she died, wasted by tuberculosis, a fortnight before Ravi's Green Card came through. But now, six months later, Ravi's father suddenly writes that he wants to come and stay. Ravi telephones, and his father says, "You don't really know me... There is, however, still time for the two of us. And I intend to make good use of it."
Ravi delightedly flies to Delhi to fetch his father. But it is the family friend Dr. Verma who meets him at the airport; and Dr Verma's very manner causes in Ravi a clutch of fear.
In the car, Dr. Verma is gentle but direct. The previous evening, Mr. Malhotra had been out walking when a hit-and-run driver struck him. The doctors had done their best, but in vain.
Dr. Verma wisely takes the young man to his own home. Next morning, the desolation hits Ravi. His father had fled eastwards to Delhi during Partition, but all the rest of the family had been killed. His mother had stayed in Delhi only because she had got married; had she gone westwards to her relatives, she too would have disappeared in the slaughter. Now Ravi has no one else.
But he has to know what happened. Dropped home by Dr. Verma, he talks to the family retainer Hari Singh. Mr. Malhotra had received a phone call from somebody called Sapna Sood. He had then walked to the local shopping complex, had made a phone call from a PCO, and had then been knocked down by what the fruit vendor Atma Ram says was a white Ambassador. As Ravi's sorrow turns to anger, the questions flood in. The phone call was not unusual — journalists often use public booths for sensitive work — but why had his father given Hari Singh Dr. Verma's phone number and not his usual doctor's number? Why had he gone walking on a 40-degree evening when he had always preferred to use his chauffeur-driven, air-conditioned car? And who is Sapna Sood?
Finding answers
Ravi starts with Atma Ram, who recalls that the Ambassador's number plates were covered with black cloth — and he tells Ravi that when making a home delivery the next day, he saw a similar car with its number plates covered; there aren't too many Ambassadors in a wealthy neighbourhood like this one, and Atma Ram knows who lives in the house too. Ravi then calls the ASI who had called in at his father's house in the evening, but the officer is off duty.
Now for Sapna Sood. But she rings Ravi out of the blue, and they meet at a shopping complex. With Ravi already feeling old among the bright young things in a fast-food joint, she tells him she is doing a doctorate at JNU on the Hindu nationalist movement in the 1940s, and she shows him a photograph of three people. One is Ravi's father, Ashish Malhotra; another, Sapna says, is one Ajit Munje. The third, standing in the middle, is Nathuram Godse.
Emerging truth
Sapna, seeing Ravi's bewilderment, takes him to her home, where he meets her grandfather, none other than Ajit Munje. The chase explodes — who murdered Ravi's father, and now, who was his father in the first place? Who was Ashish Malhotra, if, as Ajit Munje says, Ravi's father was in fact one Ranbir Lal? And where are the police in all this, with officers off duty, the case transferred for no apparent reason, and so on?
Somehow Ravi, with Sapna's help, keeps going. There is danger too, and bit by bit, the truth emerges; it is as terrifying as the slaughter unleashed by Partition. Kapur handles the tale adeptly, with twist following turn rapidly and unpredictably; and through it all ripples Maya, the veil of illusion, sometimes concealing and sometimes revealing. This captivating story, for all its accessibility, asks Indians some pointed questions about our links, and those of our parents, with the past, and in doing what others in other literary traditions have done, it goes beyond the thriller it seems at first sight to be.
Arvind Sivaramakrishnan is lecturer in politics and law at Taunton's College, Southampton, U.K.
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