Soaring free
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Fireproof is a tale about a real-life tragedy told with imagination and compassion.
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IN May 2002, The Indian Express published a piece titled "John Brown and a Dog Called Chum" by the newspaper's executive editor, Raj Kamal Jha. The article, which came out of Jha's visit to Ahmedabad in the aftermath of the riots that had raged across Gujarat earlier that year, is a pastiche of images from those terrible days: charred bodies, a slit uterus, the partially burnt books he discovered in the debris, including a child's English workbook with a story about a blind man and his dog trapped in a hotel fire.
Powerful though the piece was, it cried out to be freed from the constraints of a pre-defined slot in a daily newspaper; to be expanded into something fuller. Now the culmination, Jha's third novel, is here, and the four-year wait was worth it.
Fireproof starts with a prologue that gives us a joint statement by riot victims speaking to us from beyond the grave. These anonymous dead will continue their testimonies in little footnotes interspersed through the book: fretting about their families, wondering if the provident fund will be enough for those left behind, the older ones musing stoically that they at least got to live a full life. But the story proper begins in an Ahmedabad hospital with our narrator, "Mr. Jay", discovering that his wife has given birth to a grotesquely deformed baby. The eyes and eyebrows are perfectly formed, but the rest of the child is a mess: "the forehead a narrow strip of flesh, less than a finger wide... a slit where his lips should have been... no arms or legs... "
A despondent Jay leaves his convalescing wife in the hospital and takes the baby home for the night. But then he receives a call from a mysterious woman who tells him to come to the railway station the next day, so they can "set the baby right". Jay has seen a glimpse of this woman earlier in the evening, through a hospital window, and he's intrigued. Reaching the station isn't so easy, however, for, the city is on fire.
At one level, Fireproof can be read as a fairly straightforward allegory: on a day that sees the full human potential for evil explode to the surface, this ugliness is manifest in a newborn child's physical appearance. A father, worried about this terrifying world his child has come into, sets out to make it whole again. Simplistic though this sounds, the book does work even at this level, for, Jha tells a solid, engrossing story, never allowing the reader's attention to flag. But by the time we get to the climactic revelation, it becomes clear that he's reaching for something deeper.
Jha's work often draws extreme reactions and one reason is that he plumbs the interior lives of disturbed people with courage; he reaches places many other writers don't go. In Fireproof, for instance, by showing us a possibly repugnant side to a narrator whom we have so far seen only as a caring, protective parent, he holds a mirror up to our own darkest feelings. This also fits the lessons we learn from the worst riots — that ordinary human beings are capable of turning into monsters when their identity is threatened, or when they fall under the sway of the mob.
We've had realist literature about communal violence, we've had numbing first-person accounts by victims, witnesses and reporters. Now Jha gives us a phantasmagoric tale built around a real-life tragedy, and he does it with both imagination and compassion. A startling final act involves a solicitous dwarf, a watery land where the dead go to tell their stories, and first-person accounts by a book, a watch and a towel — and the author's achievement is that none of this seems out of place. If anything, it's poignantly appropriate to this subject matter — for, could any fantasy writer dream up scenarios more unfathomable than some of the things that really happened in Gujarat in 2002?
JAI ARJUN SINGH
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