FICTION
The paradoxes of imagination
ZAC O'YEAH
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Blind Faith breaks many laws of credibility, sometimes very enjoyably.
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Blind Faith, Sagarika Ghose, HarperCollins, Rs.295.
"WHAT are you doing here?" she asked, walking into his gaze. "Are you CIA? Do you have a recorder hidden in your teeth?"
What am I doing here? I'm looking at the patterned landscape in a tumour that blossoms from a man's stomach. The stab wounds on a child that look like the edges of a hibiscus flower.
So goes the first meeting between IAS officer Indira (Indi for short) — who "looked like a whore but thought like a statesman" — and her newfound American boy friend who, lest you missed the hints, is in the medical profession. Apart from being a feminist storm trooper, a sexual nuclear device and a fervent LSD-consumer, Indira suffers from an incurable disease that makes her blind.
There's more
There's a family curse in the picture too — her ancestry can be traced to a female demon that mated with a fisherman in Bengal. Indira grew up with a wife-beating, sadist father who "became subconsciously aware — rather like Neanderthal man may have become aware of lurking danger in the forest but found no words to articulate it — that Indi's shadow threatened not only his survival as a human being but also his survival as a species". Meanwhile her mother bathed in the Ganga so often that she died of pneumonia. To most of you this may sound like rather heavy-handed pulp, but Blind Faith is also a very interesting example of the paradoxes of imagination.
Its actual protagonist is Mia, Indira's future daughter-in-law, a London-born, half-Bengali Naomi Campbell look-alike and not so successful journalist uninspired by her regressive job doing New Age coverage at SkyVision. Like her mother-in-law, Mia is blind — but in a mental and intellectual way: despite all her reading of psychology books she lacks basic self-awareness and is torn between a spiritual yearning inherited from her academic-cum-artist-cum-alcoholic father who took the easy way out by drowning himself, and the practical attitude of her materialistic mum who says "it was just like him to go off and commit suicide when the daughter was still unmarried". Mum is therefore intent on marrying Mia off to a rich manufacturer of Ayurvedic cosmetics (the son of Indira) before she herself goes to New York with her Punjabi astrologer-cum-yuppie fiancée.
Perhaps it is no wonder that Mia's head is all messed up, and she is attracted — for the unlikeliest reasons — to a sadhu who's come all the way from an ashram in Delhi to preach the "rebirth of the Mother Woman" in a corner of Hyde Park. Marrying the desi Max Factor seems to her a good idea — it will bring her to Delhi and closer to her sadhu. Unfortunately, her hubby turns out to have an insulin pump where his sex appeal should have been, he is a habitual sniffer of a white powder which is not an Ayurvedic drug, and we soon realise — although it takes until the last pages of the book before Mia does — that he suffers from a peculiar kind of mental illness.
Unrestrained
Sagarika Ghose's comedy is unrestrained and Blind Faith breaks many laws of credibility, sometimes very enjoyably. But exactly because it is written with a soap operatic attitude towards aesthetics, the reader has to — to paraphrase Samuel Taylor Coleridge — not only willingly suspend disbelief, but lock it up in a steel almirah and swallow the key.
Whereas Coleridge thought it important to distinguish between "imagination" and "fancy" — the former, an artistic union of emotion and thought while the latter a more mechanical activity — most of us nevertheless do enjoy the fanciful: popular cinema, for example. But when a novel is written in the Bollywood format many a logical lapse or implausible coincidence glare at you from the page — such as the case, in this novel, of a suicide bomber who explodes a plane during a "dress rehearsal". Shouldn't the dead terrorist then find it difficult to participate in the actual performance? It is thus that the fragile co-existence of sensory enjoyment and intellectual understanding — a crucial requisite for the reader's participation — shatters, giving us a serious jolt. But if this plot starred Shah Rukh Khan in the male lead and Urmila Matondkar as Mia, and if I were sitting with a tub of masala popcorn in the darkness of Cauvery Talkies, I'd be mesmerised for two and a half hours — or more.
There's your paradox, Samuel.
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