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Striking out on his own

Charting his course Anand Mahadevan.

Freckled memory is smoothened by fresh strokes and teased to go full throttle in Anand Mahadevan’s “The Strike.” The novel arrests the gaze of a child and walks along as his stubborn innocence is diminished on the pathway to adulthood. Toronto-based Mahadevan’s debut novel is also a rare paean to the Indian Railways. The chugging train thrives as a space that unwittingly melts discrepancies and gives voice, though grudgingly, to those on the fringes.

“The Strike” traces the coming of age of Hari, from his rickshaw-riding days to school in Nagpur to the slow withering of innocence and piling up of guilt. A ridiculous accident ends in the death of his grandmother and well-intentioned move culminates in the death of three. Hari reluctantly joins the adult world sealed with uncanny silences, subtle manipulation and smooth escapes.

The novel, Indian in its sensibility and soul, took three years to make its appearance here, after it was published in Canada in 2006.

“I have always wanted it to be published in India as well. It was only last year that all the pieces came together and my Canadian publisher met with Penguin to organise an Indian edition,” says the 30-year-old Mahadevan in an e-mail interview. The author agrees the germs to the perfect portrayal of a child’s world lay in specks from real life. “I would agree that I have plundered from my memory of my childhood in India to populate or bring reality to some of the scenes in the novel.” However he clarifies, “But in every case the narrative’s imperative trumped the remembered memory; for example, I remember eating fish at my Bengali neighbour’s place but both my grandmothers are still very alive.”

According to this teacher-writer, “examples from mundane life” has breathed life into his narrative. Train travel, a predestined part of growing up in the 1980’s, is squeezed tight in “The Strike”. “My own sense of trains in India is that they are a great equaliser,” says Mahadevan. “At our homes, we can build walls based on class, caste and other exercises of power to keep in and out people and experiences. However, in the 1980s almost everyone travelled by trains and the bulk of those in second class sleeper compartments. Thus, one had to interact with others and had little choice in the matter,” he explains.

“Within trains, distinctions are not erased, but an egalitarianism exists because all travellers have the same purpose, to get to the journey’s end.”

Mahadevan however is frank when quizzed about certain characters winding up in uncharacteristic whimper in the novel. He admits, “I had hopes for all of the characters but I wanted a spare narrative that was focused on the single arc of Hari.” The interesting transgender Radha and a belligerent Vishu are cowed down towards the end.

“Originally, I had hoped to bring an adult Hari back from Canada to face Vishu and Radha and the others from the train, but that narrative stagnated in writing for two reasons. First off, it made the story sound like a morality play and secondly, India has changed so much from the time frame of ‘The Strike’,” he says.

For someone who moved out of India after school, the writer says it was not unusual to pick on an Indian subject. “I am finding that my writing like my own life mirrors the migration from India to the West,” he says. “While my first novel is based in India and is a childhood coming of age tale, the current works-in-progress slowly shift the milieu westward and age the characters towards the kind of life I am now leading in Canada.”

The author is wrapping up his second novel based on two Muslim boys from Pakistan who emigrate to the West and their lives pre and post 9/11. Also brewing in his writer’s den is a set of short stories.

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