Book Review: Missing & in action

What does it mean to miss someone? The dictionary defines the emotion as an absence tinged with longing. But like many four-lettered words in English, there are nuances to “miss”. When a person disappears, it creates an emptiness that can only be filled with stories. There’s none of the closure that death brings in its wake. Instead, there’s a question: What happened?

In both The City Of Devi by Manil Suri and Samhita Arni’s The Missing Queen, there is a  quest to find a person. Suri’s two storytellers are Sarita, a wife looking for her husband, and Jaz (or Ijaz), who is looking for his lover. They’re making their way from Colaba, at the tip of south Mumbai, to the northern suburbs and it’s a dangerous journey. Mumbai in The City Of Devi is a war zone. It’s divided between communal gangs.

The threat of a Pakistani nuclear attack looms and violence is rampant. Sarita ventures into this troubled world armed with a desperate desire to be reunited with her husband Karun and a pomegranate. Jaz — irreverent, resourceful and gay — ends up as Sarita’s ally even though she doesn’t trust him entirely. She meets him in a Hindu neighbourhood and quickly figures out he’s only pretending to be Hindu.

She doesn’t buy his story of going to the suburbs to join his mother, but she doesn’t guess that Jaz’s reasons for heading north are the same as hers: not only does he need to know where and why the man he loves disappeared, the man in question is Karun. The trio become a reimagining of the Devi-Shiva-Vishnu trinity operating in a futuristic Mumbai that is dishearteningly easy to imagine as real.

In The Missing Queen, it’s Sita who has disappeared and the one looking for her is a young journalist determined to unearth the truth. Arni’s Ayodhya glints with success and is an echo chamber of rhetoric. Under Rama, Ayodhya is a rich, powerful kingdom, thanks to the the riches acquired from a vanquished Lanka. Mithila (Sita’s birthplace) is effectively Ayodhya’s colony, but though it’s under Ayodhya’s thumb, Mithila feels freer than Ayodhya where the moral police flexes terrible muscle and everything stinks of deceit and hypocrisy.

The idea of setting a Hindu epic in the present isn’t novel, but Arni’s interpretations don’t feel forced or hackneyed. Valmiki as a senior journalist makes sense — he did report a story that was unfolding before his eyes. Surpanakha as a rebel leader, Rama as a consummate politician — the elements Arni introduces don’t clash with the original storytelling and her version of the events in post-war Ayodhya is engaging.

Although there’s much reminiscing about Karun and Sita in the books, it’s worth noting that the two missing characters remain something of a blur. In Sita’s case, she’s a flash of colour (ochre, to be precise) and only those opposing Rama’s oppressive monarchy seem to remember her. She embodies resistance and survival, whether in captivity in Lanka or as a victim of Rama’s shadowy cruelty.

Karun, on the other hand, is pieced together from rose-tinted memories. To both Sarita and Jaz, he is innocence. All Sarita and Jaz want from him is sex. Unfortunately, the fact that Karun is gay makes it difficult for him to have sex with Sarita and the fact that he’s married makes it problematic for him to have sex with Jaz. (The trio ultimately resolve this problem by engineering what might be one of the most convoluted alternatives to Viagra.)

Both novels are set in unspecified time periods — Arni’s in the present, Suri’s in the near future — that seems not just credible but also probable. The cityscapes in the two books show the novelists’ anxieties about contemporary India. These are intolerant, violent places that rob people of basic liberties. It’s also chilling how so many citizens are happy to be manipulated. It’s quite obvious the cities in The Missing Queen and The City Of Devi aren’t dystopic fantasies, but metropolises sculpted out of the impressions contemporary India has left upon the authors.

It doesn’t feel as though the missing, Karun and Sita, have escaped these terrible worlds even though they have by disappearing. Ultimately, their stories become less about them and more about the storytellers who survive and continue without them. So they remain in these terrible worlds despite not really being there. The missing come to stand for hope — desperate and unrealistic as it might be — because they live on in the memories of those who continue the good fight.