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| Edited By: Gargi Gupta |Source: DNA |Updated: Dec 05, 2017, 01:54 PM IST
A State of Freedom by Neel Mukherjee, back after his bravura turn in the Man Booker-nominated The Lives of Others begins with the story of a father and son on a visit to the Taj Mahal and Fatehpur Sikri. They're American, but of Indian origin — the father grew up here, while the child is new to, and unfamiliar with, the sights and sounds of India. The narrative, on the surface, is about the father's desire to acquaint the child with the country of his origin through one of its iconic buildings, even as he struggles to protect him from the rude reality everywhere — the clamouring beggars, the chaotic roads and the noise all around.
Underneath this, there's something uncanny, even sinister. The taxi driver, for instance — was his rash driving simply a reaction to the traffic and pothole-covered road, or did he, perhaps, for a mysterious reason, take a sadistic pleasure in discomfitting his passengers? Then the guide in Sikri, with the "sharply pointed face...on its way to becoming a fox's", who seems to appear and disappear at will — was he a real person, or was it all in the imagination of the father?
Perhaps, as is implied, prolonged stay in the US had sharpened his sensivity to the poverty, illness, and human depravity one sees everywhere in India — a sensitivity that stays dormant among most Indians — and led him to imagine things that weren't there? It was as if, as the father says at one point — "He was now a tourist in his own country."
Migration has been a recurrent trope in much of Indian fiction in English, perhaps because so many of the writers, Mukherjee one of them, are the product of migration, either to the West, or from smaller Indian towns to the metropolises where they landed up in search of a more cosmopolitan education, a better way of life. Inevitably, a lot of this writing is schizophrenic — impelled by the disjuncture of old and new ways of life and seeing, of looking back at a lost way of life, articulating the sense of being uprooted in the present, of holding on to the old, the difficulties of translating between cultures, and so on.
Mukherjee's book plays out nearly all of these connotations. But it isn't just the migration out of India, but also from small towns to big cities that he draws on. Such as Renu, the "cooking aunty" in the second section of the book, who'd escaped her little village in Medinipur only to become a cook in Mumbai living in subhuman conditions of a shanty colony, and yet managed to send lakhs to her nephew studying in Heidelberg. Or Milly, the domestic help, in the fourth and longest segment, who escapes from the exploitative poverty of her village in Jharkhand to find herself misused even more cruelly by the people she works for in Mumbai. It's the clash of cultures, of value systems that lends the drama here. It's not always tragic, but can also be ironic, even comic, such as when the West-domiciled man comes back to his parent's home and presumes to dictate the menu and the recipe to the cook. Or pays a visit to his cook's village in rural Bengal, not realising he has to sleep on the musty, smelly bedding, and relish the local fare which his hosts apologetically feel is not good enough for him.
Structurally, the novel is unusual in that it has five segments, five stories of unequal lengths. They're discrete sections, different in tone, but tied very loosely together by characters or situations that appear marginally in one taken up by others. For instance, in the first story there's a reference to a construction worker who falls to his death and a beggar who has a bear with him — both reappear as the protagonists of the third story. The prose is a little patchy — awkward and heavy in parts, and poetic in others. It's a dark book, bleak in its outlook on the human condition — but for those who persevere, it's rewarding.
