Book review: 'Vanity Bagh'

Book: Vanity Bagh
Author: Anees Salim
Publisher: Picador
Pages: 248
Price: Rs499

Let me be frank. I probably wouldn’t have touched Anees Salim’s new novel Vanity Bagh with a 20-foot bargepole if my sister hadn’t tied me to a chair, thrust the book in my hands and stood over me threateningly like a slave driver in Jamaica’s sugar plantations of old, till I’d read the first page.

I wouldn’t have touched this book because, browsing in a bookshop, I’d read the first line on the back cover blurb and it put me off. “Inside every big Indian city there is a tiny Pakistan” read the line and since I’m sick of books that bring me the reality of life in India — for heaven’s sake, as a reader of newspapers and a citizen of India, I already know about the reality of life in India and it sucks — I decided I’d rather be an escapist and bought an Asterix comic instead.

But my sister’s job was done the second I turned to page 2, because I was so hooked that I didn’t move a muscle except for those in my page-turning finger till I got to the end of the book. I know this sounds snobbish, but rarely do I come across a book by an Indian author that has style, substance and humour all in one delightful package, and Vanity Bagh has all three from the beginning to the end.

So. Imran Jabbari is an aimless young man who lives in town called Mangobad (presumably home to the aam janta; a city that could be anywhere in India) which is divided into a Muslim neighbourhood called Vanity Bagh and a Hindu area called Mehendi. His father is the imam and he’s part of a gang called Five and a Half Men, which is composed of six young men, all of whom bear the names of Pakistani politicians (one of the young men is mute, so he’s the half).

They are highly inspired by the neighbourhood don who, though he’s retired, missing a leg and constantly losing family members (or parts of them) to his enemies, is still very much the boss of the locality. Imran and his equally jobless friends want to be just like him, hence the gang. But the Five and a Half Men don’t actually do very much. They’re asked to ‘repossess’ a car from Mehendi on one occasion, but that’s it. Till they’re approached by a man who asks them to drive and park some scooters at several locations in Mehendi, telling them that this is to smuggle gold, and the next thing they know, they’re convicted for perpetrating a serial bomb attack that goes down in history as 11/11.

Condemned to jail for 14 years, Imran dreams of escape while working as a binder in the prison’s books section. And in the blank pages that he binds into notebooks he sees his life and beloved Vanity Bagh turned into words (something of an irony since he’s always hated books). Words that describe the life of any poorly educated and unemployed young man in India, but particularly those who come from a minority. Words that describe endless aspirations that inevitably end in frustrated hopelessness, a way of life from which there seems to be no escape.

Now, if I read a paragraph like the one I just wrote above in any book review, my inner escapist would scream ‘ruunnnnn’. But don’t run. Please don’t. Because Vanity Bagh is not your standard there’s-no-hope-in-life novel. Though you will feel an almost unbearable sadness when you finally put it down, the book itself is quite hilarious. Not ROFLMAO funny, but you’ll never stop smiling.

Imran, the narrator, is a delightfully engaging character with a brilliant turn of phrase and a propensity to scatter quotes from the residents of Vanity Bagh throughout his story, complete with their dates of birth and death (where available). The quotes are sometimes topical and sometimes totally random (including a series of hysterically funny exchanges between the local poet whose work is so bad that it’s good and his hapless listeners), and do much to lighten the atmosphere when it threatens to become heavy — but there is nothing heavy about this book.
Really. Read it.