Size does matter. Ask Arzee, the vertically challenged hero of Chandrahas Choudhury’s debut novel. In fact it isn’t just his dwarfhood that he has issues with.
Size does matter. Ask Arzee, the vertically challenged hero of Chandrahas Choudhury’s debut novel. In fact it isn’t just his dwarfhood that he has issues with, (though he’d probably be happy to engage you in a conversation about precisely where, how and why it has impacted him) but it’s merely a starting point of life’s manifold injustices to him.
Things are on the cusp of change, however, and Arzee is quick to respond, “He’d cast away some worthless notions and become newly open to others; he uttered words he did not mean and was secretly pleased he’d said them. He offered less, took more; he was flat-footed no longer, but threw himself into the dance.”
After years of uphill struggle, he is about to clamber aboard the plane of respectability and achieve a life more ordinary: a promotion at his beloved decrepit theatre Noor, a much-awaited marital alliance, and the concomitant deference of his motley band of friends. But naturally, things fall apart, and Arzee spins manically, delightfully, comically and tragically out of control. The result is two weeks worth of internal monologues as Arzee stomps his way through this city ruminating about and hob-knobbing with Mother, ageing head projectionist Phiroz, the deadpan recovery agent Deepakbhai, and the love of his life, hair-stylist Monique, whose reticence washes away against the constant patter of Arzee’s words.
Choudhury shows the distinct influence of literary greats like Gunter Grass and Scott Fitzgerald in his creation of an almost-feral self-obsessed dwarf and description of the larger than life Noor cinema as it “projected an air of stern and perpetual rebuke… a grouchy bystander, a great negator” to the world of men. But his writing is all his own, sparking with energy, and cultivated from the culture of this city.
This is an intricately comic, well-plotted novel, all the more interesting in that nothing much really happens. It is hard not to laugh aloud at Arzee, but somewhere along the line you find yourself taking him as seriously as he does himself. Arzee the dwarf emerges the unassailable hero of his own life, even as a hundred personal miseries threaten his mood.
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