Book review: 'Noon'

Book: Noon
Aatish Taseer
Fourth Estate
240 pages
Rs 299

When the hands of a clock meet at noon, the sheer tidiness of the dial is evidence enough of time having come full circle. More than that, the merging of hands could be seen as a signifier of separation — of morning from afternoon, of late breakfasts from early lunches, and in the case of Aatish Taseer’s Noon, of father from son, of the masses from the elite, and ultimately, of good writing from bad. In the case of this novel, it would be fair to say that it is within this halfway house of clock-like division that the book operates. There is always a little something that stops a fractured relationship from being mended, always a little something that stops the book’s largely above average writing from assuming the shape of great.

Noon is written in first person for the most part, and it doesn’t take long to realise that the protagonist Rehan Tabassum is a literary proxy for the author himself. Like Taseer, Rehan grows up with his mother in Delhi, sees little of his businessman-politician Pakistani father, studies at Massachusetts, and seems to spend considerable time in London. But as one would fear, these similarities don’t make way for an obvious surface autobiography that is trapped between hesitant revelation and guilt-ridden concealment. Rehan’s experience of childhood and his eternally ambivalent relationship with his father’s family come across as pleasingly surprising in their candour. The trouble starts when Taseer starts to bait bigger fish.

As one moves between the book’s four sections, one finds that each comes with a broad socio-political theme to explore. Social climbing in the fast-globalising India of the late eighties and early nineties, the relationship that the Indian rich share with the underclass that helps in their domestic chores, and finally, the multitude of fissures that defines a Pakistani society resolve to turn in on itself — each of these clamour for precedence in Taseer’s sweeping novel of manners and morality. But rather than reading as incidental ideas that are germane to the narrative, they seem more to be driven by an agenda pre-ordained by the novelist, or to borrow a phrase from Taseer himself, like an abstraction imposed on reality.

The intimacy of the book seems to collapse when the storyteller in Taseer finds himself a microphone and platform, from where he begins to inadvertently pontificate on old and new India, violent Pakistan, throwing in peripheral references to events like 9/11 and 7/7. In my estimation, someone who gives his book the title of ‘noon’, should at least know where to draw the line between material for fiction and that for heartfelt essays.

If Taseer’s prose were without a penchant for that colourfully robust last line in paragraphs — “The tree seemed startled by the violence applied to it” — it might have been hard to fault. In conclusion, it would only be fair to point that Noon borrows its scope from Taseer’s Stranger To History and its hope of finding redemption in grime from The Temple-Goers. But though Taseer does seem to be coming full circle, he doesn’t draw a new circumference.