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| Edited By: Gargi Gupta |Source: DNA |Updated: Dec 05, 2017, 02:09 PM IST
Starting with his first novel The Rozabal Line nearly 10 years ago, Ashwin Sanghi has established himself as India's answer to Dan Brown. Sanghi's books, all bestsellers like those of the writer of The Da Vinci Code, are speculative novels about the past, combining just enough real historical truth with hearsay, myth and arcane ideas from here and there to admit the question – could it be so? Could Christ have survived the crucifixion and travelled far out to Kashmir (The Rozabal Line)? What if Chanakya were to reincarnate as a poor Brahmin in India today (Chanakya's Chant)?
With this novel, his fattest yet, Sanghi pulls off another feat of imagination, linking two men –Arvind Bagadia, the son of a minor Marwari businessman in Kolkata, and Arbaaz Sheikh, the son of a poor dockyard worker in Mumbai – with a curious fate that goes back to Ashoka the Great in 250 BC!
The Sialkot Saga begins in Amritsar sometime in those blood-filled months around the time of Partition, in a train that rumbles into the railway station from Sialkot across the border carrying more dead bodies than live ones.
That's the first three pages of the prologue. The scene then shifts to Pataliputra in 250 BC to a meeting of Ashoka's court, at which there's talk of some pathbreaking research that has yielded knowledge that "emperors would willingly give up their kingdoms to acquire" which it is necessary to preserve. The action then shifts back to relatively modern times, 1950, to a public meeting addressed by Jawaharlal Nehru, and a page later, to a camp where a Baba called Mahashiv, rumoured to have lived for 300 years, has set up camp for the refugees pouring in across the border – that's more than 2000 years in the space of the first 20 pages!
The jumpy pace, very cinematic in the way it jump-cuts from character to character, from one set piece to another, settles down for the next hundred pages or so as the boys grow up – Arvind, comfortable in his affluent Calcutta home and the high-profile La Martiniere school, while Arbaaz has a rough childhood growing up in a Dongri chawl and drops out of school when his father dies and takes up a job at the docks to support his mother.
To most readers, especially keen followers of Bollywood movies of the 1970s and 1980s, or those of Amitabh Bachchan, the Arbaaz track will have a familiar ring: the poor, defiant dockyard worker who defies the goons who exploit his fellow workers (think Hum), kills the leader and becomes a smuggler (Deewar) and gets into the good books of the boss Abdul Dada, who propels his rise in the city's underworld (Once Upon a Time in Mumbaai).
That's not where Sanghi's ambitions end. The fictional plot-line frequently touches upon real events and real characters. One of the most interesting of these is Atal Behari Vajpayee who crops up time and again – the first time in Srinagar where the then 11-year-old Arvind runs into a young man "in his late twenties and early thirties" just as Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, Jana Sangh founder and Vajpayee's mentor, is arrested for protesting against Sheikh Abdullah's permit policy. Mukherjee was imprisoned and died in jail some days later – a momentous happening in Indian politics. Other prominent figures who make an appearance in their own skin are PV Narasimha Rao and Harshad Mehta. Then there's a whole cast of historical figures and kings down from Samudragupta, the Chinese traveller Xuanzang and Harshavardhan, Krishnadevaraya, and so on – all possessors of an ancient manuscript on whose wooden cover was a carving of a jellyfish, a mystery that ties in with a Bhutanese company researching the secret of everlasting life.
Sanghi's research is impeccable, but will the improbable plot convince his fans?
