MESMERIC MOSAIC
Why do I love Altaf Tyrewala's unselfconscious debut, No God In Sight, you ask? Silly question. For starters, I love it for its clear gaze into Mumbai's muddy soul. The easy-to-read freshness of its format. The ambition of its postmodern premise. Its chapter headings (A Digression With A Purpose, Shenior Conishtable Shegde). Its rhythms of speech (fatty bambola). Its characters - bar girl, butcher, beggar, mobster, mother - an endlessly enchanting list. The diversity of its dilemmas: from polio and pregnancy to fundamentalism and terrorism. The ghettoising of peculiar narrative spaces - flat 4201, police station, shoe shop, Medina Chicken Mart. Its parallel perspectives on the same situation. The dramatic significance of 21st century props like 'the bitch of a password' and the changing caller IDs that make the cellphone crackle each time with tension. And lastly, the colliding journeys it makes. Here's just one example - Babua's desire to hide his impotence ('the morgue in his dhoti') makes him look for non-Hindus to slay, making Suleiman leave Barauli's communal cries for Namnagar, where he slays his great-grandfather with a question, which propels his escape to his wife in a Mumbai slum, whose pregnancy drives her to seek a job as a maid in a flat. She in turn nudges some players who drive the action forward. This is what ultimately lends these linked stories poignancy and bite.
Some are conscious of themselves and the roles they play. Ninety-six year old 'uncut' Abbu (whose conversion that now turns Suleiman into an outsider on the run) is not: 'In my sleep, I go nowhere, regret nothing, and miss no one, like sitting in an empty darkened theatre staring at a blank screen'. Some do not even know that they have made others more acutely mindful of their own plight: 'the woman in the taxi who makes the beggar endure the agony of his own insignificance'. Sometimes the links are apparent as the novel progresses: the tormented abortionist who hears slaughtered babies in Nirvana and Radiohead cassettes at the beginning of the book is the same person the Khwajas must turn to in the end.
There's much to be said for cameos and monologues. Our fleeting, fragmented lives deserve fleeting, fragmented stories, not full-length ones. They help mirror our cultural mores, our multiple truths, our urban microcosms better.
All in all, a deceptively light, cleverly crafted mesmeric mosaic of a metro. It appears Altaf has breathed godman/conman Moin Chariya Baba's 'wowgoodgreat' mantra into it. Works fine for me.
The biggies of this season both have Loss in their title. They couldn't be more unlike. Yet each is eminently readable for very different reasons.