GRIPPING TALE
Animal’s People by Indra Sinha
(Simon & Schuster)
To tell you the truth, I picked up Animal’s People only after the novel made it to the Man Booker 2007 long list. And, I had long since finished it by the time the shortlist was released. It is easy to sum up the plot – Animal is a young survivor of the ‘apokalis’ in the gassed out city, Khaufpur. Called thus because he lopes about on all fours – his spine has been badly affected – he is pivotal to the novel, as the title suggests – and we see the world through his perspective.
This is the second book that I have read on the disastrous effects of a killer gas, the first being Dominique Lapierre’s Five Past Midnight in Bhopal. Sinha’s literary offering not only kicks you in the solar plexus – with its simple, often coarse, uninhibited language, honest yet raw emotion and an obsessive attention to details – but it also forces you to sit up and think.
There are a plethora of other characters – Zafar bhai, Nisha, Ma Franci, Chunaram – but it is Animal who is at the centre of it all...talking to a ‘tape mashin’ and directing the way the novel moves. It is his sensitivity and human qualities that surface from time to time, his extremely basic desires that are thwarted by his deformed frame that touch one’s heart. There is despair…and yet, in all the hopelessness, there is hope. One does not know when that hope will be realised and justice dealt out to the Khaufpuris.
Sinha brings to life an issue that he has time and again addressed in articles. He recreates the fabric of the lives of the people who survived that night…delves deep into their scarred psyches. It is not a novel for the faint-hearted…but for readers with a conscience, Animal’s People is a must-read.

THE INDIAN EXPERIENCE
Gifted by Nikita Lalwani
(Penguin India)
Earlier this year, Nikita Lalwani was the cynosure of a great deal of attention when her debut novel Gifted was chosen for the Booker long-list. Inspired in part by the story of Safiah Yusuf, a mathematics prodigy who was accepted at Oxford at the tender age of 13 and subsequently ran away after accusing her parents of putting too much pressure on her, Gifted is the tale of a brilliant young girl named Rumi, a teenaged genius who sees the world with arithmetical precision.
Set amidst the wan streets of Cardiff, it examines the Indian experience in England through the eyes of this precocious adolescent. It is a charmingly clever chronicle of her conflicts and aspirations and her desire for freedom from a world centered around the constrictions of her family and the unusual sense of dislocation she feels. Combining delicate humour with a dexterous use of mathematical patois, Lalwani skilfully portrays the ideological chasm between young British Asians and their first-generation immigrant parents without resorting to trite clichés or pathetic displays of melodrama and the end result is a thought provoking journey through the middle-class world of Brown Britain that is both sensuously well-written and original.
Part of me – the pretentious cognoscenti half – loved this book, for its sheer imaginativeness and its melancholic exactitude. The other half – the part which is so sick and tired of reading about the Indian diaspora – thought it really a very facile, even difficult novel. Regardless of this paradoxical quandary, one thing however is certain. Even without the Booker hype, Gifted is an intriguing, involving book and signals the arrival of a new voice of prodigious ability.

THE PARIS OF THE PROSAIC
The Seine at Noon by Susan Viswanathan
(IndiaInk)
It is one of literature’s little tragedies but while the novel and the short story both enjoy vast popularity, the novella seems to be dying a slow death, ignored and dismissed by publishers, writers and readers alike. In India particularly, it is rare to find authors brave enough to aspire to this most refined of literary forms, intimidated perhaps by the linguistic control required to make novellas enticing, coupled with the lure of the inherent profitability of the longer style.
In The Seine at Noon, Susan Viswanathan rekindles this waning art form to paint an evocative portrait of Paris, not the city of the Eiffel Tower and twilight romances, but the Paris of the prosaic as seen through the eyes of four ordinary characters living out their quotidian, disparate lives on the banks of the Seine.
Stefan, an immigrant from Kerala, is married to Esther, a baker, whom he loves passionately. However, he cannot forget his home in India and is haunted by the guilt of deserting his family. Unexpectedly, he strikes up an unlikely friendship with Jacques, an ageing aristocrat who lives in a houseboat with his daughter, Bianca and as the torpid waters of the Seine wind past their lives, they find themselves drawn together, like pieces of flotsam caught in an inexorable tide.
Vishwanathan explores their intertwining stories and depicts the complex web of passion and desire which compels the human need for belonging and fashions an engaging and moving mise en scène of the City of Light that is both elegant and illuminating and most importantly, refreshing in its sparklingly lucid brevity.

A MORAL PARABLE
The Solitude of Emperors by David Davidar
(Penguin Viking)
While it may prove crippling to my woefully nascent literary career, I admit I am not a big fan of David Davidar. Personally, I thought his first book The House of Blue Mangoes ponderous and rather self indulgent, victim to that eloquent malaise of verbosity to which so many first-time novelists are so lamentably susceptible. Five years after that unremarkable debut, Davidar returns once more with a new novel set in the quaint environs of the Nilgiri Hills.
In the ornately titled The Solitude of Emperors, he narrates the story of Vijay, a young journalist who witnesses unimaginable horrors during the Bombay Riots of 1992. Scarred by these psychological wounds, Vijay flees to the picturesque village of Meham, hoping to escape the sectarian tensions endemic to urban India. Sadly, as he finds, even this remote province is not safe from the shadow of religious fundamentalism and as the story progresses, once again he is caught up amidst a storm of internecine violence, as strife erupts in Meham when Hindu fanatics claim that a local Christian shrine is actually the site of a Hindu temple.
Interspersed within this moral parable are a succession of pedantic, overtly didactic expositions about the lives of Ashoka, Akbar and Gandhi, ostensibly excerpts from a book that Vijay’s editor is authoring and has requested him to peruse. Unfortunately, it is this very sermonising that spoils the kinesis of this novel and perhaps the novelist would have been better served in sticking to Vijay’s startlingly plangent tale, rather than resorting to such heavy-handed moralising.
Nonetheless, he does deserve credit for trying to tackle a difficult subject and The Solitude of Emperors is a plaintive, if somewhat sanctimonious, attempt to chronicle the communal discord and religious dysthymia that infects every facet of contemporary Indian society and an accomplished effort that displays both a marked growth and maturity in the author’s fictive abilities.