At the Edge of Fiction

-- Nivedita Menon

By the time Navin returned to Delhi, most of our circle had passed around his slim volume of short stories recently published by a small alternative press in the US. From Panchsheel Park to Jamnapaar, the left-secular-democratic janta was abuzz.

I met him the day after his return, at a party to celebrate the defeat of the BJP in the general elections. I hadn’t intended to go, but Navin begged me to, expecting trouble, and I agreed reluctantly. That’s what I did best with Navin - agree reluctantly. There was always something or the other he wanted me to do. All those years of alibis - for parents, for simultaneous but mutually ignorant girl-friends. Basically that was me. The guy who reluctantly agreed. Navin and I had too much baggage for me to be able to say no ever - a shared boyhood, shared lives…

So I went to the damn party. He looked across at me in a besieged way as I entered the room, but cravenly, I sidled to the other end, daunted by the formation around him. The internationally recognized halo of Dr Chatterjee’s silver hair quivered in indignation, flanked by the disapproving beards of two young ideologues of one of the splinter left groups. I gathered that the story about the leftist historian’s self-doubt had not been appreciated, and I certainly didn’t want to get caught in the cross-fire.

In the corner near the bar, where I desperately reached for a beer, a vivacious young group drew me in even as I attempted to escape. Rebecca grabbed my sleeve, looking as always, in crumpled shorts and T-shirt and running shoes, as if she had just that minute returned from toning her gorgeous legs at the gym, which she most probably had, after a long day in court arguing the shit out of POTA.

Pronounced she - “I always knew Mohanty had his paws in his students’ bras, the bastard.” 

That’s Rebecca. In your face outrageous. But at least it was another topic of conversation than The Book.

“So who’s the latest then, who’s been squealing? Been charge-sheeted, has he?”

“No, not chargesheet or anything, just, it’s so obvious from that story about the lecturer stagnating in an undergraduate college, no?”

“Arre, nain yaar”, drawled Sumit, “that’s actually about Joseph, that reference to pipe-smoking, I mean, it’s too obvious…”

From the edge of the crowd, the characteristic husky, smoker’s laugh of Farah cut a respectful hush. She had taught most of them in the circle, and her dicta were still capable of stopping them in their tracks.

“You guys are amazing”, she muttered into the palm of the man who leapt to hold a match to her cigarette. “I mean did I totally waste my time, you know? You still think fiction depicts reality in some straightforward way?”

There was some immediate buzz about the novel being dialogical, about representation and reality, Derrida and Barthes. They knew the theory all right. Apparently Farah hadn’t totally wasted her time.

“But still,” persisted Rebecca bravely, “These are people from his world, right, and we recognize most of them?”

Farah threw up her hands in despair. I exited right.

Not that I hadn’t warned Navin about the foolhardiness of his enterprise. Stick to political theory, I had urged.  Write your book on Indian politics. And he had insisted, I am writing a book on Indian politics. It’s just not an academic one. The fictional genre, he had declared grandly, gives me more room for play; in academic writing the codes of representation are more rigid. Well boss, I have news for you. You have friends and family? Then the codes of representation are rigid, period. Unless you want to try magical realism – but then, not even that seems to have helped Marquez much. Take his autobiography. Reading it, I was struck by one of the incidents he narrated, it seemed familiar. Sure enough, it turns out to be the basis of Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Apparently, when he wrote the story and sent it to his mother, she steadfastly refused to read it. Nothing that turned out so badly in real life, she declared, could do well in fiction. I had this sudden glorious vision of everyone who had ever touched Marquez’s life, all knit together in one enormous global network of gossip, complaint and recrimination, hurling accusations all over the place (But I told you not tell anyone, you know that boy isn’t to be trusted. Oh so you did have an affair with that slut. Erendira? That’s your grandmother he’s slandering…) No, magical realism didn’t help Marquez one bit. His mother saw right through to the reality behind the representation.

At the heart of most people’s anger lay, of course, the historian’s story. Parvati Pillai, the gentle matriarch, socialist feminist and mentor to generations, put it to me this way as she sipped orange juice, “This is not the time. Here we are, engaged in a battle for India’s soul, and one of our strongest, bravest …”she faltered.

‘But Parvatiji ,” I ventured, “What do you mean, who do you think the story’s about?”

“Don’t you start all that smart stuff with me, boy, we’re not fools. Anyone can tell it’s about Ibrahim Quadir, and to depict him first as a scotch-drinking, pork-eating non-believer, and then to have him turn fundamentalist in the end, that’s disgusting…Does that boy care at all about our country and what’s happening here?”

“My god, has Quadir gone fundamentalist?” I enquired in simulated shock.

“No, of course not …”

“Then why do you think the story is about him, for heaven’s sake?”

“Yes, why, why?”  Navin’s voice, all bravado, broke in. He had escaped into the mouth of the lion. “Why does everyone think I’m attacking this guy, it’s ridiculous. It’s a book of fiction, let me remind you.”

Parvati’s voice vibrated with controlled anger, “The protagonist of ‘The Historian’, is a Muslim, Shahid Faridi, who has studied at Aligarh, who has written the definitive work on Mediaeval India, he has a graying French beard, a motherly non-intellectual wife, and a bright student called Sanjay who goes to do his Ph.D in the US after a quarrel with Faridi. Sound like anyone you know?”

Navin was quite drunk by now, and becoming more blustery as he was wont to, after his third vodka martini, a drink he had made something of a fetish of, after his return, insisting on mixing his own everywhere he went, producing a small bottle of vermouth from his back-pack.

“Oh come now, don’t be so naïve, Parvati”, he spoke with the drunk’s distinctness, articulating his words with care, “I mean, take Picasso, everyone knew he had an affair with Dora Maar, and then he painted her portrait, right? So do we go around checking to see how close a likeness it is? I mean, for god’s sake, fiction isn’t…”

Parvati stood up suddenly. She said tightly, looking at us sprawled in foolish surprise at her feet. “Well, I don’t know anything about fiction of course. All I do know is about struggling to recover something we may have almost lost. Congratulations,” she turned away, “I hope you win the Pulitzer.”

“Yaar, this is too much”, Navin muttered. “At my reading yesterday, this old ex-bureaucrat-type asked me a question about why I call a character The Cripple. He quivered with righteous indignation. They are humans too, he informed me, they deserve a name and an identity.”

I couldn’t help spluttering with laughter, irritated as I was with Navin and with my new role of defender of Fiction as a Unique Realm. I mean who gives a shit. All I wanted was to spend a pleasantly smashed evening, and avoid anything real.

Navin went on, “Of course, I bowed and clicked my heels and did the differently-abled number – I mean, have these people ever even heard a story in their lives, haven’t their mothers told them like the Panchatantra, for god’s sake, is the author responsible for how the world looks at things…”

His voice tailed away. A moment when nothing was said. The safe banality of our conversation teetered dangerously as my mind thrashed around desperately for something to ward off the silence.

The fragrance of her characteristic khus perfume hit us both at the same time. Navin stopped short and looked up sharply from the joint he was carefully rolling, while I tried not to. Sufia and he hadn’t met since his return, I knew. She squatted before us, her back straight, locking glances with Navin. “That was brave, that was so brave,” she said coldly. “The story of our break-up in artistic detail. The controlling, jumped-up lower-middle-class bitch spouting gender-jargon versus the wise, stylish, instinctively feminist man. Bravo.”

Uneasy, Navin tried to laugh it off. “Chill, yaar,” he attempted a clumsy caress, reaching out for her cheek, offering her the joint.

“Fuck you Navin,” her voice broke. “Fuck you, okay? You had to give honest details, right, then why be so selective? Why not some details, damn you, of your fucking betrayal, your betrayal of your best friend and your lover, in one fell swoop?”

Navin grew absolutely still. “What do you mean?” his voice was low.

Sufia turned to me with elaborate courtesy, as I winced. “Oh you haven’t told him we talked while he was away? True confessions about our shared lover, the lover and the best friend, the lover and the lover…?”

Ta-alked, she drawled, in a pseudo-American accent, like a character in a Hollywood film, bitterly mocking of all of us.

My eyes met Navin’s. I said nothing.

“Who else…” Navin cleared his throat, “who else…”

“Who else knows?” Sufia asked brightly. “Oh, nobody else at all, don’t worry. Not the kind of thing,” she had become all British now, “that one wants bandied about, is it, my dear fellow, what will the natives think?”

Abruptly she stood up. And without another word, she walked away, out of the door.

The evening lay before us like a live, wounded thing.

************************************************************************

When the phone rang, Sasanka was pottering in his garden. It had rained the night before and the air was clean and moist. This was what he missed most on his assignments abroad, the special Sunday morning feel of Colombo. If he concentrated his senses, he could smell the sea...

When Stanley’s voice came over the wire, Sasanka braced himself. He was prepared.

“What the fuck is this about, machang?” Stanley sounded out of control, “This story shit?”

“Liked it?” Sasanka asked mildly, not ready to be drawn. Not yet.

“Why have you written this shit about me, the vodka martinis…I sound like such a pompous self-satisfied…what the hell did you think you were doing, and right there in the Sunday Observer, for everyone to see…”

“About you?” asked Sasanka, “What do you mean about you?”

“Don’t give me this fucking bullshit machang, just setting it in Delhi doesn’t make it fiction, okay, and putting an orange juice in the hand of the ‘Socialist feminist’ for fuck’s sake, instead of a glass of wine doesn’t mean nobody gets who it is. Why don’t you fucking publish it in EPW if it’s about Delhi?”

“Because EPW doesn’t publish fiction…?” laughed Sasanka.

There was a pause. It was coming, Sasanka could feel it.

And it came. “That story about my break-up? There’s no story in my collection about my breakup with Sunila…”

“No there isn’t. And that’s why this story isn’t about you,” returned Sasanka, breathing a little faster now. Now. Now.

Silence. They both held on, waiting for the other to break.

Stanley did. “And now you’ve done it,” his voice could hardly be heard.  Sasanka pressed the receiver to his ear, head held at an angle, eyes unseeing.

“You’ve done it”, said Stanley again, wearily, “Everyone knows about us.”

Sasanka let out a deep breath. “Who’s us? Remember Dora Maar, Stanley? What about your sophisticated take on Dora Maar?”

“Fuckyoufuckyoufuckyou,” Stanley said levelly. “I hope you win the Gratiaen.”

Sasanka held on for a long while after the line went dead, listening to the ever-lengthening, musical call of the koha in the garden.

Nivedita Menon

(Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Delhi University)

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