Not very long ago I had reviewed Usha K. R.'s Bangalore novel, `Monkey-Man' (Penguin, 2010). The review appeared in the journal Indian Literature (No 259, Sept-Oct 2010) published by Sahitya Akademi, India's national Academy of Letters. Many of us would remember that a `monkey-man' did make an appearance on the Indian scene sometime in 2001, creating mass hysteria, generating media frenzy and finally finding its way into a movie script - Delhi-6. Usha's novel in her own words attempts, `to explore if cities can have a metaphysical presence that parallels its people?' and as she said in a DNA interview, `The monkey man represents the projection of man’s innermost fears and desires.' My review of her novel follows:
The Mind of the Metropolis
Usha's fourth novel begins with a rush and an expectation. A strange half man half beast, the eponymous Monkey-man, leaps into the face of the reader and the characters, in a south Bangalore neigbourhood, poised on the bleeding edge of fast-changing times. The appearance of this liminal being described as `nasty, brutish and short' by the history teacher Shrinivas Moorty, one of the first to have got a good look at it, creates chaos, confusion and exictement in the city and in the mind of the reader. Riding this wave of excitement that hits Bangalore, the tuned-to-the-times radio jockey Balaji Brahmendra or just Bali Brums to his fans, rustles up a talk show hosting the first three persons to have seen the creature.
Such an explosive beginning creates a definite set of expectations in the reader's mind. But the author quickly takes it all away from us slipping instead, into the backstories of the characters and the city, which once a Pensioner's Paradise, has rapidly metamorphosed into India's buzzing IT capital. What expectation does an opening of this sort create in our minds? For one, expectations of more fireworks and then a gradual uncovering of the enigma -- the man-beast in this case. A fancy or could one say surreal opening, nudges our hopes in the direction of the magical, the fantastic or even the grotesque. Yet just after a few pages of weaving magic and mayhem, the author begins quietly talking about the past.
The story meanders back to the times when Moorty and his friend Jairam were studying at National Trust College -- the idealism of their youth, the influence of a teacher who imbibed communist ideals, the world of books, women friends and cinema. Jairam, who finally turned out to be the pragmatic man-of-the-world had more humble beginnings than the conscientious Moorty who never moved too far both materially and ideologically from where he started out. It could be a matter of debate whether Jairam's trajectory from his fiery communist days to those of a sharp-eyed and skillful negotiator for change and progress - he suggests that the college create a new Centre for inter-disciplinary studies and arranges funds to that end - is a movement backward or forward or whether Moorty's apparent stasis is symptomatic of the old order that had kept the country stagnated for decades, but the binariness of these two characters is no doubt one of the themes that echoes in the novel's name and serves as a scaffolding to build its narrative body.
Both Moorty and Jairam who finally end up teaching in their alma mater, gradually move apart from one another. Moorty largely sticks to his film club and old world values and Jairam turns out the risk-taking, smooth talking, standard bearer for change. Jairam's wife Geeta, who was in college with them, is the tenuous link that keeps the two connected, though barely.
The other pivotal characters in the novel are the radio jockey Bali Brums, Neela Mary Gopalrao -- secretary to the head of research at the Centre for Socio-Economic Studies and Pushpa Rani who starts out very small but finally lands a call centre job. The lives of all these characters intersect, brush, grate and bump against each other, weaving the complex tapestry of this story while creating the necessary narrative momentum. Yet it could have gone faster. Those looking for a quick-fix entertaining read or a soul stirring trip may not find this book up their way. This is a novel meant for a serious reader who is interested to engage with the recent past, in a quest to better understand the fast-changing present of modern India, while peering through a Bangalorean prism. This of course has its own rewards.
There are novels which have the feel and tension of white-water rafting, where the scenery changes every moment and the minutes are marked with pulse-throbbing excitement. There is a quieter book, like a country-boat ride, along a wide river with its dreamy currents and little hurry to deliver the next adrenaline rush. Usha's novel is that country boat ride along the apparently calm but often deep waters of a wide Indian river.
The half a dozen characters of this novel keep returning through their seperate backstories, sometimes grating against each other, as when Bali Brums is subjected to a barrage of questioning by Moorty, when he is invited by Jairam to a college programme. So again Neela Mary Gopalrao, through her sly influence-mongering, keeps Pushpa - once working for the Centre and other colleagues in eternal trouble only to be alleviated by the intrusion of humour in the form of a practical joke played by a smart colleague.
Bali and Pushpa -- once she has learnt the ropes of the call centre job, are once again representatives of the new world, of a city growing faster than what the human psyche can handle and internalise. Neela Mary Gopalrao on the other hand, herself coming from a mixed background and a complex past is stuck somewhere in between two worlds. She needles those colleagues who can't harm her career or who she cannot fathom, like the researcher Alka Gupta, while she aspires to the attentions of RJ Bali Brums, sending him mails and flirting with him over the airwaves.
Jairam, Bali and Pushpa on one side and Moorty and Neela to an extent on the other, together create the context for the monkey-man to emerge. Another important character in the novel, the changing city of Bangalore is also the perfect setting for the man-beast to appear; for in that city, the old and the new, the stagnating and the turbocharged, the `less-evolved' and the `advanced', live side by side, with one giving way slowly to the other. If the metropolis has a mind, then the mind of Bangalore (and many other cities of fast-growing urban India) could very well create hallucinatory projections of itself in the form of a subliminal being half human and half simian. In fact such a `monkey-man' did make an appearance on the Indian scene sometime in 2001, creating mass hysteria, generating media frenzy and finally finding its way into a movie script - Delhi 6, sometime back.
However, this award winning author's aims, it seems are not only to sensationalise the sightings of this creature but to investigate through the medium of the novel, the reason why it appeared and to connect it to the mind of the metropolis and to a time of flux. As she says in a recent interview given to DNA, "The monkey man represents the projection of man’s innermost fears and desires. I want to explore if cities can have a metaphysical presence that parallels its people?”
As 3rd January, 2000 approaches, the lives of Moorty, Pushpa, Neela and Sukhiya Ram, who is a Class Four staff at the Centre, converge in the region of Ammanagudi Street of Bangalore where they come face to face with this strange creature each giving his or her version of how it looked or what it was. Finally at RJ Bali Brum's talk show, they are invited to tell their stories. Pushpa can't make it but the others do, taking the novel to its climactic moment.
Just as the present is retold through the radio shows of Bali Brums or the day in the life of a call centre worker, the past of fiery idealism and political engagement is evoked through books, film clubs, Marxist circles, Trotskyite opponents and CIA fronts. So you get a fair sprinkling of Aldous Huxley and Brecht, Fanon and Pather Panchali, George Fernandez and the the Socialist party and many things in between. This might get a bit heavy with new readers not tuned to serious reading or the largely apolitical urban youth of today, but this is where the problem lies and this is what this accomplished author is perhaps trying to tell us through her work. That without a fine sense of balance, that by rushing towards the future while completely forsaking the past, we are ourselves turning into a chimeria of sorts, whose image is reflected in the mirror of the the city around us.
That is all there is to say about this powerful novel that seeks an involved reader as it tells its tale slowly with care and compassion. In Usha's voice we find an engaging humanity and a compassionate understanding of the failings, foibles, hopes and fears of her characters. She is best when she narrates what drives men and women into doing what they do and through that, how they mould their lives and their future.
While the advanced economies have been talking about getting bangalored as they lose jobs outsourced to cities like Bangalore, this story is about the blowback that Bangalore herself suffers as she grows at a dizzying pace. What is a little disturbing about this book, is that the monkey-man episode ending up more like a framing device after creating a different set of expectations at the beginning. However the care with which Usha etches her characters and the depths she plumbs to analyse a time of flux, puts her novel in the league of classics that would still be read and enjoyed many years from now.
Copyright: Copyright of this review rests with the author of the review Rajat Chaudhuri and Sahitya Akademi All rights strictly reserved. A slightly edited version of this review has appeared in Indian Literature journal No 259, Sept-Oct 2010, published by Sahitya Akademi.
