A mirror for us

Themes of generational, class conflict are common in A State of Freedom as in its predecessor

Last week, security guards and residents of Mahagun Moderne, a high-rise residential complex in Noida, fought pitched battles with slum dwellers who live in the neighbourhood. The troubles, yet again, revealing the vulnerable social fabric of our country, started when a household help in one of the flats went missing, and her husband, a construction worker, suspected that she had been detained inside the gated complex. When police did not help, he and his neighbours went on a rampage, which soon turned into a riot, with communal colours. The latest development in this sorry narrative of want clashing with entitlement is the razing of the slum.

Neel Mukherjee’s new book, A State of Freedom tries to negotiate the chasm between classes that have become so entrenched in India. In a series of five inter-related narratives, Mukherjee, who was shortlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize for his novel The Lives of Others, traces migrations — external and internal, geographic and emotional. The Lives of Others was set in Calcutta (now Kolkata) of the 1960s, and traced the life of a Naxalite from a wealthy business family. 

POOR OPPORTUNITIES: A migrant in Delhi. Photo: Reuters

The themes of generational and class conflict are common in A State of Freedom as they were in its predecessor.   

This is, however, technically more experimental, linguistically dexterous, and devastating in the way it deals with its chosen themes — displacement and migrations. (One of its two epigraphs is a statement of a Syrian refugee at the border of Austria in August 2015: “Migrants? We are not migrants! 

We are ghosts, that’s what we are, ghosts.”) All the five narratives in the book lay bare the bones of indifference in most of us that allow us to ignore the gross inequalities of money and power we encounter every day. It performs one of the most important tasks of fiction: turning a mirror on us, the readers.

Not everything about the book is wonderful, though. The last and shortest part narrates the story of a migrant construction worker in a city. The narrative is constructed without punctuations, with a smattering of vernacular words (for effect?), tumbling onwards in a stream of consciousness that’s, well, too far from Molly Bloom’s monologue, in beauty or technique. One wonders why Mukherjee would publish such an experiment, when his more conventional style works perfectly. Perhaps it is because he is uncomfortable with the narrative voice of the construction worker, to whose inner life Murkherjee — or any of us — can hardly hope to have any access.

He is more comfortable narrating the story of a London-based writer — like Mukherjee himself — who comes to visit his parents in Bombay (Mumbai), and gets friendly with the cook. The central characters here are all Bengali: the narrator is a sort of a cosmopolitan citizen, having grown up in India but settled in the West; his parents and the cook expatriates within India, probashi, living in another city, away from Calcutta or a village in Mednipur. The narrators’ parents and their cook are both economic migrants — or exiles, if you will; and they try to retain their imagined homeland in language and food, which become sites of conflict as well as enlightenment.

A State of Freedom Author: Neel Mukherjee Publisher: Penguin Pages: 275 Price: Rs 599

During one of his yearly visits, the narrator begins research on a book of Indian breakfasts — a sort of well-produced, glossy, coffee table publication. (In a meta-narrative joke, Mukherjee criticises cookbooks published by Penguin, also the publishers of this novel.) This project takes him back to Calcutta, and then to the nondescript village of his “cooking-aunty”. There — and from conversations he has with his mother — the narrator pieces together the fascinating life-story of the cook. The details he gathers are bare bones, and much is left to speculation, as quite ironically, despite claiming to be more class agnostic than his parents, the narrator is unable to bridge the chasm that exists between domestic helps and their employers.

The most devastating part of this narrative is an internal monologue of the narrator when he is a guest at the humble rustic home of the cook’s relatives in her village. Sleeping in a not-too-comfortable bed, he reflects on the poor dinner he was served in conditions that fall far below his standards of hygiene. In our country, obsessed with purity and personal cleanliness, the narrator, acutely aware of the pinching poverty of his hosts, cannot help being unsatisfied with the food he has been served. “I felt ashamed but couldn’t help myself from thinking the small, mean thoughts.” In this brutally honest moment, Mukherjee captures the hypocrisy we all subscribe to in our comfortable lives. The novel succeeds in snatching us out of that comfort, even if for a few minutes.