Hearing the dead

"I'm a secular didn't-cry-over-Godhra stoneheart. So last week, when I went to Ahmedabad, I wanted to bring home, as souvenirs, a charred body. Or a slit uterus." These were the opening lines of Raj Kamal Jha's May 2002 article, subtitled: "I Went To Gujarat as a Riot Tourist And All I Got Was This..."

In the summer of 2002, this piece by the writer who is also a senior editor at The Indian Express was one of the very few that broke through the indifference, the lies and the hysteria that blanketed the riots in Gujarat. As Jha records in the postscript to his third novel, Fireproof: "Over a thousand men, women and children were killed, more than 70 per cent of them Muslim."

Jha's souvenirs that summer were more fireproof than charred body parts: he recorded the pages of books he'd found in "riot-affected" areas, an English workbook, an IIT Delhi research paper, a Class XII workbook. It may have been possible""heaven knows it was""for people to ignore the news reports, the testimonies of victims trapped in endless repetition of their stories to a country gone deaf, the various fact-finding reports. But reading Jha's report, in which he tempered his savage anger with clinical detail, it was impossible to stay insulated from what had happened.

Fireproof begins with the birth of a baby, so severely deformed that he seems almost mutilated, to "Mr Jay". With his wife in hospital, Jay struggles to take care of Ithim""his name for the deformed child""in a city on fire, besieged by its own worst nightmares. Jay's world is hallucinatory: he sees dead bodies falling from the skies, finds photographs taken of smashed, ravaged homes and streets, and receives a call from a mysterious Miss Glass. She promises to help him with Ithim""but first he must play reluctant witness to three email attachments (Tariq.Doc, Shabnam.Doc, Abba.Doc), each carrying tales of vivid lives and brutal deaths.

In Dante's Inferno, the poet flinches at the idea of the journey into hell, to be told implacably by his companion, the ghost of Virgil: "Down must we go, to that dark world and blind." His only job, before he can come forth "to look once more upon the stars", is to be a witness, and no escape is possible from that duty. Novelists often take on that duty with mixed results. Books like Githa Hariharan's In Times of Siege or Shashi Tharoor's Riot work better as testimonies and as moral compasses than as literature. The weight of virtuous intentions can rapidly become polemical, bearing down ruinously even on talented writers.

Jha proved in The Blue Bedspread and If You Are Afraid of Heights, his first two novels, that he had a distinctive voice and a powerful imagination, but these were not always allied to an equally gripping narrative. Instead of trammelling his imagination, however, the hard facts of Gujarat in 2002 have set him free.

The rage that fuelled Jha's initial reaction to the Gujarat massacres becomes, in Fireproof, an insistent need to capture, indelibly, the testimonies of the dead and the lucky""or guilty""living. In one section, a young girl who watched the torture and slaughter of her parents learns that there is a place without fear: "They won't come back to kill the dead, you can't burn what has been charred." Just a few pages afterwards, Jay cleans his deformed son, touching each misshapen part of the child""the "charred skin" that is the baby's forehead, the "knife-cut" of his lips with a new and hard-won tenderness instead of revulsion.

Fireproof falters when the questions begin to pile up""where is Jay's absent wife, why is his baby so starkly deformed, could one feel sympathy for ruthless killers, where does our own complicity end? Jha takes refuge in a stylised drama of the absurd, where the objects littered around a ransacked, burned home begin to speak""a dramatic device, but also a distancing one. Some readers may guess what Fireproof is all about; some will be disappointed, because the first two parts of the novel are so vastly superior to the climactic section.

Despite this letdown, Fireproof is an extraordinary novel, a feat of the imagination that is also testimony to the importance of bearing witness. At one point, a character says: "There is no burden I carry, whatever the dead might say. Because I am alive, I can choose what to remember, I can choose what to forget." Jha combines the imaginary with the brutal truth to refute this""memory is all we have, he says, and in the face of Gujarat 2002, no one has the right to amnesia. The dead must be heard.

Fireproof

Raj Kamal Jha
Picador
Price: Rs 495; Pages: 388