Kalpish Ratna spin lives and disasters a century apart into one novel. Gargi Gupta decodes the tale
This novel is a rather fantastic mesh of two events separated by a century — the Mumbai plague of the late 1890s and the riots that took place in the city following the Babri Masjid demolition. Both caused a large number of random deaths, but that’s not the only thing tying in these two very disparate occurrences. In the imagination of the authors, both riot and epidemic are manifestations of a fissure in the life of the city, and by moving from one to the other, they lay bare how both were used by ‘vested interests’ to expose and exacerbate the divisions among denizens — Hindu-Muslim, rich-poor, British-Indian.
The here-and-now narrative is a straightforward one, tracing events in the life of the protagonist, Dr Ratan Oak, a microbiologist, in the week following that fateful day in December 1992. Inside his head, however, Ratan periodically becomes his great-grandfather, Ramratan Oak, an assistant surgeon at Grant Medical College at the time of the plague.
Explained thus, it may seem like a rather simple narrative stratagem, except that it isn’t. This is a difficult, complex novel and necessitates a degree of patient, careful reading. Much of this impression of difficulty is the result of the many ideas and themes that the authors harness together.
For instance, the fonts. The alternating accounts of Ratan and Ramratan are separated visually by fonts, and a little note at the end explains that it is Didot for Ratan since it is a “neoclassical serif typeface” and “evokes the Age of Enlightenment”, and American Typewriter for Ramratan because it “evinces an old-fashioned intimacy”. “Ishrat designed the books,” says Kalpana Swaminathan of her co-author Ishrat Syed (Kalpish Ratna is an ‘almost-anagram’ of their name), “We love calligraphy, and we wanted to share our pleasure.”
Of the many narrative strands, the principal, and most interesting, is the 1890s plague, which draws on Kalpish Ratna’s 2008 book, Uncertain Life and Sure Death, a history of the many epidemics that assailed the city of Mumbai in the 18th and 19th centuries. “The Quarantine Papers,” say the authors, “grew in the interstices of Uncertain Life... We spent three years in research before Uncertain Life and Sure Death became the book it is. But oh! the stories we uncovered, of small triumphs and large tragedies.”
Through Ramratan Oak, readers get a ringside view of the plague — the confusion and anger among people at the government’s ham-handed measures to contain the epidemic, and the medical battle to contain it, where figures from history such as Waldemar Haffkine (the scientist who developed a vaccine against plague), James Cleghorn (the director general of the Indian Medical Service) and Nusserwanjee Surveyor (a bacteriologist who worked with Haffkine) form part of the cast.
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This bit of the novel is something of a medical mystery thriller, centred on six missing vials of pneumonic plague bacteria that Surveyor grows in the lab and which become the focus of a tug of war between Muslim and Hindu fundamentalists, both of who want to use it as a weapon against the other community. This is also where the authors connect the plague with the riot, the post-Babri communal frenzy becoming an all-too-neat parallel to the rhetoric of hate sullying the air as much as the plague bacteria a hundred years ago.
The other connection is, of course, the dead body — the site of defilement by disease or violence. Being surgeons, both Ratan and Ramratan dissect the bodies of victims, which occasions long descriptions of innards — “Fat first, and scant little of it, amber globules embedded preciously, glistening kundan in silvery fascia...” It’s poetic enough if you don’t visualise it.
There’s more; Mumbai’s little-known connections with well-known names in Western art too gets a look-in through the figures of John Lockwood Kipling (the father of Rudyard), who taught at the J J School of Art in the 1860s and 1870s, and Philip Burne-Jones, his nephew and son of the Pre-Raphelite painter Edward Burne Jones. “The Kiplings were a story in themselves. The mediocre art teacher and his ambitious wife, stuck in a country they loathed… And, Philip! Eclipsed by his famous father, he deserved a better deal.”
The authors plan to mine the same material for a series of novels featuring Ratan/Ramratan Oak, exploring “medicine, politics, history and the evolving geography” of Mumbai. “Our plan is to write one each year for a decade,” says Swaminathan. “Think of it as a 10-part tale of our love affair with the city of Bombay.”
THE QUARANTINE PAPERS
Author: Kalpish Ratna
Publisher: HarperCollins
Pages: 407
Price: Rs 499
