Varghese was right, she was dealing in abstractions, stuff people could not relate with. She couldn’t let this fizzle out, could she? Like the manager said, who reads sociology journals anyway? What was that article about Indian fiction writers burgeoning by the week?” By the time Brinda S Narayan closes her novel Bangalore Calling with these lines, she has already, subtly, teased out the meaning of India’s status as the new knowledge hotspot.
Even as it offered quick, grand bucks and had enough glitter to sweep some off their feet and leave others awestruck, the offshoring industry boom through the last decade had a blistering fallout. It lured people into imposing on themselves the trauma of torn identities. The young associates of Callus Inc in Narayan’s novel can be placed anywhere between gullible and wannabe or go-getting and reclusive or brazen and vulnerable, or Indian and American.
Some win brownie points for aping the American twang better than the rest, some are written off as trashy for their “really, really high MTI (Mother Tongue Influence)” and get a nasty dressing-down from American customers who are already frustrated over jobs lost to cheap offshore locations, Bangalore for example.
All Callus agents wear two names, along with their employee number, on their company badge. One is their original name, the other an Americanised version they use during calls. Bitty becomes Betty, Azeem is Aaron, Jimutha Jimi and, of course, Brinda herself becomes Brenda (on the back cover of the novel). “When customers abuse agents for being Indian, for not resolving the problem, for long wait times, agents put callers on mute and curse in the vernacular. As Yvette in the novel or Brinda would like us to believe, call centres are breeding ground for “cultural labour”.
A series of 15 stories, Bangalore Calling is a chronicle of the lives of 12 characters, each of whom takes centre stage in one story. From a Callus trainer who quits the company to become a sociologist to another who sweet-talks her way up the ladder; from a god-fearing cab driver to a rockstar agent high on drugs and music; from a sissy associate struggling to keep her job to a take-it-easy larger-than-life CEO of the rival company; from a sweeper woman who preens herself with stolen stuff to a headstrong but I-will-never-change admin manager — Bangalore Calling dwells on the individual perspectives of each of them.
This, however, could also be taken as the weakest point in the novel. It seeks the perspectives of too many characters through stories within the story and, on its way, loses track and fails to maintain the tempo. A reader is intrigued by the developments in the smaller stories only to see them ending abruptly and inconclusively. When the novel ends, one is left high and dry, juggling with many unanswered questions.
The novel runs back and forth in time in that each story starts from either the same point as the previous one or a little later, and moves through Hurricane Ike towards something. “A bizarre call surge [is] triggered by bad weather in Texas” and it brings about some major change in the life of the hero of that particular story.
“As American companies vied with each other to set up their back-office operations in Bangalore, the name of a city morphed into a verb.” Indeed, the Americans seem to have been Bangalored by the shift of bases to the city. An integral part of the novel, therefore, is Natalie, who represents the American middle class that has taken a blow owing to the job transfers from that country. She almost loses her job and is sent for an assignment to India for “picking my own assassin”.
In her acknowledgments, Narayan mentions that her book is inspired by Arlie Hochschild’s The Managed Heart. In one of the stories, Yvette is attracted to sociology and sets out to write a thesis on “Cultural Labour at call centres,” when “it started with an accidental encounter with a roadside vendor ... Yvette picked up a red book with a large heart on it” (Hochschild’s book also has a large heart on its cover). One gets the feeling that this character is the author’s self-portrait and the novel her own sociological study.
BANGALORE CALLING
Brinda S Narayan
Hachette India
305 pages; Rs 295
