Life enshrined

Around 200 pages into God's Little Soldier, Kiran Nagarkar's complex new novel, the author makes a bold decision. So far we have followed the life of Zia, who, despite having grown up in a tolerant, secular-minded Muslim family in cosmopolitan Bombay, has moved with frightening certainty down the crevice of religious intolerance. As a child, he has observed Ramzaan against the wishes of his parents by eating meals in their presence and then regurgitating it all in private. He has stabbed a Hindu paan-seller's dog with a kitchen knife. As a youngster, he has slipped out of school to feverishly self-flagellate at a religious procession. Later, as a student at Cambridge, he has attended book festivals around the country with the sole purpose of meeting and assassinating the "Prince of Darkness", the "infidel" Salman Rushdie. And all this in the name of Allah, who Zia believes "is the only true God; the others are false".

What to make, then, of this schism in the book, with Nagarkar leaping ahead in time and introducing us to a Lucens Kahn, living and working in a monastery located on a Sierra Nevada range? Lucens, we learn, is Zia himself; this is where he has ended up after a career as a terrorist in Afghanistan. And though he appears to be a born-again (as he believes himself to be), we soon find that he has not in essence changed. He still considers himself God's chosen one, meant to fulfil a higher purpose: that the man is now "Christian", not "Muslim", is for all purposes irrelevant, for Zia/Lucens' true religion is neither Christianity nor Islam. It's extremism, and it's built on an unwavering belief in the rightness of his own cause""a belief that can, paradoxically, beget great evil.

Set in contrast to Zia's story are the beliefs of his brother Amanat, a moderate liberal who can be seen as a stand-in for Nagarkar himself. Amanat is the author of a book within this book""a story titled "The Arsonist", about the life of Kabir"" and excerpts from this story give Nagarkar full rein to express his views about the perils of religious certitude:

"If I could teach you anything, [Kabir] told his pupils and apprentices, I would teach you irreverence. Irreverence towards your guru, irreverence towards all and sundry, but most of all irreverence towards yourself and your solemnities."

Other long passages quoted from "The Arsonist" are among the most powerful sections of God's Little Soldier, and yet there is an ambivalence in Nagarkar's treatment of his two protagonists. Amanat is clearly the character he identifies with, but he also recognises that the most interesting things about him are his written words; that, in person, he's unassertive, even limp-wristed. (Could Nagarkar be saying that this is true of writers in general? That they think too much and do too little?) Zia, on the other hand, for all his delusions, is single-minded in his pursuit of the causes he believes in, and it's clear that his tirelessness stems from great idealism""even if that idealism is misguided.

God's Little Soldier is not a consistently involving work""you need patience to get through its 560 pages. There are enough ideas here to fill three or four novels, but it's difficult to muster much interest in Zia/Lucens' playing of the stock market, or in the details of his involvement in the arms trade (which he uses to fund a cause he sees as noble, and to generally purge America of its sins). Similarly, the portrayal of Amanat's relationship with Sagari, a former child star, is tenuous. (Given that Amanat is so marginalised anyway, it might have been more interesting if Nagarkar had allowed him to exist only through his letters to Zia and his excerpted writings""the author as another absent divinity!)

When it does work though, it works brilliantly. There is a delightful little frisson-inducing moment when Zia's girlfriend Vivian decides to be a good Muslim woman by wearing the burkha, and Zia (to his own dismay) finds himself sexually aroused by a garment that is meant to symbolise modesty. Any concept, says Nagarkar, no matter how lofty, can be subverted""turned into the opposite of what it was intended to be. Hence the need to constantly question ourselves, constantly examine our own beliefs. As Kabir says, "the 'truth', like all of us, has a short life span".

---

GOD'S LITTLE SOLDIER

Kiran Nagarkar
HarperCollins India
Price: Rs 595; Pages: 556