At a recent dinner conversation, the talk turned to why Madras never gets the attention as a city of stories, doesn’t throw drama and historical importance like Delhi, gangsta wars and mean streets colour like Bombay, or invoke winsome melancholia like Calcutta. Even a change in her moniker to Chennai didn’t evoke a fuss beyond imponderable questions over the city’s origins.
And so despite its fetid air and burbling filth, Kavery Nambisan’s sprawling slum is set in Chennai and ironically called Sitara in her new book The Story That Must Not be Told. As many authors before her, Chennai gets no glamour or glory in Nambisan’s story. Chennai’s badlands are neither romanticised nor livened by the colour of Tamil kitsch and cinema, set to the pulsating beats of the gaana, the dirge for the dead that the slums reverberate with, and colourful bashai or Madras lingo. Chennai is a backdrop, never a character, for the city never takes charge of the destinies of its people in the story.
Before we accuse Nambisan of selling the underdog and backstreets for literary glory and succumbing to the contemporary temptations of tokenism, be it caste, bisexuality, paedophilia, female desires, oppressiveness, or a benign Muslim guardian, it is commendable Nambisan avoids prosaic clichés with her candid approach.
Way back in 1935, Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable was a taut story of a day in the life of a Dalit in pre-Independent India, where Gandhi clearing human waste and caste-induced pollution were immediate concerns. Nearly a century later, the issue still festers.The problem of urban dystopia is never better exemplified than the messy issue of dealing with slums and a city’s poor. The unbearable apathy and scramble for livelihood by the wretched, the anger of the disadvantaged and callousness and inability of the privileged throw open the old war of the classes that Nambisan bravely wants to examine in all their fetid minutiae. She doesn’t deal with class fury and infuriation in its vicious forms in the story. Her poor are not violent respondents to inequities. Rather they stand up, simmering in rage, frothing with resentment at the schisms, and despairing over inequities. It is to Nambisan’s credit, their wretchedness is never milked for sympathy.
Sitara is never menacing but is hardly a pleasant place as it rests on a wasteland of filth, sewer, refuse and scatological litter. The slum is a microcosm of love, and faith and hope and aspirations. The yardsticks are skewed — beauty is ugly, heroism is cowardice, rage is effete and survival outlives expiration. The story develops in the twin opposing areas, geographically and mentally. Sitara is the starry slum where aspiration shines in minuscule pockets. It shares the high wall of not just coiled barbed wire but suspicion and annoyance with the upper class apartment complex of Vaibhav Apartments in the story.
Idealism and concern take the form of the quixotic Simon Jesukumar, aging, incontinent and a crusty old man. Failed with his own mediocrity whose memory of a socialist and bright wife remains a scab than a scar, he descends further by losing her manuscript on social disadvantage. It’s only logical that the story is lost on a train journey by the old man for Jesukumar’s nagging concern for the slum-dwellers remains a knotty problem with no easy answers but a fumbling response to atone. Jesukumar watches his own decay failing to inspire his daughter, allowing his pet to be put down and his attempts at altruism met with savage defiance by the slum-dwellers.
Sitara receives a lot of detail and attention and the many characters of the slum, each of whom has a story to be told and followed, from Tailorboy, Prince, Butter Muthu, Suno Tho, Nayagan, Sentha, Ega, Chellam, Ponnu, Chandran to Gaffur and Swami. They are interesting, intriguing, poignant and discomfiting tales in all. Yet they seem too many and Namibsan’s narrative flits between Jesukumar’s first-person narrative and the third-person storytelling of the middle-class citizen that Jesukumar is, alongside the many stories of the slum’s underbelly characters. It makes the reading distracting at places and baffling to keep abreast of sequence of events and characters’ progress.
Nambisan’s novel has been shortlisted for the Man Asian Literature Prize, perhaps for highlighting the plight of the unsung heroes of the underbelly of urban sprawl. It’s litter that stinks. To continue and ignore its loathsomeness is at our own peril. Endurance of the slum’s denizens calls for much admiration in the novel. Equally, if not more, the righteous indignation of middle-class apathy is accused as bogus. Nambisan knows only too well whom to mock.
THE STORY THAT MUST NOT BE TOLD
Kavery Nambisan
Penguin
272 pages; Rs 499
