The Mumbai terror attack spins off a novel that is, says Gargi Gupta, like the event itself, surreal and convoluted
Like 9/11, 26/11 was an act of audacious imagination, so way out and macabre that it could have driven the plot of a bestselling thriller. But while it is easy to demonise the perpetrators of such destruction, it is difficult to imagine what could have motivated a group of young men, some scarcely older than boys, to go about shooting people, apparently at random. It is especially difficult for us, schooled as we are in Western rationalism and accustomed to looking askance at the spectre of the Islamic fundamentalists, to look for psychological or sociological explanations. No wonder the 9/11 Commission famously called the US intelligence agencies’ failure to foresee and prevent the attacks as a “failure of imagination”.
Who were these men who attacked Mumbai — beyond the factual details of what the investigating agencies have revealed about their names, places of birth, families, where they were indoctrinated into jihadi dogma, how they hatched and executed their plans? What were they like? What were they thinking as they went about killing hundreds of innocents?
This is clearly C P Surendran’s point of entry into the story of Lost and Found. On the face of it the novel is an imaginative recreation of the lives and minds of the handful of terrorists who put Mumbai, and India, under siege over those three days in November 2008. Only it isn’t just that.
The plot is complicated by various half-strands and oddball characters. There’s Lakshmi, who works for a pornographic website; and Placid
Hari Odannur, a journalist with writerly pretensions whom she meets at a drunken showbiz party, then kidnaps and ties up naked in her bathtub, only to go gallivanting about town in an autorickshaw as she decides what to do with him next. There’s also Nirmal, who grew up on the streets of Mumbai and finds himself a role in a film on India being made by a hotshot Hollywood director (not unlike Slumdog Millionaire); and Sunil Shinde, an autorickshaw driver who once won a bet that he could drive blindfolded from Pali Hill to Bandra Station.
Abdul Razzak is modelled on Masood Azhar, the Islamic cleric who is said to have hatched the plot and directed the assassins from Pakistan; only here he is a slightly ridiculous figure who has delusional fantasises about Fatima, his classmate from school, gambolling about in tight jeans and a burkha. Squashed between these narrative threads that alternate, run parallel and finally come together in the end rather unconvincingly is Santanu Roy, Placid’s boss who runs a sleazy Mumbai tabloid, and his unrequited passion for his deputy, Mrs Kulkarni. Mumbai itself is a character, the city of dreams and a million migrants where anything can happen — a wild sexual encounter on the last train to Virar, or women accosting strangers in taxis on a rainy day to give away newborn children.
Surendran’s narrative mode here is surreal, which would have worked fine because there is more than an element of the bizarre in the Mumbai attacks of November 26, 2008. But he packs just too much into the novel. Besides the two main strands, namely the terrorist attacks and the Laxmi-Placid imbroglio, right-wing Hindu politics too gets flagged in this very convoluted plot with a “cow Sena” that leads a procession through the city on the very day of the attacks with a massive cow at its head — a cow that, bizarrely, seems to have the hots for Shinde. There’s even a Bollywood-style subplot about twins separated at birth who recognise each other at the height of the drama because they share a mole shaped like the “map of India”!
There’s irony here, but it’s so diffuse and heavy-handed that it ends up lacking bite. Surendran is commenting/poking fun at our obsession with the cow, its urine, its dung, even as he is ridiculing our sexual hypocrisies, our English accents and our fixation with Kashmir. What makes it harder for readers to sustain interest is the overwriting and Surendran’s penchant to go off at a tangent into editorialised commentary.
Here’s a passage describing the scene outside the restaurant as Salim (the character loosely modelled on Ajmal Kasab) comes out after having created mayhem there with his AK-47:
“A silent crowd gathers around the gate of the private drive leading to Breeze, watching, forming an eddying circle. Salim’s gun has turned him into a spectacle in a country perpetually hungry for distractions, just like Pakistan. The subcontinental time-pass gene that morphed quotidian events into blockbuster shows is at work…” (italics mine). And so the chapter digresses into a long-winded description of crowds gathered around a broken-down truck somewhere in Pakistan.
In the end, even that note of irony fails. The plot finds resolution in a sentimental family reunion as Salim and Nirmal discover that they are brothers, the sons of Laxmi and Placid who had been conceived one dark and rainy night on the last train to Virar — the stuff of a particularly lachrymose Bollywood potboiler. Salim is jailed and his family rallies around him while he awaits a sentence from the Indian courts, a very different person from the fierce jihadi who wants to kill or be killed.
When we see him last, he’s a disaffected teenager confused between his two mothers, his birth mother in India and his adoptive mother in Pakistan. Are we to see this as an allegory?
LOST AND FOUND
Author: C P Surendran
Publisher: HarperCollins
Pages: 262
Price: Rs 250
