“Who can refuse to live his own life?” the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova had once written in a letter to a friend. I remember copying these words neatly on to a notebook, at the height of my Akhmatova Fifteen-odd years later, as I was reading Annie Zaidi’s new book City of Incident, a slim little novel, in which we meet – briefly, burningly – six men and six women as they navigate life, these words, long-buried in the mound of memory, emerged from somewhere. But who can refuse to live her own life? What happens when they try? I ask myself this softly, almost ritually, as I turn the pages and revisit the chapters again, pausing upon their intriguing titles: “A Housewife Walks Out with her Children but Fails to Board the Train”; “An Adulterous Man Revisits the Truth After His Lover Falls to Her Death”; “A Trinket Seller Accepts Treats from a Snake Charmer While Her Husband Languishes in Jail”; “A Bank Teller Sees a Happy Baby on the Street, and Wants to Die”. Somewhat reminiscent of the structure of her award-winning previous novel Prelude to a Riot (2019), where the main characters had one soliloquy each, to tell their story and advance the novel as a whole, here, too, we find each character as the protagonist of a single chapter. All but one of the chapters is told via an unblinking over-the-shoulder camera that captures, almost tersely, every tic, every lament, every cry of hope or seethe of despair from its subject – “this man” or “this woman”. The silences in the noisy, never-sleeping city are teased out. The lonelinesses of men and women fan out against the smoky skies, whether issuing from 16th-floor over-decorated apartments or from upon the “bare earth, under the new elevated rail”. (The sole chapter told in the second person – “[y]our car is in the garage and you havehad to take an auto rickshaw back home today…” introduces a delicious change in flavour, precisely because it takes the reader by surprise.) However, this is where the similarity with Riot ends. Although the cast of characters in Riot was introduced at the outset, much as the dramatis personae in a play are, and there was a chorus commenting on the turn of events, Riot was more recognizably a novel, set in a self-contained small town, with the characters all part of one overarching story, clever little sidebars notwithstanding. In City of Incident, the canvas – the eponymous city – is staggeringly vast. (Though it stays unnamed, from the very first sentence it is instantly recognisable as Mumbai: “Between nine o’clock and midnight, this man rides in the first-class twenty-four-hour ladies’ coach on the Western line.”) Against the impossible dimensions of this city, the 12 small lives flicker bravely under the razor-gaze of the author’s lens. It begins with a moment, an image, a mood that flowers into a story. One life is linked to another, seeds are sown in an early chapter that will sprout in a later one. Sometimes it is a vague intersection, the sort of thing that is natural in a thrumming metropolis, sometimes a deep connection is forged. But mostly each is returned to their own life – who can refuse to live it?! – by the metronome of their own circumstances. Riot was urgent and political; City is restrained and almost entirely focused on the individual. We are to know no names; identities are linked mostly to class. As in Greek tragedy, the moments of greatest drama are all conducted off-stage and we get to hear of it only through the chance words of others. In my view, it is the economy of this stylistic choice that makes City so compelling. In an age when novelists are – sadly – forced to compete with Netflix, not only for their readers’ time and attention spans, but also in the overarching tilt towards a certain kind of storytelling, with its long, hyper-detailed episodes, backstories-within-backstories, hearkening to the sort of realistic world built by novelists in the past, over six-hundred pages, how can the novel fight back to stay relevant? This is perhaps a question that novelists must confront increasingly today. It is safe to say that Zaidi, one of the most talented writers of our generation, has successfully addressed this thorny problem through City of Incident. As the chapter titles – “A Policeman Reflects on Accidents, Careless Women, and Infanticide”; “A Manager Picks Up Scraps of Other People’s Lives, and Attempts to Restore Her Own” - tell us the sum of the chapter with tweet-like conciseness, the reader, cheated out of the familiar high of “hooks”, has no option but to look beyond the “what” to the “how”. We are reminded that the author’s voice, shining through the telling, illuminating the prose, is what keeps the novel vital and alive. While binge-watching leaves us exhausted and glazed-eyed in the wake of a series, when we dive into the quiet, transformative pool of powerful prose, we emerge renewed. Devapriya Roy is a Delhi-based author. Her most recent book is Cat People, an edited anthology with contributions mostly from cat lovers, but also a few haters
