Reverie to nightmare, realism to fable, they come together in Raj Kamal Jha’s dazzling kaleidoscope of a novel, The Patient in Bed Number 12

The tenor of The Patient in Bed Number 12 is, throughout, one of epic unease (Source: Amazon.in)

So preoccupied were we all in simply trying to survive that we missed the import of remote processes of decision-making. The chambers of Parliament, the schoolroom, the office conference room, and the project site were all equalised on Zoom. The absence of physical encounter allowed for a great many fine-print shifts towards opacity, at first imperceptible and now normalised, to be made in the way the affairs of countries and corporations are conducted. Emerging from the pandemic, all of us seem to have suffered some lapses of memory, a telescoping of time so that long-ago events appear vividly closer, while more recent events have receded into mist.

All these facets of our shared, universal experience of the years between 2019 and 2023 inform Raj Kamal Jha’s bleak and visionary novel, The Patient in Bed Number 12. A deeply pensive, melancholic, superbly Sebaldian take on the grim period through which the human species passed during the pandemic, The Patient… is innovatively structured as a montage of stories connected both by continuity and by rupture. Through the montage runs a largely imagined or reconstructed epistolary exchange between protagonists sharply divided by their choices, yet seeking common ground. Speaking in multiple voices – and sometimes making surprising leaps, as when a video script suddenly communicates itself as a spare, stripped-down poem – The Patient… explores varied social milieu and emotional scenarios.

The voice at the shifting, unstable centre of this kaleidoscope of a novel is a languages professor who is dying, confined to the ICU with its paraphernalia of saline drips, tubes, monitors and ventilators. He is estranged from his daughter, Nisha – her name means “night” – who, as we guess from her full name, Nisha Kumar Rehman, has married a Muslim, a life choice that did not receive paternal approval. There lies the professor, immobilised by the medication and machinery that are keeping him alive, attempting to reach out to his daughter across the gulf of estrangement, and to the granddaughter he has never met, his one wager on continuity. All he knows of this child is a glimpse of her face in a video. He is kept going by the robust encouragement of the good-natured Sister Shiny, the nurse who reminds him of the need to restore himself to a fullness of life, to remain alive for his daughter.

Other people and their stories get drawn into the narrative, mired in their predicaments yet holding on to some aspect of what was lost or what is wished for. Here, we make the acquaintance of a woman who runs an ice-cream store at a mall, in the business of bringing sweetness and delight to others, but desperately lonely herself. We come upon a security guard at the mall, who was once a teacher of mathematics in a village. There is the father who, with his job snatched away by the circumstances of the Covidocene, must prepare to walk home to his distant village with his son. And there is the kind-hearted ambulance attendant who does not allow the iron of bitterness to enter and corrode his soul.

Jha transits without warning from empirical description to reverie or nightmare, from realism to fable. Alongside the guards and attendants, we meet the children who toil in the raat ka karkhana, the “night factory” – shades of Dickens, working as a boy at a blacking factory to pay off his father’s debts. They fill night into jars that will be shipped out by day to destinations all over the planet. And meanwhile, Our Good Doctor, an avuncular figure who is part Santa Claus and part Josef Mengele, flits through the ward and the world on his nocturnal mission, managing our dreams as we sleep, reformatting our world-views by excising anti-national thoughts.

Jha’s fabularity does not offer an alternative to the anguished real, but rather, refracts it to a pitch of weapon-grade irony. Strikingly, he seems to belong, not to an Anglophone tradition, but to a Central European tradition of writers long attuned to dealing with crushing existential, psychic, political and cultural pressures: Kafka, Joseph Roth, Milan Kundera, Bohumil Hrabal, and W G Sebald. What Jha builds up, skilfully, is a composite, if necessarily fragmented, portrait of a society shattered both by the crisis and by the official attempts to deal with the crisis.

This novel affirms, precisely by not dragging the narrative to a didactic or hortatory conclusion, the trauma and horror that individuals experience in such a society, robbed of agency and deprived of hope. Occasionally, the text is punctuated by photographs that are enigmatic in their everydayness. We are left wondering whether these are visual accounts of normality, or of a world askew. Were there people here before, and is this now an abandoned stage? Or, is it a platform that awaits new forms of social relationship, new solidarities that have yet to be imagined, and for which we seem not to have the affective strength at this time. The tenor of The Patient in Bed Number 12 is, throughout, one of epic unease. It is the tenor of our sinister present.

Ranjit Hoskote is a Mumbai-based poet, curator and critic

Raj Kamal Jha is Chief Editor, The Indian Express