‘Rest in Peace’ Book Review: Laugh, for the end is near

Kiran Nagarkar

Returning home to Central Works Department Chawl 17, Victor Coutinho pauses, as he does every evening, underneath the fourth-floor balcony of Parvati Pawar to gaze at her breasts. On this particular evening, she is feeding her one-year-old boy Ram, and Victor, entranced, reaches out his hands. Ram dives out of his mother’s grasp and into Victor’s arms. Saving the baby’s life costs Victor his own. He succumbs to an immediate heart attack. His son Eddie is born the next day. Meanwhile, Ram becomes Ravan, an insurance policy his mother takes out against the evil eye.

By the time Rest in Peace begins, Ravan and Eddie, whose birthright is mutual antipathy, are yoked together in friendship. Their paths intertwine in The Extras, the second volume in the trilogy, published 17 years after the first, as they join forces to break into Bollywood as music directors and choreographers behind the shock box-office success of Hulla Gulla. Our protagonists, men whom even their mothers think of as good-for-nothings, are in demand. Soon Ravan, Eddie, and their sharp-witted lyricist, Asmaan, become stars, written about in film tabloids and leaving the chawl behind for apartments hovering in the skies above Pali Hill.

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Along with professional success comes romantic success, as Ravan marries Pieta, Eddie’s sister, and Eddie tries again with Belle, a singer who had left him for a loutish Nepean Sea Road playboy. Of course, it cannot last. In the dust of the Chambal ravines, among its tough dacoits, Ravan and Eddie lose everything. They find themselves back in the chawl, once again unemployed, once again losers. Fate invariably deals a lousy hand but Ravan and Eddie remain unbowed, as buoyant, as contemptuous of gravity as Parvati’s breasts which so bewitched Victor and sparked this whole shebang.

Falling from the celestial heights of Bollywood to the mephitic depths of transporting fast-rotting corpses to funeral pyres, Ravan and Eddie start Om Shanti Shanti Shanti Antim Yatra Services, a name as unwieldy as the cart Ravan and Eddie use to move the bodies. It offers the duo, ironically, a new life, or at least a revival of purpose. Until, that is, they’re hired by a mysterious, moneyed client.

In a way, the Ravan and Eddie trilogy is historical fiction, like Cuckold, the novel set in the 16th century which won Nagarkar a Sahitya Akademi award. The trilogy is a love letter to a city that no longer exists. Ravan and Eddie, published two years after the 1992 Bombay riots, is essentially optimistic about the city and the possibilities for its people to imagine and create their own lives. Nagarkar is a little like the Brazilian writer Jorge Amado, who is able to find bawdy comedy and hope where others might find only poverty, meanness and misery. Ravan and Eddie harks back to a time when the Hindu right were clowns in half-pants, when Hindi film music was as urban and sophisticated as anything by Cole Porter, when Bombay was a city in which to fantasize.

Sadly, Rest in Peace is a much weaker novel than Ravan and Eddie. Nagarkar is not helped by editing that does not stop him from repeating images and pet phrases; by fact checking that allows picayune but sloppy errors to stud the text — Alpha Romeo; here, here; Irwin Berlin (it’s Alfa; hear, hear; and Irving). Rest in Peace is also bogged down by plot machination, like an overstuffed Hindi film which would rather throw in another action sequence, another plot twist than develop a character. It’s an odd criticism to have to make when Ravan and Eddie was illuminated by its devotion to character, to coveting the eccentricities of personality. Still, it remains hard to resist Ravan and Eddie, hard not to love them, hard not to cheer when like cartoon characters they keep regaining their shape after being flattened by anvils. Surely this is not the end. Can characters who defy gravity ever truly fall?

Shougat Dasgupta is a critic who lives in Delhi