Between Bombay and Mumbai

First-person narration — in which a character is found talking instead of being talked about, exposing his own soul instead of being probed by an external intelligence — has a great deal to recommend it: freshness, immediacy, informality of diction, the direct revelation of personality in every word and phrase. Tyrewala’s strengths are ideally suited to this style; he has a gift for laying bare a character’s condition with one or two sentences. “I won’t be pregnant for too long now,” begins the story of Minaz, a young woman on the way to the abortionist with her boyfriend. A crippled young man reflects on a prospective alliance and is flooded with bitterness: “If today, after meeting with me, Sophiya feels she can tolerate my crutches and the braces on my legs, our families will go ahead with our marriage. Did I say ‘marriage’? More like the shifting of a burden.” A very old man refutes the perception that aged people are fixated on the past: “In my sleep I go nowhere, regret nothing, and miss no one, like sitting in an empty darkened theatre staring at a blank screen.”

The postmodern novel of multiple narrators and perspectives often dramatises the idea that the truth is more relative, more difficult to fathom, than we think it to be, and Tyrewala’s narration often shows this to be so. The abortionist, a traumatised and embittered man, speaks of how his father threw him out of the house after his mother’s death, and how this has estranged them for good. This is true enough, but our picture of his father, a shoe salesman, is revised when we see him in the next chapter, following his son around the city and thinking about him constantly: “How he left home! A few angry words from me in that grief-stricken moment and he was off.”

Tyrewala’s brief bio states that he “lives in Bombay and Mumbai”, and many of his characters also wrestle with the problem of having to live in a city in which more than just a name has changed, in which they feel ghettoised by their religious identity and cannot forget certain dark events of the past. Others are enslaved by circumstances, by family pressures, by their own needs and desires. None feel convinced that there is any place for God in the chaos and cacophony of such an universe. “There is no Allah, no heaven, no hell,” declares the shoe salesman. “In a hell like this, I guess God too must yell to be noticed,” thinks a butcher who works in a busy market.

The great merit of No God In Sight is the almost continuous pleasure of its language. Tyrewala only only has a good ear for the rhythms of human speech but also a sense of the particular syntactic structure and vocabulary of Indian English — without this the illusion of a speaking voice would soon break down. His metaphors are often very striking. One or two of the monologues are not quite up to the standard of the others, but that is no reason not to laud this accomplished debut.