Bioterror, The Puppet Show

She is desire. She is the mirage of fulfilment. She is life. She is death. She is beauty and youth. She is ugliness and fear of pestilence. ...

She is desire. She is the mirage of fulfilment. She is life. She is death. She is beauty and youth. She is ugliness and fear of pestilence. She is past, future and eternal present. She is nature, cosmic humanity at its most trivial and most profound. She is Maya, the central character of the latest novel by I. Allan Sealy. Maya is a puppeteer. She is a ventriloquist, throwing voices of the medieval times, tossing destinies from the past and modern times and colluding with Sealy in his attempt to mortalise the immortal historic past of their common playfield, Dilli. With a dash of St Petersburg thrown in, and a Russian biological weapon scientist Lev to hold one’s arm, the rumalis of Karim’s and its Mughlai fare come alive, hot and steaming.

The filth that flows beside Delhi Gate for once, at least in fiction, carries the hues of a real river, and the bustle inside the walled city comes alive and throbs in the attentive eyes of the author who walks delicately on the dangerous edge between a tourism guide and a novel about the eternal theme of love and longing.

The Brainfever Bird
By I. Allan Sealy
Picador India
Price: Rs 425

The story is about Lev the scientist who comes to Delhi dropped from research and reduced to a chauffeur in his own country. He wants to sell his knowhow to India. The only outcome of the visit is, however, that he lands up in Old Delhi and makes friends with an Indian beauty — Maya. Maya lives with her puppets and shares the house with a TV newsreader Morgan, her silent lover, who comes there to catch some sleep before he is off for his early morning news programmes. Maya falls for Lev at first sight and he does not find it difficult to reciprocate as he is mesmerised by her free spirit. He gladly accepts shelter under her roof. The past in St Petersburg, his wife Alla, his scientific mission in India, all seem illusion in the arms of Maya.

Till a plague breaks out in the Walled City. It strikes Maya and soon there are suspicions about the alien Russian scientist. But before he is bundled off to Russia, there is a puppet show about Razia, the only Queen of Delhi, and her slave lover, a graphic description of a kushti in Old Delhi and a violent attack on Lev.

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A partridge, who suffers and cries in pain even when not caged, is the brainfever bird of the book, the bird of love and longing, forever yearning and forever unfulfilled and finally a victim and a weapon of passion and fury. It becomes the victim of Maya’s fury on losing her lover and it lands up in the neighbouring bird hospital in Daryaganj in Sealy’s final adieu to Old Delhi.

The poetry of the narrative goes a long way in making the tale of the three lovers flow on without drifting into the reign of the trivial. The prologue also helps in sounding the sublime note — that the novel is nothing but a puppet show about a puppet show. And add to that — by a novelist who is puppeteer and puppet at once.

While calling Lev and Maya his white and red puppets, he asks in his prologue — ‘‘what if you yourself were a puppet?’’

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