Murder in North India

Amitava Kumar8217;s novel about Bihar explores the extremely fertile space between fact and fiction.

Amitava kumar may try hard to convince you that it is his first brush with fiction 8212; a first novel 8212; but this author of Husband of a Fanatic and Passport Photos has written a sensitively crafted book, probably as real and as 8220;factual8221; as the essays before this work.

Home Products centres on Binod and Rabinder, cousins based in Bihar, trying to overcome the gaps in the social ladder in modern India, and dreaming of making films for Bollywood. Thereby the novel bristles with the social complexities of Bihar8217;s small towns, with residents having to invent their own version of modernity in trying to better their lot. Kumar ostensibly works with a simple plot with few surprises. But each character8217;s story is like a journal about the middle class in Bihar routing its journey to a better world 8212;through Delhi, and later through Mumbai. Each of Kumar8217;s characters will at some time have to break his or her shackles.

The novel is remarkable in the manner in which it deals with its women characters. Binod sets out to tell the story of Mala Srivastava through a film he intends to script. Mala, a small-time poetess, is murdered after a controversial affair with a prominent politician 8212; no doubt inspired by the Amarmani Tripathi case in Uttar Pradesh. Her story is seen to be symbolic of small-time ambition breaking through small-town tedium.

Another powerful character is 8220;Bua8221;, Binod8217;s aunt, who pretty much beats the system by breaking the rules herself and doing so boldly, after her infirm husband dies and she is plunged into the murky politics of Bihar. Guilt-free and liberated, ruthless and crafty, Bua becomes almost iconic. 8220; In Bihar, Bua became a symbol of a form of independence that was still new in independent India8230; Bua had had nothing. She got an education and then entered public life at a time when there were no women around her to even give her company.8221;

Home Products is a narrative of new India, new north India, to be precise. It gets straight into the north Indian realities of today, with 8220;internet brothels8221;, powerful people parked in jails with mobile phones being used to orchestrate all kinds of activities and even the tragedy of Satyendra Dubey. But the book draws strength from the author8217;s refusal to limit it simply to a judgmental journal detailing rising crime rates, rifle-carrying men on motorcycles or Bihari stereotypes of the times. It also sketches the opportunities, sometimes brutal opportunities, and options available in India today. And the diverse ways in which the people have reacted to these options.

Keeping to a fertile space between fact and fiction 8212; his fictional characters living in very real times 8212; Kumar eschews the kind of bald celebration of the emerging India and the euphoria that usually accompanies such accounts. For example, while talking about the sudden and rapid displacement of lives that change in India has meant and that too what it has meant to several of those left behind, there is a moving sequence where Binod goes to talk about his divorce to his wife8217;s old uncle and aunt in their crumbling home in Deogarh 8212; evoking the 8220;the undeniable sense that they occupied an abandoned time8230; these fragments from a little visited place in the past.8221; It is this incongruity, which he senses there 8212; contrasted with his life lived partly in Delhi and Bombay 8212; that the novel succeeds in portraying very well.

Home Truths reads like the powerful Hindi novels that through the 1970s, 8217;80s and even now capture the angst, misery and fullness of north Indian lives as they struggle to cope and then 8220;modernise8221; themselves and cope with the 8220;opportunities8221; springing up. It is also an excellent read.