The Silent Dream

There is also an equally hypnotic rhythm in the stories he narrates as he sweeps you from chapter to chapter, connecting each word and each sentence, and then snapping the gridlock. If there is magic realism, yet again, it surprisingly does not disturb or irritate, because the book retains a silvery, otherworldly quality of a sorrowful fable. There is no pretentious heaviness. Often, it seems to be the kind of story that a child would tell — which while retaining a brutal honesty, yet falls softly into your listening ears. Jha spreads a large canvas — with characters sunk in the loneliness of cities, connecting and then leaving, uncertain of their own origins, or indeed of their destinations. And neither does Jha help them along. They enter into a confusion of urban angst, leaving their footprints in other tales of other people. Again, surprisingly, it all seems plausible, from the Champion of Hide and Seek who rides a crow across the city skies to men who see children floating in buckets of water to people whose names are mirror images of each other.

If some of the stories are dreamlike, then Jha has used the device effectively, because the dreams haunt you, as you turn the pages. The novel starts on a low-key note with the meeting of two strangers in an accident, Rima and Amir (their names reflect each other) in Paradise Park. Amir is grievously injured and Rima nurses him back to health and a deep relationship. Soon enough, Rima begins to hear a child crying — a motif which sets the stage for the rape of a young child.

To investigate the brutal molestation and murder of the child, Mala, a journalist, begins her journey to the murky canal where the little girl drowned. She is helped by Alam (again the obverse of Mala) but she is also weighed down by the terrible trauma of her own childhood memories.

From her we move to the last part of the book, once again, to the apartment where Amir probably lived. Here the narrative loops back: the child, in a red dress, now living in the apartment rediscovers the characters, Rima and Alam, as the faces she draws over and over again from her school textbook. Even as everything seems to fall into place, nothing ever really does. Because Jha refuses to tidy up the loose ends. Make of it what you will.

While Jha’s book does not give any ground to complacency, we reach the end with the sadness which permeates the entire novel never really dissipating. The silent ache remains, the loss of innocence, the sense of tragedy, and the unrelenting assault of accidental lives that reach out to each other in a hollow manner. If there are shallow depths in city life, Jha plumbs them for us, and like the canal in which the girl drowns, he fills the pages with life and then drains it all out.

This is a book which disquiets the reader — but at the same time weaves a pattern of stories which are happening all around, beneath the surface, being imagined everywhere, but being entered into only rarely. By drawing us into the world of our urban imagination, Jha connects us even more closely to the pain of the city dweller. If You Are Afraid of Heights marks the maturing of a gifted author.

Raj Kamal Jha is Executive Editor of The Indian Express