Transcending Boundaries

He looks white. He begins life in an Indian home, his mixed birth is revealed, he8217;s kicked out and goes from one boundary-blurring experience to another, from India to England to France to Africa. We last see him trudging across the African desert under a Bertolucci-like sheltering sky, into the final transcendence of boundaries, into shunya. He has been exorcised of the historical pressure of needing to be white, a process that began when the Englishwoman he loves dumps him for a black American, because he8217;s 8216;8216;too English8217;8217;. Though Kipling with whom all things begin for 8216;us8217; is evident right from the black umbrella in the first few pages, it is Saki8217;s ironic elegance, his breathtaking lightness in saying the most terrible thing, that one enjoys so much in Kunzru.

Few people write with such delicious BITE anymore, they8217;re so busy being in-your-face miserable. Though Kunzru does go all mystical at the nose and knees in the last bits, funnily, it works, because his prose is so clean. And then, he does these clever things which are not spelt out but make you feel clever for noticing. For instance, when his hero falls in love, his mind is flooded by metaphors, all English, 8216;8216;Elgar and tea roses8217;8217; but so exactly like a Hindi film song Ek ladki ko dekha toh aisa laga8230;. His send-up of a society pseudo-poet is sharply funny, like his description of an African tribe8217;s ways that are in fact, very western.

Amidst all this Angrezi style, his structure is interestingly Indian, like the Panchatantra or Kathasaritsagara or Dashakumaracharita 8216;mainframes8217; which contain a story within a story within a story.

With this one culturally legit and handy device, Kunzru gets to tell long 8216;background8217; stories about the characters his hero encounters, moving the tale forwards, but also adding heaps of good texture. Shining forth through all this is a very cool, very grown-up and sort of Upanishadic worldview Ishavasyam idam sarvam: all things belong to the One which is what a truly multicultural society has to offer in the new millennium as a better way to be. Both of Kunzru8217;s worlds India and Britain encompass that, though, as this book underscores, they8217;re learning the hard way how to get more comfortable in their skins.

Yet Kunzru, who ought to be crushed by being 8216;8216;blackie-white8217;8217;, refreshes and wins instant goodwill for laughing and letting go, for moving on, unlike our desi IWEs who stay crushed by the huge baggage of being coconuts brown outside, white inside. Plus, of course, they8217;re garrotted by the Premchand legacy that the sole task of fiction is to be miserable. Or they write so noticeably for a Western market that they make the home 8211; 8216;Home?8217;- reader gag.

There8217;s another deep instance of grown-up thinking in this book. Tact. Aesop showed tact when he made animals utter sharp truths in his fables, instead of human beings.

Kunzru rips apart the concept of Empire and industrial societies, of insensitive modernisation engulfing and devouring other, older ways of being. In that sense, this book could be read as a furious critique of the gobbling West and the foolish Third World. But this former associate editor of a wild, clever mag like Wired who8217;s now music editor of Wallpaper doesn8217;t knock the future.

Tactfully, he sets his watch at time-past and climbs a spiral of human hope that insists that life is not a ladder but a journey. That a person, to really exist, cannot be only one thing, of one type, but needs to link with a complex world and let it fill him.