Aum and Ashanti

The moralising ambition of the novel eclipses its literary mechanics

An ideal is a terrible beauty. An ideal pursued to the limits of its logic is an assassin. It serenely condescends to annihilate those failings within us that make us human. It is not that the weaknesses of the human race have stood it in good stead through millennia. But any attempt,individual or communal,to remove those comes with a tiny price tag that announces the promise of a corruption bigger than the original sins. For,the pursuit of perfection blinds us to the truth that perfection is garbed in the same skin the ideal of the superhuman is every bit a human preoccupation,pre-destined to leave things immeasurably worse than they were,and therefore inhuman. That is the reason why,lets say,democracy with all its irritants and inefficiencies is preferable to its more robust alternatives,tried or untried.

Nevertheless,the phantasmagoria that is Tarun J. Tejpals fabulous as in like a fable new novel,The Valley of Masks,is not the story of a totalitarianism that conceived of itself as one. It is not a Nazi or Bolshevik utopia. Rather,it is an uninhibitedly imagined,utterly impossible,made-to-order paradise where creeds,castes,communities,genders come together to build the superman who will inherit the earth. Their self-imposed exile in a Himalayan neverland is built on a supra-theology that distils the essence of every means of interpreting the universe,and the decadent world beyond their valley,in the mind and through the mouth of Aum,who led the pilgrim fathers and mothers here,whose name is the very first sound of the universe,although in folklore his original name could have been Pitambar,Gopala,Narayana8230; Mohammed,Abraham,Thomas,Francis8230;. In sum,his origins are shrouded in twirling mists and swirling stories.

What this impulse to perfection shares with the sanguinary totalitarianisms of the last century is the imperative of choosing and excluding in attaining the ideal. The pilgrims who fled every privation known to the wretched of the earth build a community where nobody possesses anything or anybody,not even children their mothers,nor mothers their children. Those name-robbed children are taken from their mothers in infancy well,they get a collective mothering a few hours a day,from all their mothers together,women who remain pleasure-givers to the men,to be forgotten by their biological children as they grow up. The boys are built into Pathfinders and Wafadars,those that teach and those that do.

Those that do boast a perfect mind in a perfect body. Incidentally,Nazi Germanys worship of the body,the Aryan body complementing the Aryan mind,has reignited some scholarly interest of late. The Wafadars are killers,programmed to inflict brutal,calculated damage and death,oblivious to the treachery of human emotion. Aums Yodhas are also terrorist sleeper cells who slip into the world outside with the sole purpose of,one day,making it theirs. This,however,is not the story of Aum but his legacy,which he continues to define and direct after death. It is the tale of a collective life told by an individual who has escaped the death-grip of perfection and,in the outside world,awaits his death a Dagadar,once a man of opinion and will and purpose,whom the Wafadars will get any minute now.

While some men could tell this story in the time it takes to drink a glass of bittersweet Ferment and others would tell it in such detail that barrels would be drained dry and they would not arrive at its end,Tejpals narrator is in between too confused to be too short or too long. Well,wherever the narrator finds his mark,he was never meant to have the arch raconteurs verbal precision as his primary virtue. Nor is it possible,when the moralising ambition of a novel eclipses its literary mechanics. If men must know what I have to tell; men must think about what I have to tell; and men must act on what I have to tell,then we sense a screaming urgency which begs to be released from the constraints,and rigours,of a perfected language.

But framed by the invented and appropriated vocabulary that twirls around us in a swirling tornado is a world where your face is covered by a mask,since the face you are born with is your ego,which must be buried under the grand collective aspiration beyond the my. No name,no face. No possession,no relationship,no longstanding human weakness,but theres the Serai of Fleeting Happiness,or the Kiln of Inevitable Impulses. Another utopia that became a brave new dystopia. But one so overwhelmingly aware of its own contrived universality and overdone inventiveness that we are left in-between revulsion and disbelief.