Tags:
Journalism of Courage
Noon
Aatish Taseer
HarperCollins India
Pages: 248
Rs 499
When your personal back story embraces two neighbouring countries that are enemies a mother from a prominent Sikh family in Delhi and a Muslim father who belonged to Pakistans power elite,brought up by the single mother and never acknowledged by the father and when it straddles some cultural and historical fissures in the subcontinent,it can be an invaluable literary mine to be exploited repeatedly. It can also be a minefield. Aatish Taseer has walked through it with growing assurance.
His attempts to connect with his biological father,Salman Taseer,former governor of Pakistans Punjab province,resulted in his first book,Stranger to History an account of his quest for reconciliation alongside his own inquiry into Islam. Taseer senior did not accept that he had a half-Indian son and the book ended any chance of a relationship between Aatish and the man he described as an absent presence,but it did kick-start his literary career. It was followed by the novel The Temple-goers which took a literary swipe at the monied aspirations and moral confusion of Indias new leisured class.
Now comes Noon,a jagged,somewhat disjointed but strangely compelling novel,that is,again,largely autobiographical and based in both India and Pakistan. The first half that is set in India very much follows the trajectory of Aatishs own life. It is about Rehan Tabassum,the son of a Sikh woman and a Pakistani lothario and brought up in Delhi by his single mother. Rehans growing up is in step with the emergence of an India where shortages and sacrifices give way to affluence and excess. Almost like in real life,his mother marries an industrialist,and he is sent abroad to study. He returns,determined to be a writer.
Rehans father,Sahil,is a powerful businessman and media tycoon in Pakistan,as was the late Salman Taseer. The novel is also strewn with episodes of political violence and social convulsions with a visible lack of resolution,much like India-Pakistan relations. Set across two decades,it is a symbolic,always sardonic,look at the subcontinents social fault-lines mainly the emerging disconnect between the rich and the disadvantaged,and the moral issues that both societies confront.
Throughout the novel,as in Aatishs earlier two works,the lack of mooring,the sense of being adrift and in search of an elusive anchor are constants. He has always drawn from what he calls his cultural marginality. Here too,the father remain a shadowy,elusive figure. The novel,resonating with contemporary events in the subcontinent,was written before Salman Taseers assassination earlier this year.
In Noon,the protagonist Rehan is an awkward,self-conscious presence,sometimes a victim of his circumstances and background,and at others the magnet that draws together diverse strands in the storyline mother,grandmother,long-lost brother,cousins,aunts,in-laws and other acquaintances he encounters on his search for the distant father. Much of the book reflects the writers complex autobiographical relationship with the material,but it also shows his growing maturity as a writer.
The book really breaks up into four episodes in the protagonists life and they reflect the authors ability to analyse,even satirise,moral and cultural issues while maintaining a tone that is more of an observer than of a protagonist. Told through a series of vignettes that span from the 1980s to the present,Noon is both a portrait of an Indian middle class struggling to define its place and a study of a young man coming of age in his absent fathers shadow.
The book does drag at times,yet Aatish Taseer has the ability to produce a sudden turn of phrase that illumines a scene. His description of a police constable,mournfully deciding between life and death,or of an India whose worst nature was hidden from herself,and the colloquial quirks in conversations,both in India and Pakistan,are what lift the narrative when it gets bogged down by the trivialities of daily life and the laconic tone that the author adopts. Also jarring are the occasional references to the 7/7 London bombings without any contextual connection.
It can get irksome,but the pace picks up once Rehan reaches the fictional port city of Port bin Qasim,quite clearly Karachi,in a bid to connect with his father,and enters a moral morass where his own identity comes sharply into question. As its palindromic title suggests,this is a book that is essentially about self-reflexive images and the tension in them: India and Pakistan,past and present,fathers and sons. This is a book that reconfirms Aatish Taseers literary credentials,but equally one awaits a book that goes beyond his own experiences.
