A Mesmerising Read
Cruelty and compassion. Confidence and bewilderment. Mad play and passionate survival. Congeries of fear, victory and failure. The crazy contours of childhood are powerful fictional ground and Rohit Manchandas debut novel, In the Light of the Black Sun, does a fair amount of justice.
The book begins brilliantly with two boys capering wildly in the gathering dusk, notching up scores in a mosquito chase. Clapping, lunging, kneading, squeezing, diving, after drones the charge of the mosquito brigade in a sleepy little coal town in Bihar is guaranteed to capture sympathetic attention from any reader.
In the Light of the Black Sun has fifteen anecdotal chapters centering on Vipul, the ten-year- old son of a coal mine manager in Khajoori, a mofussil town untraceable on a map. Insightful moments in the book strike a pulse of recognition in the reader. A childs idiosyncratic sense of justice which makes Vipul beat a newcomer at school, taller and bigger than he is, relentlessly until the besieged boy hits back, earning not merely victory, but Vipuls unstinting friendship and admiration. A childs fierce pride and instinct for survival which enables Vipul to withstand the humiliating overtures of a nascently sadistic homosexual family guest without shaming himself by tearful tale telling. A childs voluptuous but unrecognised sensuality which makes things as variant and accidental as a barbers massage and a speeding car send shivers down the spine.
All these incidents and more make up Manchandas success in creating convincing contexts of childhood experiences through which Vipul prototypical of middle class boys his age struggles to establish his place in the pecking order of peer relationships, both at school and at home. Although the book often seems to skim the surface of its material, just stopping short of significant insights, it also occasionally lights up the tremulous innocence of boyhood which lies under its carapace of cruelty. In doing so, the novel evokes in the reader the empathetic smile of a shared past.
In the chapter, The Missionary, Vipul and his classmates sit in a fever of consternation because Father Rocq-ueforte, their Moral Science teacher, has been indiscreet enough to speak of venereal hair and the sin wrapped parts of a womans body. While the boys cannot swallow such social transgression by an adult, on the flip side, they are shameless and avid voyeurs, watching with hawk-like tenacity, what they suppose is an illicit dance between another father and a forward secretary called Margaret.
But although Manchanda handles most of his fictional content with a light-hearted easy touch, language plays a rather ambivalent role in this book. In a book which would have been enhanced by a simple, direct, immediate action, the author is sometimes, jarringly, carried away by description and a flexing of the verbal muscle. A train running late is as anxiogenic, as a delayed childbirth; it obeys the same extenuating axioms of probability; no significance or moral can be read into the phenomenon. Besides heaping adjective upon adjective, Manchandas over use of similies and clauses sometimes makes laborious reading.
On a lighter note, the authors love for mutton curry and his enthused description of the smell of spices rising out of the meat being cooked by Vipuls grandfather, in the chapter To the City, betrays him into stumbling out of his neutral narrative voice into the first person. Throughout the book, the narration is not located in any discernible viewpoint. But suddenly on page 291, the author reveals himself, in what seems to be a rather hungry Freudian slip An ineffable compound aroma arose, of the kind which only a lover of mutton curry knows, and who will, like me, be unable adequately to describe, except to say that it reminds him of goats, of their ribs and of the marrow in their bones...
This making of the mutton episode is part of another dominant narrative feature. This episodic nature of the book is punctuated by chapters and moments of inaction in which the author limns the subtle nuances of family life and relationships. Just ways of being a father tucking in sons on a winter night, relatives sprawling together in lazy casualness on the first day of a holiday, married sisters getting together to have a healthy bitching session about family hierarchies. While these incidents sometimes stray into dullness, on the whole, they add to the authenticity and texture of the books intention making In the Light of the Black Sun, a very pleasant, if not mesmerising read.