A hellish place in heaven

Pinki Virani’s fictional outing demands more from the reader than perhaps even she had set out to seek, says Kishore Singh

When journalists turn writers of books such as Aruna’s Story or Bitter Chocolate — horrifyingly, if bravely, about incest and paedophilia — and write intense, argumentative columns that create cyber storms that let loose a fusillade of abuse, you can be excused for thinking of that person as a toughie, someone hard-nosed, sharp-edged, flint-lined. Pinki Virani surprises you with her softness and her humour, but also her incisiveness, her willingness to debate (rather than harangue) — and in view of the somewhat unkind perception that she is a publicity-seeker for her books — with her concern for both nation and society.

 

In a south Delhi coffee shop, surrounded by diners talking business, Virani is making a case for “incremental valour”. “The contemporary history of India is replete with instances of people working to be decent citizens,” she says. That, she says, is the whole point of her new book, Deaf Heaven, her first work of fiction, “If we all found our strengths, we wouldn’t be vulnerable. Stand up, don’t be a victim — that is the message in Deaf Heaven.”

I tell her I have issues with Deaf Heaven — that it is too ambitious but also incredibly naïve, that its stories are too public, too celebrity-laden to deal with the complexities it claims to represent, so when you read it, it is almost for the gossip rather than its intent, which, says Virani, is “to show them up as hollow public figures”. Over earlier telephone conversations, she had shared her bitterness with critics concentrating meaninglessly on the identities of the characters and their page three chronicles, yet should she not share the blame for offering up mirror images of film stars and politicians as those characters? “I wanted to have people rooted in reality,” she is insistent, though it is clear that it is a flaw in a book that starts out interestingly enough as a dead librarian soars free of her body to comment on the chronicles of our times.

The hare-lipped and very dead Saraswati as sutradhar, according to Virani, was “an involved librarian” — her other choice, given the “pan-Indian procession of contemporary history”, would have been a journalist — whose peregrinations of the spirit range from the aftermath of the demolition of the Babri Masjid to the Bombay riots, the Gujarat pogrom, female foeticide, dysfunctional marriages, the Union Carbide gas leak, sati, the Taliban and the “Bharatiban” — make of it what you will — to the disappearance of carcass-eating vultures, about whom Virani, now, cannot help smirking, “You need vultures like you need politicians, we can’t do without them.”

Not to say there isn’t a journalist, along with a “maharani”, actors (so easy to identify, really) and characters who flit through the structure of the book that it wears like an uncomfortable party dress instead of a pair of jeans. Factoids intervene, meant to inform, but irritants nevertheless; a long monologue has the tedium of a Doordarshan documentary, though Virani, unsurprisingly, disagrees. Her inspiration, she says, as, now, also her defence, is Mohammed Hanif’s The Case of Exploding Mangoes which has a similar structure.

“Exploding Mangoes,” Virani argues, “brings non-fiction to fiction,” but worse “it parodies Zia’s wife, who is alive — why is that juxtaposition okay? It drags Zia’s name through mud, it happens as fiction in that book, why is that praised by critics?” Strangely, she has let slip the answer earlier, when she talks about why she wrote Deaf Heaven. “I looked at international literature, especially literature from Nigeria and Afghanistan, and found authors there are telling their contemporary history, which we are not.” That they are doing this “in one voice, as one narrative” is possible because they are dealing, she says, with small countries. “We are dealing at once with a large country, with a million voices, at a time when there is Bollywoodisation of the mind,” all of it requiring, according to Virani, different strands to knit into a shared narrative with the help of her impaired sutradhar, the dead/undead librarian.

Unlike Bitter Chocolate which caused “manifestations of ill-health” when she wrote it, requiring her to take medication, Deaf Heaven involved a process of research that she found joyous for the “many vulnerabilities and many heroisms” she discovered as she poured over articles and documents. She makes interesting arguments in the book, not least about how we respond to zar, zor, zameen or zoru stressing the terrorism that is within and around us, and how India, unlike a Nigeria, or Pakistan, or Afghanistan, which have already gone over — is at a tipping point. And then, maybe because she’s contrarian, she assures you that “the baba log politicians are in a position to be good role models, they can make small, incremental changes”, because if there is an essence to the book, it is this: that everyone can be a hero, even if only to themselves. “I took very complex arguments and distilled them,” Virani explains, “so they might appear naïve because they are reduced to something understandable” — and here she cocks a snook at her critics — “but to the readers it makes sense.” The next book is already under writing, part of this book’s “diptych”, so a couple of characters will surface in Bloody Hell, but “it will be a leaner work of fiction”, Virani introspects, probably without the intruding factoids, taking ahead the argument of Deaf Heaven which, ambiguously for some, but interestingly for me, ends on the note that “[i]f we accept that this is as good as it gets…we make our life on earth more fulfilling.

“And then we live our best life; the kingdom of heaven being, in fact, at hand.”

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DEAF HEAVEN
Author: Pinki Virani
Publisher: Harper Collins
Pages: 283
Price: 295