Baser instincts

What is it about magic realism that so attracts Indian novelists in English? Salman Rushdie, I Allan Sealy, Amitav Ghosh, Aravind Adiga, Kiran Desai, Amitava Kumar — the list of writers who’ve used elements of the fantastic and the mythical in their fiction is long and full of many much-feted names. Rushdie’s success with magic realism in Midnight’s Children (most particularly, though all of his later work belongs to the genre) surely has a lot to do with it. Perhaps, following Rushdie, fiction-writers fell back on magic realism as a way to capture the many layers of India’s complex, chaotic reality. Or, perhaps, they all grew up reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

 

The spectre of Marquez hangs over this debut novel by Binoo K John, journalist and hitherto writer of the greatly amusing Entry from the Backside Only on the idiosyncrasies of Indian English. The novel charts the fortunes of the de Souza family in Puram, a fictional avatar of Thiruvananthapuram, the city in which John was born and grew up. There’s Simon, the driver of the school van of Holy Mary’s Convent; pretty, playful Silvy, his daughter, who is pledged to the church, becomes a nun and ends up becoming a driver in the Vatican; and Savio, his tall, handsome son, the school hero, champion basketball and football player, and gifted singer who can out-sing Yesudas’ Chemmeen songs but has one tragic failing — he is so bad at studies that he can’t even clear his class ten board examinations. Over all this hangs the shadow of tragedy: the apocalyptic tsunami that struck on December 24, 2004.

There is a larger, social-political-cultural context to this domestic drama — the competitive stratagems of Our Lady of Our Heart Church and Bheemapally mosque to win over the souls and purses of the people of Puram. Both mosque and church, located just five kilometres apart, have a reputation for “miraculously” curing the deranged and the seriously ill and so attract thousands of seekers during the late December festive season. The trouble begins when the mosque steals a march over the church after a woman is miraculously cured there. Afraid that the church’s appeal would be severely affected, the vicar decides to attract the miracle-seeking hordes by getting Savio to sing.

There is also a third claimant to the attentions of the faithful: the Church of Resurrection, founded by “Goddess” Saramma who, ably assisted by “deputy Goddess” Silvy, “re-enacts” the drama of death and resurrection every evening, amid much frenzied chanting and swaying, and earns as much as Rs 5,000 in daily donations. Religion is a lucrative business.

If this was all there was to the plot, this would have been an engaging novel. But the narrative meanders, held up as John digresses into grotesque, often gory descriptions of violence, or fervid descriptions of sex.

Take this description of the making of the “karingkurangu rasanyam”, a magic potion that is supposed to give “lifelong protection” from asthma and constipation, strengthen bones, increase muscle mass, and also — as Olympian Bhaskaran, the sports teacher of St Joseph School, tells his students as he goads them to buy it — the length of their phalluses. It’s “process operandi”? Take a chimpanzee from the “virginal Silent Valley in the Watern Ghats”, and “stew [it] over a slow fire for two days in a cauldron with plenty of herbs”. Bhaskaran, a bully and a sadist, arranges the rasayanam to be made on the school premises so that the boys (and we the readers too) watch with horrified fascination as two drugged chimpanzees, who turn out to be lion-tailed macaque, are paraded by the “Chimp Man”, before being killed and their heart taken out and placed in their hands. More gruesome details follow. As the stew boils, the Chimp Man collects the dripping fat and burnt hair with a spoon, adding to it “the aorta and other arteries stewed separately”, whole pepper from Idukki, cinnamon, the blood of a goat and a cow, and perhaps, some boys speculate, the “menstrual blood of virgins”!

The great Latin American magic realists used the fiction in a poetic vein, to hint at a heightened reality. In the hands of John, it becomes a fictional ploy to hint at man’s baser instincts, at a deeply flawed world, caught between poverty and god, so that for the young and ambitious who haven’t left either for the Gulf to work as a labourer or the Vatican as a nun, sex and violence are the only things left.

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THE LAST SONG OF SAVIO DE SOUZA
Binoo K John
HarperCollins
350 pages; Rs 265