Overturning a world with the middle finger

The Middle Finger

By Saikat Majumdar

Simon & Schuster, 2022

Rs. 599

Saikat Majumdar writes charming ascetic prose. It has the power and lightness of a dancer's musculature and flows limpid and deep like a poem. And it delivers shocks of recognition in shafts of soft, evocative light. 

I have read the novel three times and felt refreshed with each reading. In fact the opening chapter, which initiates the reader into a world of slaughter, death, survival and loneliness, possesses the wholeness of a standalone story. But then it is strategically positioned in the complex structure of a larger narrative that traces a sphere around a layered labyrinth. The fragile, fearful world of the opening chapter will upend another world, a world of privilege and self-assurance (howsoever tentative). With a mere middle finger, a whole world will be overturned.

Subversion is the beating heart of the novel. But it is no easy thing, much less an easy obvious theme. It is complicated work, defiantly ambivalent, an enactment suggested by gesture and performance, two things that recur and resonate in a text woven like an intricate web of echoes, catching, reflecting, refracting the way the fabric designs in Dilli's Chandni Chowk do the ambient architecture. The dedication - to Amit Chaudhari and Derek Attridge - and the two epigraphs signal this. This 'this' is the point ever just beyond the field of clear vision where art and thought meet and fuse and set each other free, making creation possible. 

So poetry becomes dance. Words become body. They reincarnate themselves in someone else's voice. Metamorphose in another consciousness. And when they return, they threaten to blow up the lids you have been sitting tight on inside. Words have their own life. They compel us to see that perhaps an 'I' is not just 'me'. Megha, Poonam, Jishnu, Rory are, in dimensions other than those of the body's space-time boundaries, also whirling currents in a kind of astral sea. It is a heart-breaking, mind-bending experience. Who would not resist it? Megha does, the reader too will. Megha wakes from the nightmare of ambivalence to embrace it as reality. The reader too will, if he cares. Happiness comes at a price. But is it happiness? And is it the end? Is there an end?

The binaries of the inward and the outward melt when Poonam's devotion - to the word, to Megha's words and to Megha - awakens her inner teacher. Devotion becomes subversion, a sublime irony in which the teacher is waylaid by a strangely faithful student and achieves her best against herself in the student. This finally brings Megha to Poonam's door. Poonam's self-imposed exile to Calcutta, to the home she had left for Delhi, is Megha's homecoming. And it is far away from herself, in some unmapped inner island where the bird of poetry returns to sing again.  She journeys from self-assured ignorance, though fear, self-doubt and hatred, to love and quiet awe. Words have their own life, she discovers. And that is a lesson in how to become in order to be.

Majumdar's novel announces an era in which the empire has done with writing back. There is no longer any nostalgia, even the surreptitious kind. There is no exoticism, the enchantment sewn up to cover self-conscious craving for validation. Home is no more a given; it is provisional at best and suspect at worst, guilt and shame darkening its tender attractions. The world space is a structure of hierarchies and discriminations that are many shades subtler than those of the post colonial fiction kind. Identities are processes of destructuring towards a deeper but more perturbing and elusive sense of self. You discover that what you thought was your voice was not yours at all and you try to cope with feelings of cultural muteness and fakery. You could be swimming in privilege yet find that you are terribly destitute in spirit. That you are the lesser other in relation to those you have habitually othered. That some hierarchies are differences and some differences hierarchies. That conflicts - such as between writing and reading, reading and performing, poetry and dissertation, home and abroad, knowledge and ignorance, victim and oppressor - are also interfusions, osmotic inter-bleedings. That complexity is irreducible. 

That a novelist's vocation is to render the irreducible complexity in a form that makes the complexity thinkable. That aesthetics is a pursuit to think the unthinkable.

Majumdar places race at the centre in his theatre of conflicts and follows this up with an unexpected inversion. Megha's self-perception as a victim of racism, voiced in her poems, explodes in her face when Poonam reads (and sees performed) her poems. To the 'tribal' Poonam, those poems read like dehumanising caricatures of her own people. Megha's aggrieved self is traumatised. The cracks will let the light in. In her kind of healing, the cracks don't close. They are suffused with light. Enlightenment is learning to live with one's wounds.

In the assimilated tribal that Poonam is, Megha meets her own assimilated Indian self. She realises that assimilations have no closures. Probably this reconciles her to her homelessness. America looks like another galaxy now, but she is not at home in India either. In their different locations and along their very personal trajectories, all inhabitants of the world space are essentially homeless. But this is not a perennial metaphysical condition only; it is aggravated by a historically specific crisis that is at once political, economic and cultural. 

Majumdar brings out the horror of this crisis with an ironically light and spare touch of his middle finger. He evokes the anguish of the 'teaching coolies' in America's universities and with a quick and sure stroke damns 'the old port and cigar gang at Princeton' that 'doesn't give a fuck' and carries on 'like nothing has changed'.

For once, you feel you're listening to a dirge to the humanities. And it cuts deep.

Rajesh Sharma

March 20, 2022