Urban fiction usually comes with a heady suffusion of sordidness that revels in its own lack of a sanitising filter. Add to this a pithy, if slightly corny, title like Junkland Journeys , and you might pick the book up with wariness, fearing that you’re about to douse your mind in a frenetic mix of self-indulgent storytelling that prides itself on being fleeting and insouciant. You know, the kind of punk fiction where the dirtbag protagonist staggers from one messed-up drug-addled experience to another, clutching his head like his subjectivity is somehow more poignant than anyone else’s?
Well, Ajith Pillai’s tale surprises you as it moves along. It’s not your usual dark-and-bleak drug novel, although that is admittedly exactly what it is for a large part. It starts out with sincerity; as the protagonist Hari Menon tries to understand the meaning of life and where the sentient human being figures in it. And what better way to pierce the veil of reality than with the prick of the psychotropic syringe?
Hari is an everyman who represents the entity at the core of everyone’s self once the layers of societal affiliations are removed. The one who sees himself as alienated from the world and isolated within a mind that just can’t seem to discover an affinity with any strata. Confused and disillusioned, the son of a rich father whom he accuses of insensitivity, Hari is the perfect vehicle for a tale of self-discovery. Pillai draws Hari’s character out with an authenticity that can come only from dipping into your own conscience. If you’ve ever met yourself, you will enjoy identifying with Hari, his conundrums and his idiosyncrasies.
Though the story is set in the late 80s and early 90s, Hari might as well have been a clueless millennial — the kind with a hapless dependency on their parents; a dependency that breeds resentment and exacerbates the cluelessness. So, when Hari takes a travelling sabbatical from his job at an ad agency, you don’t really expect that he will cover much ground. As he trundles along the streets of Mumbai like a disciplined itinerant, he meets a motley assortment of characters.
Many of them are drawn out perfunctorily, almost like they were sketches that made it into the final draft because the author didn’t want to abandon them. Meanwhile, others are imbued with unnecessary detail even though they have little relevance to Hari’s tale — even Das, a seemingly major character, gets way too much page-time simply for the sake of expounding on rural realities.
Through Hari’s interactions with these characters and his inner monologues (often humorously blurted out like some judicial verdict at the end of a drawn-out thought process), Pillai builds a comprehensive pre-Y2K time capsule of Indian society — both urban and rural — with an inventory of its parochialisms, aspirations, and politics. Some of these observations are quite penetrative and pin human behaviour to the wall with blindingly perceptive light.
But somewhere in its transformation into self-referential meta-fiction, Pillai’s otherwise classy novel ends up resorting to the exit clause that many an ambitious writer succumbs to. A kind of self-congratulatory simplification that absolves itself of the goal of successfully communicating complexity, lazily ascribing the failure to the whim of ‘the writer’. It is disappointing to lose your seat in Hari’s point-of-view at the exact stage in the book where you want his perspicacity to illuminate what is really going on. Although, the meta-resolution is accomplished in an airtight and transparent way, for which the author deserves credit.
As a consequence of this cop-out, it becomes very hard to tell whether Pillai truly intends to laud Hari’s pop-philosophy as a succinct distillation of high Zen thought and cosmic equations, or whether he is parodying pop-philosophy’s tendency to peddle oversimplified tautologies as spiritual panaceas. Either way, the story has an endearingly witty tone, full of irreverence and self-deprecation.
The final third of the book — for some reason, a blow-by-blow of the Bombay riots in the early 90s, told with the astute pen of Pillai, the veteran political journalist — actually sweeps the narrative away into the macroscopic domain of religious-political conflict (also, it’s all the more ironic for Hari and his entourage to have become so embroiled in it given their stated apolitical status).
It’s hard to stick a bottomline on a book that aims to be as realistic as Junkland Journeys does. Seemingly a stream-of-consciousness commentary on everything under the sun, including music, literature, philosophy, poetry, politics and, of course, psychotropic explorations, the book leaves you wondering what it is really about. What is the takeaway, besides the tautology that life is a series of overwhelmingly unpredictable fluctuations that finally deposit you on to plateaus of monotony, much like what the eponymous ‘junk’ (heroin) does?
In the end, the novel is as a thoroughly entertaining — if incomplete — bildungsroman; a novel that proffered you a lit joint that you never did smoke down fully because the cops rumbled you.
Junkland Journeys; Ajith Pillai, Authors Upfront | Paranjoy, Rs. 325.
mihir.b@thehindu.co.in
