Aatish Taseer’s novel Noon tells us, in five parts, something of a young man’s life. To call them episodes might imply that the exploration of character and motivation in each is more superficial than it in fact is. But the author does call them that, and they have the quality of separate segments connected sometimes organically, and sometimes only tangentially.
In the first, Rehan journeys by train to Pakistan to meet Sahil Tabassum, the father he has never seen. On the train he meets Mirwaiz, a drifter who says he knows the Tabassum family.
The story then shifts to Rehan as a small child in his grandmother’s house in Delhi. His mother, Udaya, wants to move out so that she can be independent and bring up her son without her mother’s superstitious influences. But the boy is frightened both about living alone and about leaving his grandmother alone in a city so dangerous to the solitary elderly. Gradually the boy and his mother meet halfway about living in a new place, as the dynamics between him, his mother, and his grandmother are played out. Udaya meets the industrialist Amit Sethia, whom she eventually marries.
The third part then turns to the back story of Amit Sethia, to a dinner party he hosted with his first wife in a time when liquor had to be arranged through foreign embassies, when servants didn’t know how to let wine settle, and wives had to be instructed that pasta was to be served al dente. There is something supremely unlikable about Sethia, his dinner party, his guests, and in fact all his concerns. He blusters to show his wife he is inviting the Rajamata only for his own purposes, and to display his power he insists on serving dinner before the Rajamata arrives. And then he crumples into his own hollow protestations. His strange fascination with royalty surfaces repeatedly, driving him to insult the Maharaja of Gwalior and, years later, a grand-niece of a royal family who is working in a hotel spa. He is small to begin with, aiming his contempt at those who are equally small, and he diminishes steadily. Taseer exposes the thoughts and motivations of the man, but he cannot bring us anywhere near empathy.
Taseer then takes up Rehan’s history again, in the aftermath of a burglary at his mother’s farm house outside Delhi. His officious cousin and policemen of increasing rank question the ten servants and security guards who keep this empty house in order. Men are interrogated and beaten, nothing is recovered, and Rehan flees to Boston, feeling that power and class have obscured whatever truth might have emerged about the theft.
Finally, Rehan gets to know his paternal relatives better in Pakistan on a subsequent visit. He gets caught up in their rivalries and backstabbing. There is love, betrayal, revenge and scandal. And blood.
From all of these episodes, we understand that Rehan is a young man burdened with neti neti contradictions. But is there anyone anymore with a seamless history, in terms of communal, national, linguistic or religious identity? Certainly not in fiction, and for good reason. The writers of today straddle many worlds. They finish their schooling in one city, work in another, and then leap over an ocean or two to study creative writing in a foreign university. Naturally they transmit the resulting cultural ambivalences, which have become a cliché, to their protagonists.
Apart from those ambivalences, then, what is Rehan? He suffers some of the resentment of the fatherless. In different ways, as the only man in the family, he is protective of his mother and his grandmother. He feels guilty about his class affiliations but is radical enough only to run away from them, not subvert them. He is impressed, sometimes unwillingly, by his family in Pakistan and their power games.
The connections between these parts of the story remain implicit. We can’t quite get a picture of Udaya, for instance. The abandoned woman, the mother who shelters her young son from what she considers a regressive outlook, and the older woman who remains off stage in the rather puzzling episode of the burglary do not read as a continuous individual.
The title hints at a half-told story. Taseer has left us at the midpoint of his protagonist’s life. The narrator himself says at the beginning of the last episode that he felt compelled to write all this, but that his story had too many gaps, too few threads. But he gives us also the argument of authenticity to justify that incompleteness. A patching up of the dissonances would have been contrived. Most of the threads with which we draw together our narratives are fabricated. Taseer holds back from those fabrications, and the uncertainties are in the end the most satisfying aspect of his work.
