Like Kolaveri — that audacious Tamlish song that has repossessed a corner of the colonised imagination — Twice Written stakes two claims: one on language, and another on love. “Would we have an idea of truth if there were no language?” a youth asks on a suburban train. Left hanging in the ether like the legendary Trisanku by a girl who will neither accept nor reject him, nothing seems real to him except the killing pain of loving.
The real thing
And there the comparison ends. The language in K. Sridhar's Twice Written is neither slapstick nor spectacular. As for the love-story, it's not terribly sexy or syrupy. By now, Indian English fiction is as easily available as street food, and we have got used to our civilisational highs and horrors being churned up and shaped into odd-tasting concoctions in a global buffet. But this is the real stuff. Comfort food with recognizable ingredients, filling every character with ‘conatus'; what Spinoza calls the will to live.
Twice Written is about three intelligent young people, exploring the world of ideas, opportunities, and liveable values available to them. One is a would-be physicist, and he is in love with a girl who questions everything, including the reality of love.
Sridhar, a physicist of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, has conducted something like an open-heart surgery on the foundation of philosophical enquiry – consciousness as expressed in words with a double-edged knife of a theme. Could this have been written by anyone who doesn't think in at least four Indian languages? And about how love feels to people who do think in many languages as Indians do? Outside Bollywood, I mean.
Prahlad is born in a printing press and inherits a literal approach to scientific method, which two happenstances the writer shuffles like cards, along with images of writing and printing. There's the reminder that no text is final and that there can be many rewritings. And erasures. There are brilliant vignettes of colonial history reconstructed from the subaltern perspective like a Communist worker musing on Ambedkar or the sister of a Gandhian who hates having to burn her fine foreign saris. A British official writes to his sister in England about the superstitious reactions of the ‘natives' to the coming of the railways, and Dadasaheb Phalke makes “Raja Harishchandra”, the first Indian movie…
Cut to the Bombay of the 1980s! The owner of Madras Café worships Lakshmi and the cash-box in the morning, and throws a tumbler of fresh coffee on Ropewalk Lane “as an offering to nature”. An old woman sees two tiny fairies sitting on rose-petals. A ‘possessed' woman in a chawl spouts predictions that come true. Characters and situations are tossed together in an absurdly flavourful avial .
Basic struggle
Like the writer, the social science student Ananya keeps a wary distance from all isms, but is herself a field for a more basic struggle: “…Mind was staking its claim on Ananya, and Body was refusing to give up…” Neither Mind nor Body can protect Ananya from a suitor who discards her for a rich bride. She's not so different from Prahlad who weeps when things go wrong. Desperate to know if she'll ever find love, she's drawn into a séance, of all things! And so an Ouija board appears! Isn't that almost an obscenity for the man of science who wrote it? …But there's more. There's (ahem!) GOD.
Driven by an insistent hunch about the centrality of the subjective approach, Sridhar's narrative mimics the story-within-a-story format of the Panchatantra, the Bhagavatam and the Jatakas and who knows what else. Yet the authorial presence is not intrusive. The writer never stumbles into the embarrassing confessional mode nor does he identify himself with any one figure. The result is a dispassion amounting to near-anonymity. It is also androgynous. The female characters are not put-on in any sense. Sridhar is not ‘ acting' them. He's not one of those who exoticise and market ‘ Indianness'. He isn't an agent provocateur with a trendy agenda.
Yet there's some mischief afoot: a knotty existential crossword that's preventing Prahlad and Laila from tying a more ordinary knot. The chapters and titles form a code that this reviewer failed to crack. Perhaps it's pique, but I wonder if the Tantrik masala isn't a bit over the top? Together, the objective and the subjective blades saw away at a consciousness based on language, taking on pair after pair of apparently irreconcilable opposites, cutting both ways and splicing them together. Not always neatly. But the wound heals.
Twice Written; K.Sridhar, Popular Prakashan, Rs. 195.
