The narrator of Aatish Taseer’s debut novel is a young man named Aatish Taseer, and some of the details of his life appear drawn from the author’s. The device is guaranteed to raise questions about exactly how “autobiographical” The Temple-goers is (as if such things are neatly quantifiable), but that would be to miss the wood for the trees; this is a book that encourages us to ask subtler – and more interesting – questions about identity.
The fictional Aatish is a young writer born to privilege. After a few years studying and working in America and England he’s just returned to Delhi to revise a novel, and he has access to two apartments – his mother’s and his girlfriend Sanyogita’s – in the high-end colonies that border Lutyen’s Delhi. A citizen of the world, Aatish is estranged from non-cosmopolitan India, and always conscious of – and uneasy about – this estrangement.
This is reflected early on, in the book’s descriptions. When he writes about places like Jorbagh and Lodhi Gardens, he does it with precision and familiarity. But he’s on less firm ground with other parts of Delhi, including its growing satellite towns, and the novel is deliberately non-specific about those parts. Instead of Noida or Ghaziabad, they are given the abstract names “Sectorpur” and “Phasenagar”. The impression one gets is of a city map where the posh colonies of south-central Delhi are in sharp relief but the names get blurred as the map spreads outwards, until the satellite towns are anonymous smudges: unknowable and frightening places to someone who has led a sheltered life.
We are prepared, then, for the fascination Aatish feels towards the book’s other major figure, a fitness trainer named Aakash who lives in a lower-income-group flat in Sectorpur. “Double A like me!” Aakash exclaims when he learns Aatish’s name, the first time they meet, but gradually we will come to see how Aakash himself is something of a double, a doppelganger for our narrator. He’s a developed character in his own right, but it’s also possible to see him as a figure born in Aatish’s subconscious, threatening and attractive in equal measure. As a high-caste Brahmin, seemingly very sure of his place in the world, he is an object of envy, and Aatish’s descriptions of him have a ring of awe (“His small, powerful body hovered over mine, the rope of black religious strings hanging down like a noose…”) . When he shows up – as a security guard – at an upper-crust Holi party where Aatish is a guest, and later, when he invites himself to Aatish’s flat, there is a hint of rupture, of one world intruding on another.
Their improbable friendship deepens: Aatish goes on a day trip with Aakash and his family to an ancestral village temple; later, he accompanies him to the home of a middle-aged prostitute where they share a different sort of intimacy. Aatish’s interest in his new friend’s life may suggest a novelist collecting material for his next book, but it’s just as likely that he is trying to understand himself and the country he wants badly to belong to.
The Temple-goers is a carefully crafted book in which even seemingly marginal scenes (such as a description of a writers’ meet where a young man reads out a short story that may or may not be an account of a real-life incident) become significant in retrospect. This carefulness can also be seen in its examination of identity – national, communal and personal.
In his first book Stranger to History , Taseer – whose estranged father is a Pakistani Muslim – described his journeys through various Islamic countries to try and understand how the religion manifests itself in different places. The Temple-goers is, in part, a complementary examination of Hinduism, a religion that had pagan roots and was not founded on a fixed belief system; the repercussions – good and bad – of this fluidity; and the growing danger of it being overtaken by fundamentalist forces today.
At one point, Aatish’s Urdu teacher Zafar uses the word “ vehshat ” to describe India’s “history of animalism and sacrifice”, which he associates with the majority religion. “The land is stained,” he says, “It has seen terrible things: girl children sacrificed, widows burned, the worship of idols.” We are reminded of his words in a later passage set during a jagran , where the master of ceremonies cheerfully tells a story involving the sacrifice of a young boy – and still later, when a gruesome murder takes place in Sectorpur.
But it’s equally clear that this is just one perspective, and The Temple-goers offers us others. In one very entertaining passage, ideas of India are bandied about at a dinner party where a V.S. Naipaul-like figure – a writer named Vijaipal – holds centre-stage. Responding to the popular liberal-intellectual stand that India isn’t really a single country at all – that the common man from Gujarat, Assam or Tamil Nadu wouldn’t have the faintest idea of India as a land – this writer declaims that the temple-going Indian “knows this country backwards. He forever carries an idea of it in his head…He knows it through its holy places…there is almost no other country, certainly not one so vast, where the countrymen are as acquainted with the distant reaches of the land through their pilgrimages as they are in India”.
Persuasive though this monologue is, the reader might well wonder whether this generic “temple-goer” really is a pan-Indian creature or if what we’re talking about here is again a very specific variety of north Indian religious chauvinism. But then, one of this book’s achievements is that it presents forceful ideas without necessarily throwing in its lot with any of them. The fictional Aatish may have a clear sense of what the future will hold for Indians like him – and for Indians like Aakash – but the real Taseer doesn't give us a broad, over-simplified view of a vast, contradiction-ridden country.
The Temple-goers;Aatish Taseer, Picador, Rs 495.
