A game in black and white: Review of Nihshanka Debroy’s ‘Checkmate’

Nihshanka Debroy’s tedious debut novel is all tell and no show

Will the upper-caste hegemony accept that “chess was not created by some obscure brahmin in a raja’s court as a game to idle time away”? What really are the origins of chess? Nihshanka Debroy attempts to explore these promising questions in his debut novel. Most readers, however, will decode all the answers in the very first chapter, stripping the thriller of any suspense. This coupled with hackneyed writing makes the going tedious.

Intended to be historical fiction, the narrative alternates between two time periods and locations — present-day Delhi and 5th century central India. The dateline is repeated at the beginning of all 27 chapters, signalling the author’s mistrust of his readers’ intelligence. Or is it mistrust of his craft?

An estranged daughter is forced to return to the country after her father’s death to take care of his unfinished business — both professional and personal. As she follows the trail of her multiple-Swiss-bank-accounts holding father’s last days, she also has to keep two sinking ships — her company in the U.S. and her father’s in Delhi — afloat.

Because the author repeatedly

tells and doesn’t show , he fails to evoke any empathy for the protagonist. Overwrought descriptions, filled with cardinal directions, numerical dimensions and material possessions, drag the narrative down.

Debroy’s disregard of the politics of language, however, is Checkmate’s biggest flaw. His villains are foreign, meat-eating savages with yellow teeth and thick coils of hair who “bark harsh sounds that one could not tell apart”. The whitest pebble is anointed king and black pebbles are considered the enemy. All women — a gang-raped monk, an intelligent princess, and a courtesan — in ancient India seem to have just one attribute: they are beautiful and have a slender nose/ neck. Insults like “My mother can fight better than you” are sexist and lines like “Just as beauty can be a curse for a woman, bountiful riches have doomed our land” are unpardonable.

Debroy redeems himself somewhat in his treatment of the fight sequences in the 5th century sections, but that, alas, is too short a reprieve.

If I did endure the misogynistic and predictable Romeo and Juliet , I’d at least want to be rewarded with “Love is a smoke made with the fumes of sighs”. Checkmate doesn’t give you fine prose. It gives you “Hands tied with a rope as thick as a python.” Mount your knight, mount your rook, steer away, far, far away.

pragati.kb@thehindu.co.in

Checkmate; Nihshanka Debroy, Westland, ₹399