In a 2003 travelogue about his everlasting love for Mysore, the city where he studied, Paul Zacharia calls himself a “rascal of a dreamer”. If you have followed his writings, you would nod in agreement. Most of Zacharia’s stories, novellas and even socio-political non-fiction reflect the angst, anxieties and ambivalences of a rascal of a dreamer. That said, his prose, way ahead of the times in most works, never confused or perplexed the reader, like, say, that of contemporaries like O.V. Vijayan or Anand. Zacharia’s works in Malayalam are known for their unique ability to blend the simple with the weird and the macabre.
In A Secret History of Compassion , his debut novel in English, Zacharia sheds the simplicity and embraces a supremely complex narrative to tell the story of Lord Spider, a renowned 40-something author of 131 mysteries, thrillers and romances, and
his grand project of writing an essay on compassion for the Communist Party. In that mission, Spider meets an executioner and a man of perverse imagination, J.L. Pillai (the J in his initials stands for his father Jesus), and Rosi, his wife, whom he calls a philosopher of some repute. Obviously, it is not the project but the process that hooks the reader, who is taken on a literary roller-coaster ride.
There is no single thread to this novel: it is multi-layered and multi-coloured. Every character reveals strange facets about themselves as the narrative progresses; new intents and motives barge in, new stories and characters spring up and vicious cycles of events and emotions take shape only to go back to the beginning, where yet another convoluted process of fact-finding (or fiction-finding, as Lord Spider would have imagined it?) awaits the reader.
This is Waiting for Godot in 431 pages, or a giant Aesop’s Fable with an Adults-Only tag. From the periphery, the novel is utterly confusing, strewn with references and allusions that would choke the brains of a millennial reader even if she is a student of art and literature. The Bible, Zacharia’s favourite reference manual for most of his works, makes its presence felt here as well. In fact, Lord Spider’s psychological journey is reminiscent of that of a gospel-maker, only that he is building a counter-Bible where the good becomes the ugly. This is Zacharia’s Paradise Lost moment and at the very start, through Spider, he makes his intent clear by saying that his paradise is a different one. It “hid an underworld of deprivation and the chronic anxiety of the downtrodden, which journalists on junkets obviously hadn’t bothered to sniff out. Shame on them, and the forbidden fruit — a shrunken little thing — was such a let-down”.
Clearly, Communism and its many mighty falls form a strong sub-plot, and Zacharia cleverly fuses this into the main narrative. But he doesn’t hide its existence. Instead, he lets the sharp edges jut out here and there so that it disturbs the reader’s linear ways of experiencing the novel. Zacharia, deliberately I guess, wants the reader to wrestle with the narrative before deriving meaning from it. From the references to Stalin and Marx to the many allusions to events and ideas that disrupted our past, Zacharia spares no-one, exposing and examining every possible quirk of his time and beyond. Lord Spider’s long-winding conversations with the executioner, reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal where a doomed knight plays chess with Death, are disturbingly comic and mirror the broken, erroneous realities of our times. It is a clinical lament on the times, in the vein of Eliot’s The Waste Land .
That said, there are many instances where the author gets carried away by the sheer grandeur of his treatise and refrains from wielding the axe. And it seems that his penchant for courting controversy has conquered his imagination in many places. There are many sentences — “Marx loved making love” — or references to the “Stalin-woman” or Spider’s big penile erection when the “priest was offering up the sacred host for transformation into Jesus’s body”, which, despite amusing you, might make you wonder about their raison d’être. That said, some passages shine:
“Who says killing is a sin? It’s my lifestyle,” says ‘the’ snake. Spider shook his head sorrowfully. How they chase arguments and ideologies. No wonder so many films fail at the box office and works of fiction crash.”
Whether Zacharia’s debut English novel will crash from its sheer intellectual weight and its obstinacy in staying time-agnostic and counter-chic is anybody’s guess. It is definitely not a novel for faint literary sensibilities, but it is worth a read.
jinoy.p@thehindu.co.in
A Secret History of Compassion; Paul Zacharia, Context, ₹699
