In this translation of the 2014 Marathi novel Khidkya Ardhya Ughadya , encounters among a handful of characters are played out against the Mumbai of today. In the city of Half-Open Windows there are no raucous neighbourhoods or pavement vendors. There is just a frightening anonymity.
Each chapter is written in the voice of one character, and Shushrut’s voice begins and ends the novel. That structure gives this slight book the feel of a short story collection at first. The characters are architects, architecture students, and their families are all of an upper middle class milieu. Given this narrow class of people, there is little scope for an expansive, novelistic web of relationships. Instead, we feel hemmed into a half-lit corridor, a place for limited encounters that reveals more disconnection than connection. But gradually the threads overlap, and the reader knows that some voiceless innocent will pay the price of another person’s crimes.
Shushrut is between jobs, and his only social activity right now is to defend his dog against the complaints of his elderly neighbour. That lonely neighbour is torn between her cat and her son in America, who feels she should wind up her establishment and live with him. Shushrut’s wife Sanika proposes that he join her in a six-month assignment abroad. She and her colleagues constitute a young firm developing ‘Elena’, a strangely personal name for an impersonal skyscraper in Colaba that will house the obscenely rich. Elena has, unsurprisingly, been founded on financial irregularities. The shadow of financial crime brings in Premendra and Swarupa, old associates of Sanika who now work for an NGO that helps slum dwellers. They now see an opportunity to bring her down, or defend people from corporate greed, depending on how the light falls at any moment.
More frightening than the inhuman scale of today’s Mumbai are the one-dimensional souls of these characters, their minds sapped by their gadgets and the inevitability of corruption in all their transactions. It is a thin slice of humanity where dilemmas about work, love, life, death, and betrayal seem to take up less mind space than the problem of where to park. Is this all they can feel?
Half-Open Windows; Ganesh Matkari, trs Jerry Pinto, Speaking Tiger, ₹299.
The writer is author of Three Seasons: Notes from a Country Year.
