This is a novel of interlinked stories by one of India’s finest newer writers. Each chapter stands alone, yet together they add up to a glorious but searing commentary on the ‘state of freedom’ (or otherwise) in the independent Indian state. Carefully patterned, with recurring motifs, and ouroboros-like in shape, the text’s odd- and even-number chapters link to each other. In narrating the scattered lives of migrants and internally displaced people, on the move and on the make, a fragmented form is a sensitive and powerful choice. The protagonist of one chapter may resurface again as a peripheral player in another. Through his apparently piecemeal structure and elements of the fantastic and oral ghost stories, Mukherjee bends realism in profound ways.
Chapter I’s protagonist is an NRI based in the US. Countering a sense of displacement as he watches his six-year-old son becoming increasingly American, he takes the boy on a whirlwind tour of north India’s Mughal sites. Already upset by concealing from his son the gory evidence of a construction worker who fell to his death near their Agra hotel, in Fatehpur Sikri the father encounters a threatening tout with a face like a fox’s. Further disturbed, he ushers the boy away, even though he doesn’t appear to have seen anything. During the return journey, another fox-man confronts them, tapping at the car window alongside an animal in chains. The story unfolds the father’s realisation that he now looks at his homeland through a tourist’s gaze, as ‘an utterly foreign country’; its timbre is of foreboding and dread.
Double lives
Written in the first person and set in Mumbai, Chapter II foregrounds the theme of employer-servant relationships. Its narrator is another NRI, a young Bengali-heritage man who ‘lives a divided life’. He works for a hipster design company in London but is also writing a cookbook about India’s regional cuisines. On a sojourn at his parents’ home near Bandstand Promenade, he becomes intrigued by their new cook, Renu’s, truculent manner, rivalry with another maidservant, and erratic catering. She repeatedly insists that he sample the food from her village in Medinipur.
A State of Freedom; Neel Mukherjee, Chatto & Windus
To his parents’ classist chagrin, on a visit to relatives in Calcutta, he takes the opportunity to stay with Renu’s family. He soon uncomfortably realises that they could ill afford to host him. A rare tale of upward mobility emerges of Renu’s nephew having received a scholarship to study in Heidelberg, Germany. Initially, the narrator thinks: ‘Something in this broken country worked’. However, this male success comes at the expense of Renu’s daughter, whom the woman valued less than her brother’s son. As such, she saved to support the boy’s education while marrying the girl off young.
Chapter III marks a ‘shift in tonal gear’, to adapt one of Mukherjee’s well-wrought phrases, and readers plunge into the lives of India’s precariat. Lakshman can barely support his joint family, particularly since his twin brother has apparently deserted wife and children under cover of moving away to work as a builder. Lakshman chances upon a baby bear, abandoned by a qalandar, and pins his hopes for a change of fortune onto making him dance. The bear is as much a character as any of the text’s human protagonists, allowing Mukherjee to reflect on anthropomorphism and animal cognition as well as human abjection.
The most ambitious section of the book is IV, which is divided into (shattering) chapters of its own. These trace the narrative arcs of two childhood friends, Soni and Milly. The girls belong to indigenous people of Jharkhand, oppressed by the police and forest officers on the one hand, and Naxalite fighters on the other. Despite a thirst for knowledge, Christian-convert Milly finishes her schooling at age eight to become a servant. She ends up escaping from modern-day enslavement in Bandra, Mumbai. Soni, her prospects blighted by family members’ experiences of illness, alcoholism, and rape, becomes a militant. In a chance encounter between the pair as young women, Soni challenges Milly to join her in the Communist Party on account of her ‘broken life’. Towards the end, Milly silently formulates a riposte that also functions as commentary on the book’s structure: ‘Her life is not fragmented. To her, it has unity and coherence. She gives it those qualities. How can movement from one place to another break you?’
The final, unpunctuated, first-person chapter, which cannot be explored in detail here, is the most fissured in terms of both content and form. And yet, it is this that gives the book its overall cohesion and a sense that this is, after all, a novel rather than a short story sequence. Like a kaleidoscope’s broken shards of glass that form a beautiful pattern, Mukherjee’s fragmentary vision is richer than any attempt to paper over India’s cracks.
A senior lecturer in global literature at University of York, the writer is author of Britain Through Muslim Eyes .
