Like the self-contradicting ‘Holy Roman Empire’, the hero of Vauhini Vara’s novel is neither immortal nor a royal nor even really a Rao. Born into a high-status Dalit family in a small village in Andhra Pradesh, King (‘Raja’) Rao leverages his unexpectedly brilliant mind, escapes his happy but tedious environs and hard-works his way into becoming a powerful tech-billionaire in the U.S. In short, he achieves the Great NRI Dream and has the pool and white wife to prove it. Needless to say, he wakes up.
Had the novel traded its complicatedness for greater complexity, Vauhini’s debut novel could have been an elegant and delicate diaspora novel that explored the meaning of escape. Instead, the author preferred to embed the story onto a science-fictional canvas, one that involves climate apocalypse, environmental terrorists, futuristic cybernetic drugs, designer babies, alternate techno-history, omniscient AIs, mind-downloading, and other Lego elements of the millennial imagination.
Technical difficulties
The result is a novel that has the sutured feel of two story projects with very different storylines. Both components are well-written — indeed, right from page one, there’s the pleasant sense of being in the hands of a talented writer — but only one of the components makes any sense. The other is a bloated word bubble that should have been burped long before the book went to print.
The novel begins with a beautifully written passage detailing the marriage of Rao’s mother to a man she despises and her subsequent death during childbirth. The novel’s narrator is King Rao’s daughter, Athena, who is stashed in high-security jail. This choice of narrator leads to some technical difficulties. Athena has access to her father’s memories, (no) thanks to Rao’s techno-thuggery, but it is unclear how she can also recount his mother’s experiences. On the whole, however, Vauhini takes care to ensure that King is a witness or participant in the scenes Athena narrates.
Lower resolution
Who is she narrating to? Indians? Americans? Cosmopolitans? When Athena tells us that in “the shade of the slanted cashew tree, Pedda sat crossed-legged in prayer”, for whom is that word “cross-legged” meant? Or when she says, “the cripple was untying his dirty dhoti wrapped around his waist”, who are the readers who may not know how a dhoti is usually worn?
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On the other hand, when Athena is arrested at Alki Point beach near Seattle, she describes the people around her as scurrying “to their feet, pulling their Cocoglass headsets down around their necks, bundling up their towels and darting off”. Did they dart off in their birthdays suits? Or can the reader be expected to know how deportment and towels work on American beaches? There was a time when King Rao, Athena’s father, may not have known that Americans loll on their beach towels, and unlike 70s’ coy Indian film heroines, don’t make a habit of wearing them. The book doesn’t seem to be intended for that King Rao.
Point is, Athena is more than a narrator. She is also a mediator who is evoking and explaining Indian settings and Indian minds for a global audience. In that regard, Vauhini does an impressive job of capturing village life (her depiction of caste politics is insightful). It is also to her credit that Vauhini avoids the usual tricks authors employ to evoke a postcolonial land (for example, describing typically native scenes such as women grooming each other or using native words for well-known objects).
“The novel devolves into a dystopian techno-fantasy, with Rao emerging as science fiction’s old friend, the Mad Scientist, who achieves what the Freemasons, Illuminati, Elders of Zion, United Nations and K-Pop have so far failed to achieve: a world government”
Such mediatory novels necessarily have a lower ‘resolution’ than native novels intended for native audiences, but for global audiences, they are also more ‘relatable’. It is perhaps why Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake is far more popular than Raja Rao’s subtler Kanthapura in American college courses. Lower resolution or not, great novels have come from such narrator-mediators, and blessed are their tribe, for they bring the world together.
Usual tropes
Unfortunately, as mentioned earlier, Vara’s novel also embarks on a separate mission, namely, that of getting filed in the climate-fiction section. King Rao goes to the U.S. as a computer science student in the 1980s, and the novel alternates between recollections of his life in the village and his career in the U.S. For someone who was a technology journalist with The Wall Street Journal, Vauhini seems to have a really naïve understanding of what counts as innovation in computer science. For instance, we are told that Rao is brilliant at designing programming languages. But many programming languages already existed in the 1980s and great software is not about the underlying language at all. It is about the underlying algorithms.
The novel devolves into a dystopian techno-fantasy, with Rao emerging as science fiction’s old friend, the Mad Scientist, who achieves what the Freemasons, Illuminati, Elders of Zion, United Nations and K-Pop have so far failed to achieve: a world government. The narrative gets quite unhinged as Vauhini works out the consequences of having a world government, or as she calls it, the Shareholder Government. The world-building is amateurish, even if the writing is not.
The novel of ideas is a very different beast from the novel of sensibility. Vauhini’s novel tries to be both, and as with most such attempts, the result is a deeply compromised work. Then again, failure is the melancholy privilege of high ambition. Debut novels usually function as calling cards, and all things considered, this one announces Vauhini is a talent to watch.
The Immortal King Rao; Vauhini Vara, Fourth Estate India, ₹699
Author of Half Of What I Say, the reviewer has a collection of short stories forthcoming from Hachette.
