The brash lives of others: Tabish Khair reviews Pankaj Mishra’s ‘Run and Hide’

While Pankaj Mishra writes about the structures of privilege in aspiring neo-liberal societies here, his focus is more on the distorting shadows they cast on personal spaces

Watching Boris Johnson speak in the British Parliament reminds me of a successful kind of Indian English writing, germinating in the 1980-90s, which, despite its different political affiliations and its surfeit of ambivalence and magic, is suffused with a similar kind of brash, upper-class confidence. Pankaj Mishra has steered clear of that kind of writing. His second novel, Run and Hide, published two decades after the first, The Romantics, displays a recognisable meditative bent, some of its most significant moments located in the pauses and doubts between brisker actions.

Ostensibly, this is a memoir written by Arun, a brilliant IIT graduate, who left the corporate life early and retired into translating Hindi novels from a rented place in the foothills of the Himalayas. It is addressed to Alia, a glamorous, cosmopolitan Muslim woman from a family of inherited wealth and liberal attitudes, with whom he has recently had a relationship.

The Indian Gatsbys

Alia was introduced to him by Aseem, a classmate who leveraged his lucrative IIT connections into a flamboyant career as a member of the global Indian English literati. She is researching a book on a financial scandal in the U.S. involving some of Arun’s and Aseem’s IIT classmates — financial wizards who worked hard and played dirty from East Hampton to Tuscany. Among the scandal-rammed, now imprisoned in the U.S., is Virendra, a Dalit, and it was about Virendra’s rise and fall that Alia first approached Arun.

This takes the narrative back to Arun’s deprived childhood in a small railway junction town, growing up with a neglected mother and sister, and a bullying but determined father, who ends up with a grouse against the ‘libtards’ he has never even met in real life. From the start, Arun’s escape into IIT is a fraught dream: it is willed into being by his father and by Arun, but for different reasons. For Arun, IIT is a ticket out of everyday deprivations and cruelties, to which his father contributes; for his father, it is an assertion of family pride, a balm on his many resentments.

One of the most powerful scenes in the initial pages of the novel is the ragging that Arun, Aseem and Virendra receive at the hands of their IIT seniors — some of whom end up becoming collaborators and, finally, fellow-prisoners later in life. It is a scene that disturbingly underscores the cultural sexual deprivations and related fantasies, and the brash confidence and violence — including casteism — of these brilliant young men who are propelling themselves into relentless success. When, later in the novel, Arun’s account to Alia shows us these men, now middle-aged, with their vast mansions in the West, their spoiled children or their tall blonde escorts, one is reminded of this early sprout of their driven pursuit of success at the cost of everything else.

However, Run and Hide is not a pot-boiler full of corporate intrigue, exotic locations and gratuitous sex. Actually, these appear only as passing references in Arun’s account, and even the financial world — the institution that these Indian Gatsbys set out to crash — is not part of the main narrative. The cut-throat competition, economic manipulation, political leverage, and moral turpitude that envelope his fellow-IIT alumni in the U.S., U.K. and India seem a world apart from the ruminative space of Arun’s narration, whether in the Himalayas or in genteel London, after he accompanies Alia to her luxurious and inherited flat there. The reflexive and sculpted sentences that Mishra writes aid this: V.S. Naipaul haunts this novel, as was also the case with The Romantics, written when Sir Vidia was still alive.

Trumping India

What does one make of this engagement with the world of Trumping India — a world that, Mishra reveals, is only one planet in the larger universe of global privileges as glimpsed in quiet London clubs and from Alia’s inherited flat? Why is it given to us from the quiet vantage point of Himalayan foothills and gilded London neighbourhoods? The simple answer is that Arun is not writing an exposé, as Alia is; he is writing, with some reluctance, a memoir addressed to Alia. But the more complex answer is that Mishra is not interested in the institutional structures of power and privilege in aspiring neo-liberal societies, but in the distorting shadows they cast on personal spaces: between mother and son, between friends, between siblings, between lovers. This is a more troubling diagnosis than one that would have called for, say, a revolution.

More so because, despite his sensitive meditations and final renunciation, Arun remains a damaged character, who evokes little empathy and whose failure to make any significant connection is the flipside of the coins of superficial connections under which, in different ways, Aseem and Virendra are finally interred. Arun avoids the tragedies that Aseem’s and Virendra’s desires impel them to, and he seeks private solace deeper in the Himalayas as against the public social media righteousness of Alia’s privileged crowd. But one is still reminded of A.K. Ramanujan’s warning to the perfect ‘Hindoo’: “The only risk is heartlessness.”

Run and Hide, Pankaj Mishra, Juggernaut, ₹599

The writer is an Indian novelist and academic who teaches in Denmark.