Reviewing a favourite writer’s latest is a bit of a difficult ask. You go in tentatively, hoping it will be more of the same, only better. You look at that advanced reading copy, almost afraid to turn the page and plunge into an uncharted narrative dimension. When the writer is the oddly reticent Anees Salim, he keeps the reader’s anxiety taut, giving his first book in four years an odd title like The Odd Book of Baby Names.
Only, with a writer like Salim, funny, wry, bleakly comic, oddness is par for the course. A few pages into the book and you are rewarded with everything a Salim novel has come to mean to his agape-and-waiting audience – a dysfunctional family, dark humour, an unusual setting, a raconteur setting out to pull us all into this distinctly strange but utterly believable fictional world.
The names
A lot of Salim’s fiction has been asynchronous with contemporary times, and in the annus horribilus that 2020-21 has been, this step back into an earlier period of time is almost like relaxing a muscle you didn’t even know was pulled into painful tension. Set in the late 1960s (a clever set of clues embedded in the narrative will tell you exactly when), the story unfolds in an unnamed erstwhile kingdom, a princely state annexed by the Indian union.
One could spend a considerable bit of research energy figuring out whether or not this unnamed state is Hyderabad. It has, after all, a Four Minar, a Lake Hussain, a ruler who held the title of Nizam. This Nizam was once featured in Time magazine as the wealthiest man in the world. He also fathered sons named Azam and Moazzam. He lives (and is waiting to die) in a palace named Cotah Mahal.
The historically minded amongst us would be in agony trying to crack the code of historical authenticity, but The Odd Book is not about accession or the complex political manoeuvring that led to the taking away of a kingdom from a pedigreed royal family. Jawaharlal Nehru does make a cameo appearance in the book, but the story does not belong to bigwigs. It is, instead, a chronicle of those on the peripheries of a royal family – the oddballs, the misfits – a motley crowd of children sired by His Highness, acknowledged by name in the pages of his book of baby names and subsequently forgotten.
Salim frequently plays around with form and structure. The Blind Lady’s Descendants (2014) is a suicide note/memoir. Vanity Bagh (2013) turns what would be prosaic dialogue into delicious little epigraphs. Letters, news reports, fiction embedded in fiction marks much of his narrative style.
In The Odd Book, the author makes use of nine distinct narrative voices, each belonging to the dispossessed king’s children. Two of these are the lawfully recognised sons and heirs – Moazzam and Azam. The rest are drawn from a diverse range of backgrounds.
Shahbaz and Sultan, growing up on the same rundown street, have mothers who were nautch girls at the royal court. Hyder is a lowly attendant, hired to keep watch over the comatose ex-ruler. Humera, perhaps the only one of the offsprings outside of the palace to have met her father in person, struggles with depression.
Muneer runs, albeit unsuccessfully, a tailor shop, specialising in fezzes. Zuhab, a runaway from his home many railway miles away, works at a tea-shop. Owais, seen only as a voice on the other end of a telephone line, is keen to claim a precious diamond, supposedly promised by His Highness to his mother. Each of these characters, despite the paucity of space, has not just quirks peculiar to them but a distinct personality; is a clear narrative voice.
The babies
The book begins with the two princes, Moazzam, drunk in his bathtub, surrounded by songs of sparrows, and Azam, angry at the possibility of having to share what he imagines is rightfully his. The rumour of His Highness’s death becomes the trigger that sets forth the narrative outpourings of the aforementioned nine progeny. In the time-honoured tradition of brothers who despise each other, Moazzam refers to Azam as his archenemy.
The hostility between the half-brothers is a pattern that plays out repeatedly in the novel. There are multiple points of confluence between half-siblings, most of whom are unaware of the relationship they bear to each other. Connected by a tenuous bloodline and nothing else, each of Salim’s characters is the protagonist of their own story. In an interesting inversion, His Highness, the supposed repository of power, recedes to the background, reduced to a prop.
Salim’s prose is rich with humour but he is also a dab hand at complex human emotions. Grief and loss have often punctuated the narrative in his earlier work. In The Odd Book, we are consistently made to encounter the haunting element of loss. Zuhab misses the home he has run away from, imagining his mother grieving his absence, his siblings going hungry, his home subject to stillness in time. Shahbaz has lost both his mother and his best friend to the ravages of the black fever, an eerie echo of the losses so many of us have experienced in the recent, horrific past.
Humera, struggling with alienation and loneliness, begins to confide in inanimate objects, in doors and windows and mirrors, letting them chide her, allowing their taunts and scoldings to wash over her, bidding them goodbye in an everyday exercise of leave-taking from the living world. Hyder, adrift in a world that refuses to make space for him, imagines a miraculous reunion with his half-brothers, forging a family he is never likely to have. Hyder might want to believe that “nobody is alone in this world,” but experiencing aloneness is perhaps the one experience common to each of the characters who wind up in the pages of the book of baby names.
The stories
Readers familiar with Salim’s oeuvre will find familiar patterns in the novel, starting with the setting- an erstwhile princely state, reminiscent of the Mangobaag of both The Vicks Mango Tree (2012) and Vanity Bagh. Thirteen remains an age when lives change. The unnamed protagonist of The Small-Town Sea (2017) is made to leave the familiarity of home and settle into a new place where his father is preparing for death. Amar Hamsa, the blind lady’s descendant, embraces atheism at thirteen.
In The Odd Book, Shahbaz is left parentless at thirteen. Sultan, Shahbaz’s best friend who dies at thirteen, sees himself as not dead but invisible. The dead carry on while the living lose their ability to see anything but the banal. Proficient at marbles, Sultan carries on playing, even after people stop seeing him: “Even after they ceased seeing me, I did not stop playing marbles, even though there was no one to play with.”
And then there are the raconteurs, the expansive story-tellers that we meet again and again. Zuhab is perhaps the most obvious raconteur figure in The Odd Book, speaking to an unnamed listener, spinning a story like that other teller of unending tales, Scheherazade of One Thousand and One Nights, stopping ever so often to gauge his audience’s interest. There are other stories inside stories. Like that of Moazzam’s mother’s paramour, the animal handler, who was eaten by a lion: “Not the whole of him, but the whole of his heart and a lion’s share of his intestines.”
Horror is never very distant from humour in this odd world. Even His Highness, a man completely lacking imagination as per his son Moazzam, is seen immersed in the story of a circus. With his insistence on being the owner of a circus, an enterprise that Moazzam claims never existed, the dispossessed ruler seems to have entered a realm of either fantasy or metaphor where statecraft and attempts at retaining power are perhaps the performance, the circus. In this world where grand gestures are futile, where romance is doomed and death is always lurking around the corner, it is perhaps apposite to borrow from Margaret Atwood and conclude, “In the end, we’ll all become stories”.
If you have already been Anees Salim’s reader, you probably do not need a ringing endorsement of The Odd Book of Baby Names before picking it up. If you are new to the author, please know that you might go in for the story, but you will stay as much for the stylistics. As former, I do have one serious grouse about the novel. At 200 and odd pages, it is too short. I wanted to see more of Moazzam’s misadventures and more of Azam’s angry ambition and more of Sultan’s spookiness and definitely, definitely, more of Humera’s too-short love story. Perhaps Salim’s next will be a Big Book and just give us more.
The Odd Book of Baby Names, Anees Salim, Penguin Books.