For half a decade now, Saikat Majumdar has been exploring sexuality beyond heteronormative desire in his fiction. In The Scent of God (2019), two pre-pubescent boys discover gay love in a hostel run by Hindu monks; in The Middle Finger (2022), ethical questions around mentorship are delved into through the prism of a tentative lesbian relationship; in his latest novel, The Remains of the Body, bisexuality is uncovered through a triangular bond between Kaustav, Avik and Sunetra. Taken together, these three novels could constitute a trilogy.
Though the protagonists are different in the novels, there are echoes of the previous narratives in The Remains: Kaustav and Sunetra both have shades of Megha (The Middle Finger) in them – in his disillusioning graduate experience of North American academia, in her dogged determination to find her authentic self; and Kaustav and Avik are strongly reminiscent of Anirvan and Kajal (The Scent of God) in their total immersion in each other in their teens.
Those days it felt that Avik and Kaustav shared a body. Every weird thought or feeling that came into one’s mind came to the other’s too, or if it didn’t, it had to be shared till the other person sensed it like his own feeling and they forgot who had felt it first.
What is distinct about The Remains of the Body is its delineation of the fluidity of love and friendship – the way they can merge and mesh beyond disentanglement.
A complex triangulation
Avik and Kaustav are childhood friends; Sunetra (Su) comes into their lives in college, as Avik’s girlfriend, “whooshing him away” from Kaustav – or not quite. Avik is Kaustav’s rock: his natal family and home in Calcutta was Kaustav’s anchor in their growing up years; in their adult immigrant lives in North America (in Canada and California), too, the family that Avik creates with Sunetra and their son Manan sustains Kaustav. “Avik was his straw to a real world beyond journals, conferences, grants. Poverty and homelessness.”
The novel opens at the couple’s home in La Jolla, San Diego, with the three relaxing in its freshly excavated swimming pool on a weekend. With a few deft strokes, the novelist establishes both the tenor of their bond and the rising dissonances between them.
Conflicting immigrant ambitions have already distanced Avik and Sunetra when we first meet them. Avik wants – and gets – the “simple things” in life he had craved for and worked towards: “A house in the suburbs and two cars”; a wife and child necessarily complete that picture. He is the epitome of being “settled” – flabby, middle-aged, successful. And his social life is completely given over to fraternising with similar men.
Su however finds those gatherings in her home suffocating: “The bloated middle-agers who act like sloppy teenagers and vomit their pathetic jokes about college life every weekend, the same jokes and the same single malt.”
Instead of playing the perfect host, she escapes to her kitchen then, finding solace there in Kaustav’s quiet company. She and Kaustav are both “losers”, at least in Avik’s eyes, not having pursued the conventional path to success.
Su once teases Kaustav about his postdoctorate in Anthropology, by saying, “You’re such a cute college boy. No real job, no mortgage, no wife and kids and past mid-thirties, are we?” Truth is, she would have gladly swapped places with him. She had wanted to devote herself to scientific research at CalTech but was bullied out of it by Avik for the financial precarity it would entail, especially for one with a family. The resultant reality check of working for Merck, doing corporate R&D, never sits well with her – nor the life she builds with Avik.
The interesting thing about Su is that though she does not lead the life she wants, she knows her mind. In the opening chapter, Kaustav observes her thus in the swimming pool: “Her shoulders were shapely and articulate, the collarbones awake like those of a gawky teenager. But there was finesse in her movement, the surety of a body that knew the world.” That surety manifests several times in the novel. When she opens up to Kaustav at his conference, she analyses their failures dispassionately. When she makes love to him, she harbours not an iota of guilt: she was not cheating on her husband; her marriage was behind her already. When she leaves Avik, in the final meal they have together as a couple, she casually mentions a period of separation “before we can file”. Her dream has been compromised. She wants it back. She is sorted, even when her world has fallen apart.
Kaustav hovers in a liminal space. He is torn between his loyalty to his childhood friend and his solidarity with the aspirations of his friend's wife. He is also torn, even more devastatingly, between his attraction to her and his unnameable desire for his friend – lifelong inarticulated, even to himself.
Avik was home. His house and his arms, his dumb jokes and his street-boy irony. Kaustav had known no other home. Avik could make him do anything. With his banter, he could get Kaustav to jump out of his clothes into a pool and sink into happiness. And Sunetra. She could be a forgotten cousin, suddenly alien. He could not let go of the memory of her hand in his own, the fingers sliding from fear to assurance, the feet on his thighs, the sharp, talkative toes. He loved Avik’s body with his heart but Sunetra’s bony limbs created reels of delight, delight that brought a pang of despair. He wanted to run after Avik, hug him, cry into his chest. Why was his own body so cruel to him? How did it trap him so?
Unwittingly, Su’s body becomes the conduit for Kaustav to reach his love. Su, however, finds him out, dares him to confront himself, and finally decides to end her marriage.
Su breathes a different kind of energy into the novel. Her angst is real, palpable. The chapters she has with Kaustav are the most alive, most dramatic in the narrative. Kaustav’s primal bond with Avik and his sexual indeterminacy is the emotional core of the novel, but it is Su who is the most sympathetically and fully realized. The second part of the novel almost becomes a tussle between their respective points of view. Avik seems incidental to it.
Loyalty and betrayal
The Remains of the Body is memorable for laying bare, with remarkable precision, the anatomy of a failed marriage. But its singular achievement is its exploration of bisexuality – in that, Majumdar has expanded the scope of Indian English fiction.
What is both brutal and poignant about this exploration is the liminality of Kaustav’s experience of inhabiting it. He can never really be what he wants; never really bare his soul to his closest friend though they are supposed to have shared their most intimate secrets with each other since boyhood. While they realise that their friendship means more to them than their individual relationships with Sunetra, the lines of love and friendship are forever blurred between them in the wake of Kaustav’s moment of truth with Sunetra – making his ultimate act of loyalty to Avik also an act of betrayal.
The novel, for all its marvels, becomes a little repetitive towards the end. And one feels a sense of claustrophobia in the incestuous swirl of the triangular bonding. When Avik and Su part, the reader breathes more freely, too. But it is an uneasy relief. Herein lies the novelist’s power.
The Remains of the Body, Saikat Majumdar, Penguin India.
