I am not sure what to make of a book whose own narrative is so incoherent that it almost ends up being a portrayal of all kinds of class struggle and ethnocentrism, rather than a badly thought-out anti-hero story. Is Gajanan Godbole a victim of his circumstances or just plain horrible? Is there really racism at play against him for being a Marathi, or is he the racist one demonising other ethnicities? Is the character a perverted creep or is that the author’s own view of women and sex? There are so many themes to unpack in the book yet so little actual content, you can never be sure what the takeaway is supposed to be.
A second life
The Grudges of Gajanan Godbole, by Salil Desai, utilises the very critical time of just after the Covid-19 pandemic to set itself in. The book unfolds like an almost-dystopia at the beginning, when you wake up to see that only you have survived after an apocalypse. This is a hero whose origin story is contracting Covid and living to see the other side of it. He has spent numerous days in the hospital. He has, in his own words, almost seen death. The turning point of his life is when he eventually overcomes the disease and is discharged, but his wife, who was admitted along with him, passes away. And this begins the journey of Gajanan Godbole to unleash his real inner self, which he has never bothered or dared to connect with.
As a starting point, this is ingenious. Not enough fiction has embraced the existence of the pandemic and its aftermath. Most writers and filmmakers somehow treat those years as a collective fever dream – nobody seems to refer to it, so far from actually setting a story in it. In this, Desai’s choice is bold and he uses Gajanan’s origins for multiple plot points. But in the quest to make an unusual septuagenarian murderous protagonist, he loses sense of why Gajanan Godbole has so many problems, to begin with.
Gajanan decides that with the renewed vigour he has been given a new lease on life, believing it to be some special sign that he survived a deadly virus, he will create a hitlist of people who have wronged him, and murder them. Simple enough. But as he starts making the list of his potential victims, he is suddenly not interested in murdering them at all. He is doing petty things like asking for apologies and humiliating them. In fact, when Gajanan decides to commit the first murder, Desai frames it like some pathbreaking thought our lead has, as if that wasn’t the very premise of his making the hitlist in the first place. The reasons for him harbouring resentment against these people would also be borderline funny if they weren’t simply so insignificant. The writer was so keen to get to the action, it seems there was a complete rolling over of why Gajanan wants to commit extreme acts of homicide at all.
If Desai wants us to believe Gajanan feels he has been born again and this is the new him, then he doesn’t do a very good job of positioning these traits through his character. These are things we as a reader are supposed to assume. And not like we are getting rewarded for these assumptions at our end either. The language and treatment of the subject feel like it was written by a debutant 20-year-old in 2007, not someone with a writing career spanning nine books over many years.
A perverted protagonist
But these are smaller problems. A messy plot, no clear motivations, a character lacking any sense of reality. The bigger, and at times glaring enough to be the biggest, hindrance to reading the book is Gajanan Godbole being a sleazebag of the highest order. There is of course nothing wrong with making someone a sleazebag. It adds to the character. It shows you something more about them rather than a rather than a blunt list of personality points. But when you portray an overwhelmingly negative person and fail to draw a moral line, however blurred, it changes how the book is supposed to look.
Gajanan is crude, perverted, crass, demeans women, and speaks of sex in ways I would rather not have to read ever again in print. But instead of showing us that this is a, simply put, bad person, Desai lets the depravity hang over the book until the next plot point. After which we are back to it again. This unresolved treatment and lack of a counterpoint make it dangerously close for the reader to assume that this is the author’s stand as well. That it is okay to say this. Every other unhinged idea Gajanan has is contrasted with a saner view, except his sexism. The only people who call him out or express disgust are also described as annoying, troublesome, naïve, and intrusive. I am a little surprised the editors signed off on this language.
I wish I could add something nice. I liked the inherent idea of a lead who believes his life has revamped itself, who considers it freedom from his dead marriage that his wife is dead, and whose fear of consequences has drastically reduced after a life of only subjugation and conformity. But whatever goodwill the book accumulates crumbles quickly under the weight of its many, many drawbacks.
The Grudges of Gajanan Godbole, Salil Desai, Hachette India.
