It is inheritance, not love, that is a tale as old as time. If Jane Austen is to be believed, marriage, now notorious as the “culmination” of love, only began to bother with love in the late 18th century. Most of Austen’s men, like the imperious Mr Darcy from Pride and Prejudice, are comfortably off. If, God forbid, they are a little beggared, either through disinheritance, like Edward Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility, or because of sheer bad luck, like Captain Wentworth in Persuasion, born into nothing, they still end up with a living. Wentworth, in fact, wins a lush fortune through prize money and the navy. Anne Elliot marries him only after he is flush, of course.
“A man without a family, without evident roots, is no one’s idea of a son-in-law, whatever his achievements,” says Tara Saxena, the protagonist of Keshava Guha’s second novel, The Tiger’s Share. Tara’s maternal family, however, could hardly afford to be choosy. Her grandfather, having lost a case in which he tried to claim ancestral land he “believed his brothers had diddled him out of”, was left penniless, having spent what he had in a bid to acquire more. The situation was so dire that his legal fees exceeded the value of the “putative share of the land”. Just as he resigned himself to “housing a daughter who would grow more spinsterish with each year”, a deus ex machina arrived: a man.
The novel opens many years later. The man, Brahm Saxena, now a retired chartered accountant who managed to enter the ranks of elite society without a pedigree, convenes a “family summit” to tell his children they will inherit nothing. Arguably the cruellest thing a wealthy man ever told his progeny: “…now that my duties are done, you can expect nothing from me,” he declares.
In dispensing with his family’s inheritance, Brahm sets in motion a chain of events that diagnose contemporary India as a selfish, often crass, and acutely unhappy society. Contemporary novelists in India have taken on the laborious task of writing these diagnostic novels, and many publishers’ lists abound with books that are partly, if not entirely, about Caste, Climate, and the Cabinet, as if these three capital C’s are the only imaginable way to meditate on the country. And imagine they must, for none of the Cs truly affect them; if they did, they’d hardly have time to write these “theme” novels.
As Walter Benjamin warned, “…the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics.” Posterity, by any good measure, is inconceivable for theme novels, for they are catered to contemporaneity. There is perhaps an exception in Guha’s The Tiger’s Share.
The haves and their have-nots
In a country as poor as India, love comes second to inheritance, even for the idealist. “All his life, my mother’s brother worried about the prospect of other people’s claims on his money,” tattles Tara, an accomplished lawyer who sanctifies work as if it were therapy, adding, “That might be why he has never made any.” Tara’s brother, Rohit, and her friend Lila’s adopted brother, Kunal, don’t earn much either. This, despite everything that has changed in the country over the generations, despite all that has suddenly become possible.
Like millennial men of their generation, they’re frazzled by the self-evident apocrypha of their victimisation. One hides behind so-called art and apathy, reading only to impress women or imitate white auteurs. The other, a contrarian in khadi, founds a media company named “Adhimukta Bharat”, dons a “Modi jacket”, and invokes monarchist wisdom without irony. What surprises them less than their own inadequacy is that their sisters, who couldn’t afford to bemoan the lengths they had, went off and became the very people they had aspired to be. If they weren’t so moneyed, we might pity these men. Even after all that supremacy, they’re men in stagnant infancy.
After her businessman father, who “spent most of his time at the Delhi Golf Club”, dies of a heart attack, Lila texts Tara, telling her she needs her “as both friend and lawyer”. By now, we understand the theme. Inheritance. Like many “theme” novels where characters and their concerns stand in for modern India, a gig worker here, a liberal, progressive woman befriending an activist there, Guha needed something recognisably national in scope. He chose the so-called last citadel of the elite. Capital. Most of it, of course, is untaxed.
Lila doesn’t need the money that could come to her on the conveyor belt of time. “Nor do I feel entitled to it,” she adds. “But, my concern is with justice… I don’t begrudge him his share. But he’s not going to bully him out of mine.” It wouldn’t be entirely inaccurate to say that Lila perceives herself as self-made, even while residing in a family house in Golf Links and flitting between America, the UAE, and India at will, making motherhood appear effortless with her entourage of aides. So feckless a character by any moral measure, she makes Tara appear sinless.
These characters are instantly recognisable if you’ve ever had the misfortune of knowing someone who owns a house in Lutyens’ Delhi. To trust the ballots is to trust that its residents, who have only ever rented abroad, are citizens this country seems resolute in loathing. Perhaps because they wield all the power, even as they remain convinced of their pyrrhic fate. In a novel of unbeaten sisters and unbuilt fortunes, where sons season protein shakes with their father’s ashes and interns moonlight as spies, Brahm Saxena seems positively sane. Tame, if not puerile, in his wish to “serve other duties” now that he’s ticked every box of a family man’s life, except leaving behind a will anyone actually wants.
The mirrors we live in
Although Tara is second-closest to Brahm after his brother Vikram, she knows little about her father, having acquired his history “piecemeal”, turning the novel into an odyssey of learning about her parent anew, one who philosophises like a character from an indie film. He takes Tara to the kachra ka pahar, literally a mountain of trash, a dumping ground in Ghazipur next to a government hospital, and muses on human arrogance; he keeps a framed photograph of Bhagat Singh and another of a brother and sister, two children, the girl he calls his “leader”; he proffers his sophomoric philosophy, adding that she shouldn’t hate anyone. Kunal accuses Brahm of being “clinically insane”; Rohit alarmedly tells him, “Daddy, you’ve gone full Greta”; and Tara’s friend is almost grateful that he sees at least one of the two “principal” projects/targets of India’s “collective sadism”: the environment and Muslims.
Even if Tara takes him seriously, Guha does not insist that the reader must. Brahm’s clinical, sometimes grandiose declarations never quite dispel the charge of senility, and his corporatised deportment with his ménage can seem loveless. After all, to think of care as duty is a precarious endeavour.
The cynical reader will dismiss Brahm’s ecological concern as a geriatric reflex, a riposte to the ever-nearing collision with fatality. Much of what he proclaims carries the affected, maudlin diction of a countryman newly learning to care, disclosing the charade of naïve incrementalist politics that feigns trouble is far away. For a risible character, Guha still manages to build Brahm as an enigma. He is the only character who startles us, just as we are surprised to have cared about him at all.
No one in The Tiger’s Share is easy to like. Even Tara, who often insists on her affability, flails as a moral character with her righteousness. When she rejects a client accused of rape, it is not only because she knows he is guilty, but because she refuses to be a “woman lawyer”, having worked hard to avoid the kismet of one: “For eighteen years I had fought to avoid becoming one of them, and I was closer than ever to winning.”
The respectable don’t come off well in Guha’s world, but neither do the indifferent. Everyone gets what’s coming to them, even if it’s just a mirror. He has spared no one, not even us, his readers. Until now, the gaze of the so-called theme novelist has been directed elsewhere. At someone who warns us of our complicity, our indifference, the casual ease with which we trade material reconstruction for identitarian politics. The Tiger’s Share does not risk taking anyone lightly. Perhaps the enemy of our enemy is not our friend, especially if they still have capital to spare.
The Tiger’s Share, Keshava Guha, Hachette India.
