Vikram Chandra is one of those writers who really likes to spin a yarn. Unlike many contemporary fiction writers, especially from India, whose focus is on their prose, Chandra, while stylish, is above all else a storyteller.
His first and third books are epic novels with long, complex plots and subplots that unravel like a spool of thread. Sandwiched between those two is his second book, the collection of stories called Love and Longing in Bombay. Published in 1997, the same year as The God of Small Things, this book won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Eurasia region, leaving Roy’s novel at second place.
And yet it’s nowhere as well known as the other book, which is a pity because the stories are not only gripping but an excellent depiction of the complex, multi-faceted life of Bombay.
Love and Longing is all about storytelling. In its pages, a retired civil servant gathers his audience, including our narrator Ranjit Sharma, in a sea-facing bar called Fishermen’s Rest, and says, “Listen.” What follows is a set of five stories – three of which qualify as novellas. The stories, Dharma (Faith,) Shakti (Strength,) Kama (Love,) Artha (Wealth,) and Shanti (Peace) all deal with love and not just longing but loss.
Set in what was still called Bombay in the years immediately following the liberalisation of India’s economy, they reveal many of the contradictions of the city. Thus we find a whole array of characters ranging from socialites of Malabar Hill to computer programmers working through the night, from closeted gay lovers to hardened cops, from powerful underworld dons to egotistical painters. Chandra takes us on a tour of the city, through fashionable living rooms and dingy police stations. These five stories are long enough to encompass entire novels, but never leave you feeling confused or overwhelmed.
The five stories
Dharma is the story of Jago Antia, a legendary major general with an artificial limb, who returns to his childhood house in Bombay to find it haunted by a child. Known for his stoical adherence to duty, the veteran finally begins to feel the phantom pain in his missing limb that he has so long denied, as he is forced to confront the ghost and his memories of a childhood tragedy.
Shakti, my favourite story in the collection, follows Sheila, a social climber whose family’s new money, and all the power and comforts that brings, is not enough to satiate her. She sets her sights on an old mansion on the top of Malabar Hill that belongs to the established Boatwalla family. The rivalry between Sheila and Dolly Boatwalla comes “down to this vulgarity – that they had the pride and she had the money.”
Kama is the most erotic of the stories. Here, Sartaj Singh, a police officer who reappears later in Chandra’s magnum opus Sacred Games, is investigating the murder of an apparently nondescript, middle-class businessman, while also dealing with his impending divorce. His wife is set to marry another man, and urges him to sign the divorce papers, which he is reluctant to do. To take his mind off his personal problems, he throws himself into the murder case, thus unraveling lurid details about the victim.
In Artha, Iqbal, a young computer programmer, and his female supervisor, write code late into the night in a tiny apartment, in a desperate attempt to find a bug. Iqbal meets his boyfriend Rajesh furtively, until one night when the latter disappears from a party. As Iqbal begins his desperate search for Rajesh, he is drawn into a world of underworld crime.
In the final story in the book, Subramanium tells Ranjit how he met and wooed his wife Shanti, and it is here that we get a closer glimpse of our narrator and the man who is the source of all the stories.
Intricate plots
Chandra’s strength lies in weaving plots and subplots together. The stories yield more stories. The protagonist’s life often finds an echo in that of another character. For instance, in Shakti, Sheila’s quest to climb the social ladder higher and higher alternates with the story of her maid Ganga. From Sheila’s relationship with her son and her concern when he falls in love with the least suitable person in the world we go to Ganga’s modest kholi in the slum which she is forced to sell to pay for her daughter Asha’s wedding. In Kama, the focus remains firmly on Sartaj, but as he takes more and more interest in the secret life of the murder victim, we too are drawn into the details.
Chandra’s background in film and scriptwriting (he co-wrote the screenplay for the Hindi movie Mission Kashmir) imparts to his fiction some of the elements of a potboiler. There’s plenty of suspense in these pages. Whose ghost haunts the bungalow in Khar? Will Sheila and her husband succeed in buying out the Boatwalla mansion? Who killed Chetanbhai Patel? Will Iqbal find Rajesh? Will Subramaniam marry Shanti?
The cinematic quality is evident in vivid scenes. One example is this scene in Artha that offers a glimpse of some of the changes coming over the city:
“So we had a sudden new crowd at the old bar. The balcony filled up with journos full of horrific election-time tales from the interior, and the younger Maruti 1000 kind of stockbrokers, and also a certain hotel-trainee group who always said. Hamara group has the most fun, man…”
In the same story the characters attend an “arty party” where the crowd is delightfully superficial and snobby. But elsewhere there’s a garage at the rear of a four-storied building in a lane near Bandra station, where lines of fresh clothes hanging from every balcony. Some of the characters live in chawls, while others seek adventure in dodgy boarding houses with dark rooms. This is Bombay in all its dimensions, often in the same story and at the very same time.
Driven by longing
The characters vary greatly too but what they all seem to have in common is their deep longing for something. The stories are driven by Jago Antia’s attempt to obliterate the past and his demons, by Sheila’s relentless pursuit of social approval, by Sartaj Singh’s longing for his ex-wife, and by Iqbal’s desperation to find Rajesh. And these are only the main characters. Several others come alive in these pages and together fill up the canvas representing an entire city. The most important character of all is Bombay itself.
Intricate plots and intense narrative tension are sometimes looked down upon by literary writers. But these stories are not merely page-turners. The quick pacing and series of intriguing events are punctured with remarkably quiet moments, revealing characters who are complex, self-reflexive and often tormented.
One such moment comes towards the end of Artha, where Iqbal and Sandhya pause their maniacal coding, unable to figure out what has caused the glitch. Iqbal says, “And then, suddenly, I was overcome by sadness. It came out of the endless azure sky and settled in my bones. I looked out at the yard, at its scattered pieces of paper, the two workers squatting against the wall with their bare knees shining, at the scattered bits of smoke around their heads, and I was hopeless.” It is such moments of haunting clarity that linger long after the stories end.
Amidst the whirlwind of murder investigations and police interrogations and frantic lovemaking between soon-to-be-exes, there is this moment in the middle of Kama, when the tough cop Sartaj sits quietly “in the loneliness of his flat. It was very dark, moonless, and the small space between the gleams on the furniture held him comfortably in its absolutely silence. He knew that if he disturbed nothing, not even the shadows on the floor, he could hold on to the madly delicate balance of peace that he had struggled himself into.”
It is impossible not to be aware of the passage of time and of how this “balance of peace” is constantly slipping away. The lives of these characters are full of action – clandestine affairs, business deals, terminal illness, brutal murders, porn, amputations, tragic accidents, weddings, divorces, torture, and so on. Through it all, perhaps there is one constant and common longing.
The characters, like the city they inhabit, are all seeking something, not just faith, love, wealth and strength, but perhaps, most of all, peace. They are all struggling, no matter how rich or beautiful or highly esteemed. They have all lost something, and even in their small, temporary victories, continue to lose. As Iqbal says in Artha, mothers are always teaching their children to endure. Iqbal finds himself wondering, “Endure. How much, for what?”
The title of the final story suggests that perhaps peace is a possibility after all. By the end of the book, there is a sense that some kind of shanti will prevail, that despite all the travails that threaten it, Bombay itself will endure.
Oindrila Mukherjee is a writer and an Assistant Professor at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. You can follow her on Twitter at @oinkness.
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His first and third books are epic novels with long, complex plots and subplots that unravel like a spool of thread. Sandwiched between those two is his second book, the collection of stories called Love and Longing in Bombay. Published in 1997, the same year as The God of Small Things, this book won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Eurasia region, leaving Roy’s novel at second place.
And yet it’s nowhere as well known as the other book, which is a pity because the stories are not only gripping but an excellent depiction of the complex, multi-faceted life of Bombay.
Love and Longing is all about storytelling. In its pages, a retired civil servant gathers his audience, including our narrator Ranjit Sharma, in a sea-facing bar called Fishermen’s Rest, and says, “Listen.” What follows is a set of five stories – three of which qualify as novellas. The stories, Dharma (Faith,) Shakti (Strength,) Kama (Love,) Artha (Wealth,) and Shanti (Peace) all deal with love and not just longing but loss.
Set in what was still called Bombay in the years immediately following the liberalisation of India’s economy, they reveal many of the contradictions of the city. Thus we find a whole array of characters ranging from socialites of Malabar Hill to computer programmers working through the night, from closeted gay lovers to hardened cops, from powerful underworld dons to egotistical painters. Chandra takes us on a tour of the city, through fashionable living rooms and dingy police stations. These five stories are long enough to encompass entire novels, but never leave you feeling confused or overwhelmed.
The five stories
Dharma is the story of Jago Antia, a legendary major general with an artificial limb, who returns to his childhood house in Bombay to find it haunted by a child. Known for his stoical adherence to duty, the veteran finally begins to feel the phantom pain in his missing limb that he has so long denied, as he is forced to confront the ghost and his memories of a childhood tragedy.
Shakti, my favourite story in the collection, follows Sheila, a social climber whose family’s new money, and all the power and comforts that brings, is not enough to satiate her. She sets her sights on an old mansion on the top of Malabar Hill that belongs to the established Boatwalla family. The rivalry between Sheila and Dolly Boatwalla comes “down to this vulgarity – that they had the pride and she had the money.”
Kama is the most erotic of the stories. Here, Sartaj Singh, a police officer who reappears later in Chandra’s magnum opus Sacred Games, is investigating the murder of an apparently nondescript, middle-class businessman, while also dealing with his impending divorce. His wife is set to marry another man, and urges him to sign the divorce papers, which he is reluctant to do. To take his mind off his personal problems, he throws himself into the murder case, thus unraveling lurid details about the victim.
In Artha, Iqbal, a young computer programmer, and his female supervisor, write code late into the night in a tiny apartment, in a desperate attempt to find a bug. Iqbal meets his boyfriend Rajesh furtively, until one night when the latter disappears from a party. As Iqbal begins his desperate search for Rajesh, he is drawn into a world of underworld crime.
In the final story in the book, Subramanium tells Ranjit how he met and wooed his wife Shanti, and it is here that we get a closer glimpse of our narrator and the man who is the source of all the stories.
Intricate plots
Chandra’s strength lies in weaving plots and subplots together. The stories yield more stories. The protagonist’s life often finds an echo in that of another character. For instance, in Shakti, Sheila’s quest to climb the social ladder higher and higher alternates with the story of her maid Ganga. From Sheila’s relationship with her son and her concern when he falls in love with the least suitable person in the world we go to Ganga’s modest kholi in the slum which she is forced to sell to pay for her daughter Asha’s wedding. In Kama, the focus remains firmly on Sartaj, but as he takes more and more interest in the secret life of the murder victim, we too are drawn into the details.
Chandra’s background in film and scriptwriting (he co-wrote the screenplay for the Hindi movie Mission Kashmir) imparts to his fiction some of the elements of a potboiler. There’s plenty of suspense in these pages. Whose ghost haunts the bungalow in Khar? Will Sheila and her husband succeed in buying out the Boatwalla mansion? Who killed Chetanbhai Patel? Will Iqbal find Rajesh? Will Subramaniam marry Shanti?
The cinematic quality is evident in vivid scenes. One example is this scene in Artha that offers a glimpse of some of the changes coming over the city:
“So we had a sudden new crowd at the old bar. The balcony filled up with journos full of horrific election-time tales from the interior, and the younger Maruti 1000 kind of stockbrokers, and also a certain hotel-trainee group who always said. Hamara group has the most fun, man…”
In the same story the characters attend an “arty party” where the crowd is delightfully superficial and snobby. But elsewhere there’s a garage at the rear of a four-storied building in a lane near Bandra station, where lines of fresh clothes hanging from every balcony. Some of the characters live in chawls, while others seek adventure in dodgy boarding houses with dark rooms. This is Bombay in all its dimensions, often in the same story and at the very same time.
Driven by longing
The characters vary greatly too but what they all seem to have in common is their deep longing for something. The stories are driven by Jago Antia’s attempt to obliterate the past and his demons, by Sheila’s relentless pursuit of social approval, by Sartaj Singh’s longing for his ex-wife, and by Iqbal’s desperation to find Rajesh. And these are only the main characters. Several others come alive in these pages and together fill up the canvas representing an entire city. The most important character of all is Bombay itself.
Intricate plots and intense narrative tension are sometimes looked down upon by literary writers. But these stories are not merely page-turners. The quick pacing and series of intriguing events are punctured with remarkably quiet moments, revealing characters who are complex, self-reflexive and often tormented.
One such moment comes towards the end of Artha, where Iqbal and Sandhya pause their maniacal coding, unable to figure out what has caused the glitch. Iqbal says, “And then, suddenly, I was overcome by sadness. It came out of the endless azure sky and settled in my bones. I looked out at the yard, at its scattered pieces of paper, the two workers squatting against the wall with their bare knees shining, at the scattered bits of smoke around their heads, and I was hopeless.” It is such moments of haunting clarity that linger long after the stories end.
Amidst the whirlwind of murder investigations and police interrogations and frantic lovemaking between soon-to-be-exes, there is this moment in the middle of Kama, when the tough cop Sartaj sits quietly “in the loneliness of his flat. It was very dark, moonless, and the small space between the gleams on the furniture held him comfortably in its absolutely silence. He knew that if he disturbed nothing, not even the shadows on the floor, he could hold on to the madly delicate balance of peace that he had struggled himself into.”
It is impossible not to be aware of the passage of time and of how this “balance of peace” is constantly slipping away. The lives of these characters are full of action – clandestine affairs, business deals, terminal illness, brutal murders, porn, amputations, tragic accidents, weddings, divorces, torture, and so on. Through it all, perhaps there is one constant and common longing.
The characters, like the city they inhabit, are all seeking something, not just faith, love, wealth and strength, but perhaps, most of all, peace. They are all struggling, no matter how rich or beautiful or highly esteemed. They have all lost something, and even in their small, temporary victories, continue to lose. As Iqbal says in Artha, mothers are always teaching their children to endure. Iqbal finds himself wondering, “Endure. How much, for what?”
The title of the final story suggests that perhaps peace is a possibility after all. By the end of the book, there is a sense that some kind of shanti will prevail, that despite all the travails that threaten it, Bombay itself will endure.
Oindrila Mukherjee is a writer and an Assistant Professor at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. You can follow her on Twitter at @oinkness.