At first sight, what absolutely fascinated me about Kaushik Barua’s No Direction Rome was a tastefully conceptualised and designed book cover – understated, subtle, symbolic and stylish. Sombre and dark, it embraced a patina of lost time. Little did I know that this beautiful cover housed a carefully crafted plotless narrative of love, loss, longing and life, enmeshed in the ageless chaos of time – almost as a curse on our incidental birth. What began as a reading meant to satiate my thirst for good literature ended up as food for thought for many days to come.
While undertaking the journey with the protagonist, Krantik, No Direction Rome reminds one of Amit Chaudhuri’s Ananda in Odyssesus Abroad. Undertaking a plotless rumination on an expatriate experience – dealing with questions of identity, meandering in the ennui of a modernist creation – they are similar but not congruent.
Chaudhuri’s Ananda is different from Barua’s Krantik in the sense that Ananda has a vision for his redemption – he craves for an idyllic situation in life, seeped in nostalgia and family camaraderie. Barua’s Krantik, on the other hand, rebels (kranti) without reason, asks directions to fancy places without any intention of a visit.
Krantik hates his job, imagines he has a severe medical condition, attempts to love out of boredom, destroys every shred of stability that his life seems to offer him and embraces a condition where he is forever hanging on with a deeply vacant, grim and glum mindspace. However seedy the narrative appears, Barua’s mastery of an exquisite prose, cultured in the inconsequential details of everydayness, architectured by the banality of ambitions, introduces a beautifully and artfully crafted piece.
All the while, a causal hangover and/or a “high” from this borrowed experience from Krantik belies the intense interiority of the protagonist’s mindspace. In fact, the long drawn, sleepy description that Barua sketches while narrating Krantik’s scatological fascination of observing his shit-pot and imagining the crimson of blood painting this scene for him, the writer touches something very deep in a very profound yet offhand way – that which is the running ‘theme’ in the novel.
Going somewhere while going nowhere
The purposelessness of this “Facebook generation”, as Barua prefers to call this frenzied madness, is a subject of intense introspection in No Direction Rome. There is scatology, invective, violence, love, sex, boredom, romance, weed, alcohol. There is life, meaninglessness, repetition, circularity – all making a heady cocktail of something which cannot be missed. It is right there staring at our faces – something that all of us have faced at some point in time or the other. This book offers that which is real, in the most unquestioning yet unbelieving of ways.
Cocooned in the comforting capsules of our timelines, tweeting and dubsmashing fragments of our lives – moments, thoughts, feelings – this book is a quiet refuge for us, “this generation”. One can identify with the pictures of that lady with Somalian kids, inviting the observer into her intimate world. At the same time it also acts like the other lady in the book who slashes her wrists and never lets anyone in beyond physical penetration – the unreconciled dualism of human experiences. One can identify with Krantik, who meets Pooja, cannot muster up the courage to say no to her, but finds release and mystery in Chiara – the unresolved binaries of a singular identity.
This generation which is the raison d’etre for Kaushik’s creation, has nothing to grasp and clasp – no ground, not twig. It is a generation lost in the ever dynamic whirlpool of transition and change, bereft of an ideal to decide, whether “to be or not to be”. This is a book which while dealing with existential questions of this generation, generates a steep flip in readers’ consciousness. It is similar to the rise or the fall of a trip the reader undertakes – curled within a smoked-up journey with Krantik, in the alleys of a directionless Rome.
Consuming the reader without a plot
It is remarkable how despite the seeming half incompleteness of the directionless plot, Barua manages to keep the scattered narrative tightly snug and “held up” in peculiar ways. The uselessness of everyday existence and its repetition like Sisyphus, the purposelessness behind a full knowledge that “nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes”, like in Waiting for Godot, keeps a consistent hold over the narrative.
It is, as if by embracing the essence of postmodernism, Barua rejects the very idea of postmodernity in a strange structural symmetry. While merging the twin demands of form and formlessness of style, he audaciously challenges the discussed and the accepted “norms” of a postmodern craft.
The book is a self-conscious narrative struggling to remain unexposed behind a plotless plot. By a seemingly maverick rumination on issues so disjointed yet connected, Barua tickles the faculty of imagination, perception, appreciation and analyses, establishing a “method to the madness”. Its effect is so deep yet unnoticed that all through this fascinating trip, the reader feels consumed with sensations of an artfully articulated cursive craft.
It is this daring experiment that makes Barua noticed among the many writers who slip in and out of today’s literary limelight. No Direction Rome is Kaushik Barua’s second book. Markedly different from his debutant novel, Windhorse, which fetched him the Sahitya Akademi award, this book adds another dimension of discussion on “ways of seeing” the world. While Windhorse was about research and analyses, No Direction Rome is about feeling and becoming.
No Direction Rome by Kaushik Barua, HarperCollins India.
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While undertaking the journey with the protagonist, Krantik, No Direction Rome reminds one of Amit Chaudhuri’s Ananda in Odyssesus Abroad. Undertaking a plotless rumination on an expatriate experience – dealing with questions of identity, meandering in the ennui of a modernist creation – they are similar but not congruent.
Chaudhuri’s Ananda is different from Barua’s Krantik in the sense that Ananda has a vision for his redemption – he craves for an idyllic situation in life, seeped in nostalgia and family camaraderie. Barua’s Krantik, on the other hand, rebels (kranti) without reason, asks directions to fancy places without any intention of a visit.
Krantik hates his job, imagines he has a severe medical condition, attempts to love out of boredom, destroys every shred of stability that his life seems to offer him and embraces a condition where he is forever hanging on with a deeply vacant, grim and glum mindspace. However seedy the narrative appears, Barua’s mastery of an exquisite prose, cultured in the inconsequential details of everydayness, architectured by the banality of ambitions, introduces a beautifully and artfully crafted piece.
All the while, a causal hangover and/or a “high” from this borrowed experience from Krantik belies the intense interiority of the protagonist’s mindspace. In fact, the long drawn, sleepy description that Barua sketches while narrating Krantik’s scatological fascination of observing his shit-pot and imagining the crimson of blood painting this scene for him, the writer touches something very deep in a very profound yet offhand way – that which is the running ‘theme’ in the novel.
Going somewhere while going nowhere
The purposelessness of this “Facebook generation”, as Barua prefers to call this frenzied madness, is a subject of intense introspection in No Direction Rome. There is scatology, invective, violence, love, sex, boredom, romance, weed, alcohol. There is life, meaninglessness, repetition, circularity – all making a heady cocktail of something which cannot be missed. It is right there staring at our faces – something that all of us have faced at some point in time or the other. This book offers that which is real, in the most unquestioning yet unbelieving of ways.
Cocooned in the comforting capsules of our timelines, tweeting and dubsmashing fragments of our lives – moments, thoughts, feelings – this book is a quiet refuge for us, “this generation”. One can identify with the pictures of that lady with Somalian kids, inviting the observer into her intimate world. At the same time it also acts like the other lady in the book who slashes her wrists and never lets anyone in beyond physical penetration – the unreconciled dualism of human experiences. One can identify with Krantik, who meets Pooja, cannot muster up the courage to say no to her, but finds release and mystery in Chiara – the unresolved binaries of a singular identity.
This generation which is the raison d’etre for Kaushik’s creation, has nothing to grasp and clasp – no ground, not twig. It is a generation lost in the ever dynamic whirlpool of transition and change, bereft of an ideal to decide, whether “to be or not to be”. This is a book which while dealing with existential questions of this generation, generates a steep flip in readers’ consciousness. It is similar to the rise or the fall of a trip the reader undertakes – curled within a smoked-up journey with Krantik, in the alleys of a directionless Rome.
Consuming the reader without a plot
It is remarkable how despite the seeming half incompleteness of the directionless plot, Barua manages to keep the scattered narrative tightly snug and “held up” in peculiar ways. The uselessness of everyday existence and its repetition like Sisyphus, the purposelessness behind a full knowledge that “nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes”, like in Waiting for Godot, keeps a consistent hold over the narrative.
It is, as if by embracing the essence of postmodernism, Barua rejects the very idea of postmodernity in a strange structural symmetry. While merging the twin demands of form and formlessness of style, he audaciously challenges the discussed and the accepted “norms” of a postmodern craft.
The book is a self-conscious narrative struggling to remain unexposed behind a plotless plot. By a seemingly maverick rumination on issues so disjointed yet connected, Barua tickles the faculty of imagination, perception, appreciation and analyses, establishing a “method to the madness”. Its effect is so deep yet unnoticed that all through this fascinating trip, the reader feels consumed with sensations of an artfully articulated cursive craft.
It is this daring experiment that makes Barua noticed among the many writers who slip in and out of today’s literary limelight. No Direction Rome is Kaushik Barua’s second book. Markedly different from his debutant novel, Windhorse, which fetched him the Sahitya Akademi award, this book adds another dimension of discussion on “ways of seeing” the world. While Windhorse was about research and analyses, No Direction Rome is about feeling and becoming.
No Direction Rome by Kaushik Barua, HarperCollins India.
