Intense Journey into inner self


A middle-aged man, man who turned 40 at the turn of the century leaves his home in a sleeping city and takes a taxi to the railway station. Nothing remarkable in that, you may think, and in a sense you are right. It is an unremarkable act and Aftab Chandra is, in many ways, an unremarkable man. Yet, the act of catching the train is, for him, momentous, a break with life as he has known and lived it and first step towards recapturing his inner self.

The life Aftab has lived, despite his age, has always felt like somebody else’s. His spouse had been chosen for him by his family; his job was a safe option chosen out of fear and laziness. Aftab’s life has been a series of compromises embraced with reluctant arms. And, like most compromises, it is deeply unsatisfying.

Aftab is a man in middle-age crisis although even that is not of his own making. In keeping with the rest of his life, Aftab’s hand has been forced. His wife has left him and taken their son with her. Worse, she left for his closest friend, Rajiv.

But pain is a mighty catalyst and although, at first, Aftab sits in his office numbed and inactive, his hand is eventually forced. His work life has become unacceptable and his family life has been stolen away by his best friend. So early one morning in Delhi, he takes a taxi to the railway station and starts a journey that leads him both to view the events of his life and to make his way back towards Rohini, his first and most enduring love.

Aftab’s is a journey of the mind, a search for salvation and a reluctant hero’s return home. The book is divided into sections following the stops the train makes at the main stations en route to Dehradun, the scene of his childhood. Each section/station is a further opportunity for reflection and exploration, for taking stock, for reviewing the past and speculating, somewhat timorously, about the future.

We Weren’t Lovers Like That is, as befits its protagonist, a quiet, meditative, thoughtful book. It lacks drama, in one sense, if by drama you mean strong reactions to external events. When Mina tells Aftab that she is leaving him for Rajiv, he makes almost no show of his feelings:” I nodded. My lower lip was trembling, I realised. I rested my elbow on the table and cupped my chin in my hand. Something was scalding my eyes.”

In Navtej Sarna’s skilled hands, the effect of such understatement is both intense and moving. Aftab may suffer in silence, but he certainly suffers.

Yet for all his sensitivity and, at times, inertia, Aftab is no drip, no loser. Caught up, against his will, in the harsh world of office politics, he discovers in reaction to his boss, Basu, that he does have principles and is prepared to suffer for them.

Basu is a revolting creature, a modern age man with his Mont Blanc pen and his mistress, who shamelessly manipulates and humiliates in an attempt to enhance his own standing in the firm. In one of the book’s more memorable scenes, he sets up a meeting which results in the dismissal of the company’s secretaries.

“Why do we need secretaries?” he asks. “For making our coffee? People must be laughing at us. What are we? Some sort of antediluvian brown sahibs? We have to decide whether we are going to be a profit making competitive firm or whether we are going to become a government department.”

To set an example, Basu fires his secretary and the others follow suit. When joy, Aftab’s secretary, is invited to leave, it is the trigger that sets Aftab free.

“You can spend a lifetime being comatose, a sheet pulled over your head, surviving merely by moving to the side of the road, to the spot of least resistance, and staying there, face turned away, and hating yourself for it. Years pass and you think you are used to it, even the self-hatred ceases to matter. And then one day, the light changes, the breeze shifts a little and something that is perhaps of the least significance to you makes you turn around and walk into the middle of the road-to halt the juggernaut or be killed. Only in retrospect will you see all your life condensed in that single moment.”

For Aftab, the moment arrives and he catches the train in Delhi. He resignes from his job, takes leave of his wife and starts his journey back to Rohini, the love he ditched because his family said she was not of a suitable caste. He has some cause for hope from the e-mail correspondence between them. But his journey to meet her is a voyage of faith; nothing has been explicitly written and there is always the risk that what he discovers will not be what he remembers.

I enjoyed We Weren’t Lover Like That. Aftab is, I think, a very human and recognizable figure. There may at first be little in him to admire, but as the book develops it is impossible not a feel respect for this hesitant protagonist whom Navtej Sarna described in an interview as “a man who has the courage, despite his obvious weaknesses, to face his own reality without flinching. His life in shambles, he can pick out his long-held guilt and recognize it… He has to simply state his own terms.”

But I have one small bone to pick with the author. The book’s title is a line from a Leonard Cohen song, Sisters of Mercy, But nowhere at all is this acknowledged. Aftab’s fate is left ambiguous at the end, an ambiguity that is partly resolved, if you know the next line of the song. “We weren’t lover like that…” sang Cohen, “and besides, it would still be alright.”