A journey into the past - Karishma Attari

If you’re going to take a sentimental journey, then you can’t do much better than We Weren’t Lovers Like that.This remarkably nostalgic first novel runs its course sedately, following the train tracks of memory and longing across a swiftly evocative mindscape.  Beginning at the end like a novel of quest and ending at the beginning like a true romance, We Weren’t… for all its elaborate metaphor of a longitudinal train journey keeps the reader riveted within an ever brightening circle of reminisce.

 The hero of the tale-and one mustn’t be taken in by the amply declared ordinariness of his world and actions – is Aftab Chandra, male, 41 years old and in the process when the novel opens, of running away.  His wife has left him for another man and taken with her their only child.   Confronting   the occasion Aftab, at first with limp compliance and then with anger, decides not to pick up the pieces and chooses instead to head for the hills.  Except, of course, he takes everything with him.

What follows is a train trip, heading from Delhi to Dehradun, running parallel to both the past and the present.  We view the objective in all its miniature detail: the sights and sounds and smells, even   the touch and texture of things are spread out in lavish detail, from platforms to a plate of soggy breakfast served mid-journey. As the train approaches yet another stop the images arrive, seemingly unbidden:

“Yellow houses. Squat, tired yellow houses. At the far edge of Saharanpur, at the fringe of the railway colony, where the mango trees meet the sugarcane fields”.

But for the most the observations merge seamlessly with the observer. Aftab leaves a deserted Delhi behind with mingled joy and regret:

“These streets have grown with me. From cycle lanes they have become two, then four, some eight lanes, while I have lost my hair, changed my spectacles many times and gained several pounds around the waist”.

 For all the novel’s tribute to the Indian English fiction tradition of minute detailing, it is the subjective landscape that reveals the poet-author in his true colours.  For the succession of ghostly familiars that troop out before the dozing  Aftab and take their places in the scene, are keenly realized.

Author Navtej Sarna’s touch is tender but sure when it comes to characters.  There is the dejected salesman from an aerobically inclined past “an intellectual, I thought, in the wrong job” who still manages to make his sale. The present traveling companion Vijay Singh who arrives in uniform as security officer of the London Underground, and goes on to marry off two daughters in a month. There is the remembrance of Joy from the office, who struggles as valiantly against age, circumstance and drabness, as Aftab resignedly drifts with the flow of them.

The league of ordinary kind people is never really formed however, and that is part of the overriding despair that inundates sections of the novel.  When Joy decides to let Aftab in on the grapevine he feels a surge of friendship, that electrifies his thoughts “ I wanted to tell her:

‘Go on Joy, I know it is only loyalty, the kind of loyalty that one has  towards a dog or a cat.  I know it is not love and don’t think I am going to misunderstand anything.’ And he asks instead as she turns to him in confidence ‘Do we need to shut the door?'

The shutting of doors does in a sense resound through this quietly meditative novel, for each remembrance of times past is accompanied by regret for a lost potentiality.  Rohini writes, “Spring came early that year, and the sun was brighter, it was like an omen… and I yearned to go back home.”  We Weren’t… becomes a novel of homecoming. The soul lightens as it reaches backwards, through marriage and misunderstandings, till the years strip away inexorably to reveal a pathway to something resembling salvation.

The poignancy, on which the novel turns, a slow roast on the spit, can get overwhelming:

“The loneliness of the long distance runner, stepping blithely and lightly through open vistas… is nothing compared to the loneliness of a diabetic on a treadmill”.

And even though the novel never ventures close to the maudlin, there are passages that seem a little too drenched in defeat and monsoon metaphors. The novel appears to make an art out of finely and variously defined points of regret, typical among them:

“Sixteen years ago, I set myself up for all this: disaffection, defeat, this strange defiance against their world and my life.  It could so easily have been otherwise”.

Saturated as it is with the weight of so much realized disappointment and unrealized potential, the novel has at times, a precariously maintained balance. The central consciousness enlarges with ease to accommodate another voice, but the recurring lines such as “I wonder what the rain has meant to you all these years… have you thought of anything at all as the clouds gathered and the day darkened all of a sudden under the thick trees in your garden?”   seem to belong more to stylized poetry than a composite novel.  The tempo, often punctuated brilliantly by the motions of a train journey, lets up disappointingly at times and towards the end becomes slow and meandering where the beginning was brisk, and controlled.

There is little danger however of We Weren’t… passing through one’s hands without it being a memorable read, for its pocket-book existentialist, cyberphobic, Prufrock-like hero, for all that he wears his trousers rolled, is irrepressible.   A comic satirist in his own right he mocks with middle class glee, the glint of a Mont Blanc pen in a business suit, Flipping Duck cocktails and elegant silver cases for cigarettes.  And remains heroically impervious to corporate Iyengar Yoga, viewing even the brash Indianised statements of khadi kurtas and raw leather chappals at a party as the trademarks “ of the tribe”.

Perhaps even more insidious, Aftab’s memories shimmer before one’s eyes long after the chapter is turned.  The comic-tragic existence at Sunshine Terrace, the failed but industriously applied for civil service exams, the first meeting with a potential wife, even the remembered formula of dacoits attacking a train and surrendering to an honest police officer, from an old B grade movie. Narrated with a mixture of wistful reminiscence and regretted impotence, they inform the figure of Aftab in a train, and gain something with the implicit promise that this journey, unlike others he has taken, is going to end conclusively.

The title, which reminds one of the refrains from The Sisters Of Mercy by Leonard Cohen, echoes hauntingly through the novel.  The poem ends with “And it won’t make me jealous if I learn that they’ve sweetened your night. We weren’t lovers like that, and besides it would still be alright. We Weren’t Lovers Like That, and besides it would still be alright.” 

And the novel establishes something quite similar, taken in its entirety, a kind of willful lack of determination in a world where relationships and things seem all too determinate.  For all its nostalgia, it is not a novel of apology for times past as much as an affirmation that living and loving differently requires quite an ordinary sort of guy.