Between Memory and Desire -K. Satchidanandan

Navtej Sarna’s debut novel is a minor masterpiece of lyrical, romantic fiction.   Narrated in the form of a series of reveries during a train journey from Delhi to Dehradun, the story embodies a rather desperate act of retrospection coloured by some introspection.  Aftab, the pensive, middle-aged protagonist on his way to Dehradun in the hope of meeting his old beloved Rohini, is seldom self-critical.  This is especially true of his reflections on why his wife, Mina, finally left him to marry her old friend Rajiv.  He cannot identify any shortcomings in himself that might have driven Mina to Rajiv.   He concludes, rather, that Rajiv had a better presence and was better in bed.  There is a touch of narcissism in Aftab, coloured by nostalgia for days of passion spent in Bombay with his ‘Ro’, whom he did not marry because his father had found her family wanting.  She had then married Gautam, a busy young NRI careerist in the US.  She left him without remorse, for she had other ideas of wedded life.

I don’t think a serious writer in an Indian language would ever dare to pick such a theme for a novel, for fear of being dubbed ordinary, romantic and downright sentimental, worthy only of those popular magazines that serialize triangular love stories or television soap operas that trivialise human life.  Navtej Sarna, however, has not only dared to handle the theme but has even turned his first novel into a success, thanks to his linguistic skill and polished style, an unerring eye for detail and rather subdued handling of situations.  He avoids sensationalism while retaining the emotional quality of his tale.

The novel is unpretentious and the whole narrative rises above the protagonist’s own rather prejudiced and self-laudatory view of things because of its sincerity, its undercurrent of sustained emotions and a dreamy quality that comes from its lyrical, evocative idiom.   Sarna’s prose can cleverly conjure up urban landscapes and encounters with love and death.

Regarded objectively, Mina and Rohini are both independent women, asserting themselves in difficult situations and getting out of suffocating relationships without self-pity.  They perform their turbulent acts calmly.  Come to think of it, so does the angst-ridden hero when he quits his job and embarks on his journey of dreamy anticipation and uncertain fulfillment.  The author does not valorize the protagonist’s perspective: the reader is free- and is even invited – to be critical of his morbid self-love, his cowardice before his father and his wife, his insistent refusal to open up except to himself in his moods of contemplative introspection.   Aftab seems to enjoy his solitude and nurses his wounds with masochistic   pleasure.

The reality of the city, mostly described from the perspective of a satisfied resident (thus avoiding engagement with its traumas and frustrations), bursts upon us at least once: When Rohini encounters a death – an apparent death – on the streets of Bombay.   The perception is soon personalized; the girl recalls seeing her mother’s dead body when a child of ten.  Since then, she has feared the dead.  The hidden terror of the claustropohobic city haunted by poverty, helplessness and death comes alive in this episode.

There are meditative passages of poetic charm, too:

“One after another, beautiful fragrant beginnings go sour, turn ugly and die.  And then there is nothing much left to do but consign all that is left to flames.  Let the incandescent indiscriminating heat turn to dust what was sick and what was still alive, what was right and what was wrong.  Then the dust of the past, the little shrapnel of bones that have proved too resistant, the remains of memories and emotions and promises can all be packed up in a bag and emptied into some sacred river of flowing time that carries away days and nights, months and years, birthdays and anniversaries”.

Passages like this reveal a potential far beyond what the author has accomplished here, a capacity for deeper and more complex contemplation of human relationships, of love, hate, sin and death that characterizes the greater novelists of every literary tradition.