In the middle of CP Surendran’s Hadal, the antagonist Honey Kumar, an utterly vile and undeniably un-sweet police officer in charge of the security detail of a visiting Maldives President meets with the owner of a toddy shop cum ‘library and cultural center’ in Kerala who claims to have a 107 year old great-grandfather. Within minutes of meeting, Kumar decides to present the old man as an acquaintance of the President’s ancestors. The old man is an actor, so it is easy to convince him for one last act. Things do not go according to plan. The old actor flubs his lines and reveals that he is a fraud. However, this changes nothing because the President is not really the President but a body-double. He takes off his clothes and disappears into a landscape of whirling wind turbines, like a character vanishing into a wet painting.
This is how whimsical Hadal is, and there is a lot of it. Take for example the hotel receptionist who is a connoisseur of African masks and Marquez, a businessman who dies mid-coitus, or Honey Kumar’s mother who is killed by a falling coconut (probably the most memorable incident in the novel — ‘…when a great coconut from the vanquished tree plummeted through the flashing space in a dead drop and fell on her head crowned with triumphant thoughts of gender justice’). Honey Kumar himself is of mixed race — ‘The broad-ridged Dravidian nose. The Chinese cheekbones. The long Arab chin’ — a patient of chronic colds and a victim of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of his school teacher.
At the center of the novel is Miriam, an aspiring writer who comes to India and lives in ‘the violet violence of the Kerala vegetation’ to escape a dead job and an alcoholic husband in Maldives and to write her first novel. Once in Kerala she rekindles an old love affair with Paul Roy, a rocket scientist with ISRO. Honey Kumar (‘stereophonic masticator’ and consumer of copious amounts of cough syrup), transferred to the Kerala Passport Office for being involved in a medical examination scam in New Delhi tries to exchange her visa extension with sexual favours. When she rejects his overtures, Kumar goes into revenge mode and implicates her and her lover in a fake espionage scam. What follows is hadal, or deep waters in which all the main characters and a number of secondary characters slowly sink.
In a story of sex, rockets and suspicion, the main player is fate, or rather, detachment. There is Haws, an American activist who tries to instigate a popular uprising in Rockport, a small Kerala town but is ultimately disillusioned by the apathy of the villagers and goes underground. He manages to escape police authorities but later, while taking a bath in a lake, fails to gauge the depth of the water and drowns. His death is painted as a tragedy, a tragedy of a fool but a tragedy nevertheless, but it is entirely unconvincing and evokes nothing. The characters who survive the novel do so by simply walking away from the action, whether it is the President’s unnamed double or Honey Kumar’s boss Ram Mohan or even Miriam, who in the decent last chapter of the novel cycles from the prison, hops on a plane, grabs a taxi, reaches her home in Male and pens the first lines of her novel — all in an interrupted long take that is equal parts cinematic and equal parts baffling. Even Honey Kumar, for all his devilishness, manages to walk out of the novel with only as much to lose as in the beginning of the novel because he simply stops caring.
That is probably the problem with Hadal — it presents eccentric characters and interesting situations but is so busy with expositions that it doesn’t have the time or the space to flesh out either.
Spurious characters and events are aplenty, with entire chapters devoted to them so that we do not really know what Honey Kumar sounds like until on page 93 — ‘his own voice, a deep, gruff one with a bit of petulance woven into it.’ Similarly, Honey Kumar’s meeting with his childhood tormentor, Father Almeida, or a description of the death of Miriam’s parents and sister in a cyclone are incidents which have gravitas but very little bearing on the central plot of the novel. To modify the famous quote from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, ‘For a moment, nothing of consequence happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing of consequence continued to happen’ in Hadal.
The same is the case with the places in the novel. Male, Jor Bagh, Old Delhi, Rockport and Trivandrum are named and abandoned so that finally turn out to be empty locales rather than players in the novel. All the exposition also means that there is a very limited scope for dialogue, so much so that that all the characters seem surprisingly taciturn. The central exchange in the novel where Honey Kumar demands sex in exchange for a visa extension should have been chilling and dramatic, but it turns out to be laughably drab and boring, filled as it is with queasy references to orgasms — ‘The squirt orgasm is different’, Honey Kumar continued. ‘This is because the crucial play area is not the clitoris, but the G-spot. You know about the G-spot, of course.’
Towards the close of the novel when Miriam mentions the draft of her novel to Ram Mohan, he reflects on current reading habits, ‘…they buy only lists now, ten fastest, eight most successful, twelve best… they read only lists of superlatives now.’ The bit about superlatives could easily apply to Hadal.
The reviewer is a Research Scholar, Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia