What a delightful, delightful novel! It has been repeatedly affirmed that blurbs tell nothing about a book. They are either so vague that they could apply to any work (sometimes, any work in any genre) or so hyperbolical as to cause mild amusement. The wonderful Ursula K le Guin’s blurb to Anil Menon’s Half of What I Say is, as expected, generic (she calls it an ‘intricate, brilliantly written novel’) but rather modest. What Anil Menon has built here is a masterpiece of plot structure. The language and style, though beautiful in their own right, sit back whenever storytelling changes gears. At one point in the novel, a character says about another — Durga was a much better storyteller than a writer. It is difficult to suppress a smile while reading this line.
The story begins with a speech by Durga Dhasal, a revolutionary mathematician and filmmaker who is murdered shortly after delivering the speech and sets the events in the novel in motion. Keeping this pivotal character in the centre, the novel moves backwards and forwards in time, drawing out the repercussions his death has on a number of people who are tied to him and each other in various permutations and combinations. There’s Anand Dikshit, a hotshot businessman with a closeted lesbian wife trying to make a business deal with Eshwar Pillai, a game developer and entrepreneur whose ambition is to bring an affordable internet to all Indians. There’s Anand’s sister-in-law Kannagi, a reluctant leftist professor of mathematics who makes kolams out of algorithms and is an ex-student of Dhasal. There’s Vyas, a writer and police officer whose book Durga has read and which shares the same title as one of the good professor’s movies. There is Saya, a movie actress who has acted in the Durga Dhasal movie and has also rented out her house to him. On paper, so many connections seem to imply a royal mess. Trying to map the characters leads to a spider-web-like mesh: Similar to Kannagi’s kolams and Pillai’s massive web network. However, Menon ties all the ends together and so masterfully that it all makes sense.
In the centre of all these characters and events is lokshakti, an unholy union of an ombudsman and a right wing pseudo-political party that wreaks havoc whenever it moves and destroys whoever it touches. In the lokshakti, Menon creates a truly great villainous organisation, as pervious as Big Brother and as threatening as the Galactic Empire. Unlike both, it has no central command, nor is it built around a central ideology, thus allowing it to mould itself to situations as and when required. It paints itself as patriotic and benign, almost fatherly, but is so above bureaucracy and manipulation as to prove almost Godlike. This also means that it can attack anyone with complete impunity, as the characters belonging to the elite class woefully realise.
The India in the novel is very much like our own, with familiar people and places — Delhi is mapped out wonderfully in Kannagi’s travels by the metro and Saya signs a movie where her co-stars include Shah Rukh Khan, Hrithik Roshan and believe it or not, Rajpal Yadav! King Khan even makes a delightful cameo. However, the lokshakti proves that the India in the novel also exists on a totally different plane with stormtrooper-like soldiers and secret lairs in the Thar desert.
More than anything else, this is a fun novel. The humour is inventive, raucous, silly, sexy and explicit and interspersed with wisdom and myth-making. The characters themselves are broad caricatures. From cigar chomping lechers to deluded silver screen sirens to a tough cop who is also a tender hearted family guy, the novel is filled with stock 60s’ era film characters. However, there is an underlying smartness which strikes the mind like a flint and lights up the pages. These bursts of wit and humour are so frequent that there is either a witticism or a lewd joke or an acute observation every alternate line. Just sample this example where Kannagi, the reluctant revolutionary first meets the lokshakti: “She’d expected a Hindutva-type outfit. She had expected saffron and kurtas… this was far smarter. The lokshakti had weaponised the Humanities”.
Or the scatological mirth in Saya’s treatment of her assistant Bindu: “Saya wanted rain, an impossibility at this time of the year, and Bilkis wondered if Bindu would be ordered to squat over Mumbai and spray”.
More importantly, this is a novel for our times. It is a fun mixture of nostalgia and millennial cool. And it’s even better when these polar opposites are paired with one another. So we have the maudlin, conceited diva Saya pitted against a reticent, tough and uncompromising police officer Bilkis. Against the fatherly Anand Dixit who doesn’t even know what a broadband connection is, we have the millionaire playboy game developer Pillai. And when Pillai leads Anand into his bachelor pad where nubile employees don bikinis and jump into his private pool, the cliché doesn’t really seem out of place.
However, the trite characterisation of the novel doesn’t really matter in the end. This novel is so beautifully structured that one might get fooled into believing that this is an uncertain world where anything might happen. Indeed, when the crisis does occur, it isn’t because of the hubris of the big sharks but due to a fringe character who is so inconsequential that she hardly seems to matter. This is when the powerful structuring of the novel reveals its full potential. If one retroactively mulls over the character in question, it appears as if every other character has the same function: To link oneself and everyone else into the web of the plot. In such an intricate structure, each character has the potential to disturb the equilibrium, to render the perfect symmetry chaotic. Menon picks one suicide bomber and picks wisely.
The reviewer is a Research Scholar, Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia