A Plague on Both Your Houses

The life of Ratan Oak,or more accurately the nine days in his life beginning December 6,1992,makes up the sum and substance of The Quarantine Papers....

The life of Ratan Oak,or more accurately the nine days in his life beginning December 6,1992,makes up the sum and substance of The Quarantine Papers. On the day a fanatic Hindu mob brought down a centuries-old mosque,its sanguinary aftermath fracturing the countrys polity and society,Oak,a freelance microbiologist,begins his own fractured existence,a dislocative trance that makes him privy to secrets spanning three generations.

As Oaks present-day persona navigates the death and destruction of a riotous,post-Babri Bombay,attending to the living as well as cutting up its dead in the stillness of autopsy chambers,his other self in the person of his grandfather Ramratan Oak gets embroiled in a mystery surrounding a plague outbreak in a communally volatile 19th century Bombay. As Ratan is to discover,a century might have lapsed,but the language of hatred remains surprisingly familiar,its pain as wincing,and its wounds as jagged and repulsive as ever.

As practising surgeons,Kalpish Ratna the anonym for the writer duo Ishrat Syed and Kalpana Swaminathan are well-equipped with a rich compendium of images and metaphors to describe the anarchy swirling by. So rash,exanthema,fever and contagion abound (along with thicker passages of arcane medical jargon) to sound that note of discord that says all is not well,to convey a sense of alarm. The tribulations of a plague-hit population being quarantined,segregated,ghettoised,serve as the perfect metaphor for other kinds of divisiveness that can throw life asunder. Be it Albert Camus Nazi-occupied France or our very own Bombay,such contagion can only destroy,its macabre finale quite like Pieter Bruegel the Elders The Triumph of Death that Syed has chosen as the books cover.

Story continues below this ad

The writers weave several historical threads into the central narrative,the depiction of British imperialism and incipient nationalism providing the contextual anchor to the plot. The carefully chosen quartet of friends Oak,Surveyor,Ahmed and Kipling (John Lockwood,not Rudyard) represent the four prominent religious denominations; even so,in their interactions with the coloniser,they learn to circumscribe any passionate,forthright outburst of honest fellow feeling for instance,Ramratan Oak sits through Alice Kiplings reading of The White Mans Burden.

To maintain a racy thrill,the narrative needs to be taut. Elmore Leonard,while laying down certain cardinal rules for writing in 10 Rules of Writing,advises aspiring writers to try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. The books jacket says that this is the first of the Ratan/Ramratan Oak novels. A little less flaccidity and the series should be worth watching out for.