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Journalism of Courage
We last met Sophie Das as a child in Shillong on the pages of Anjum Hasans debut novel Lunatic in My Head,embellishing her world with lies because the truth was often so shabby and unconvincing. She is a 25-year-old woman now,living alone in Bangalore,a BPO employee who subtitles soundtracks of Hollywood movies for DVDs. Reality still remains a problem for Sophie. She hasnt been entirely truthful to her parents who believe she works as an editor of childrens books. Her run-ins with the landlord; a boyfriend who has talked himself into the EMI cycle and deadening work chafe at her peace. Once she woke up,everything narrowed down. Everything was degrees of pettiness.
What Sophie misses most about home is Beauty waking up early on a winter morning,and watching through the frost on the windows two boys in jackets and an occasional taxi rolling out through the morning mist … till the light slowly changed and sunlight transformed the air of ancient sadness that hung over the scene. In Bangalore,she finds only a zest for ugliness; on its roads she is struck by a crippling fear of being over-run by murderous traffic. The profusion of exotic things in malls only paralyses her with sadness. She looks at the gleaming warrens of the city and says: Not this.
Neti,Neti concerns itself with a swathe of experience that millions of young urban Indians undergo: the journey out from the cocoon of a small-town home to the fast lanes of a city for work,money and liberty. But how does one love a city,its chilling impersonality? How does one find meaning in its enormous machinery? Hasans first novel illuminated the inner lives of her characters as they came to grips with the disappointments of life in slow-moving Shillong. In her second novel,she opts for a straighter,faster narrative,driven by the energy of the urban life she depicts. The language is less lyrical than her first novels,though perfectly capable of mirroring the many revelatory moments in Sophies journey.
Hasan is an assured writer,excellent at teasing out the comedy and despair in the lives of imperfect,confused characters and their muddled rebellions. Her portrait of a middle-class Kannadiga neighbourhood is shot with gentle irony. Bangalore comes to life in its many layers and by-lanes. If anything,one can fault her for being too realistic. She lingers too long on road rage and the traffic that claws at peoples sanity. There is heavy-handed symbolism in her depictions of consumerism and the nouveau riche: a child falling to his death inside a mall and desolate flats crowded with expensive bric-a-brac. The episode involving godman Baba Sampige doesnt work and Sophies friends are not forceful characters either.
The strength of the novel is Sophie,a seeker of signs,a woman who measures her choices against the three books that have shored up her life Swami and Friends,Vivekananda: Awakener of Modern India and Madame Bovary and the talisman of hope that is Shillong,home. This is a story of her disillusionment,the tiny shocks that awaken her to the shrunk margins of life. She has looked the home and the world in the eye and said,Not this,not this, and she realises,She was alone from now on. She was her own context. This is a novel that will speak to a generation.
