Of No Fixed Address

The city,not home,is at the heart of a new sensibility in fiction

Masterji,why do you want to stay in a building that is falling down? It is a home where the ceiling blossoms with water stains,and taps sputter into reluctant,muddy trickles. But Yogesh Murthy,the protagonist of Aravind Adigas Last Man in Tower,hoards the memories of his dead wife and daughter in its bare cupboards,and chooses them over builder Dharmen Shahs generous offer of redevelopment: Rs 19,000 per square foot for the mildewed,rotting flats of Vishram Society. His home and society add up to something more: Just as when a drop of formaldehyde falls on a dead leaf in a science class,revealing a secret life of veins,Vishram throbbed with occult networks. It was pregnant with his past.

Flipping through the pages of Indian fiction in English over the years,one stops often at houses: rooms clogged with the collected detritus of years,or filled with the warmth of laughter and Kuku couplets; or kitchens clanging with unspoken anger. Here are Bim and Tara,hesitantly watching each other in the house of their childhood,a refuge on some days,and a prison on the others (Anita Desais Clear Light of Day); and there is V.S. Naipauls Mr Mohun Biswas in the tragic and thwarted search for a house of his own. And Jaya Kulkarni,slowly clawing out of the stagnation of being Mohan’s wife in Shashi Deshpandes That Long Silence. In several novels,the home,and by extension the web of family and relationships,not just described characters,but defined them. It was often the moral theatre in which they were tested,which circumscribed them,but where they had to grope for meaning and sense of their lives. Equally,in several others,the Family Saga tipped unarguably over into the exotic caricature loved by the West stories of conflicted generations and lonely afternoons in large mansions surrounded by mango orchards.

But is there a change of scenery in current English fiction? A fatigue with brooding inner courtyards,and stifled domestic lives? Amitav Ghosh,a writer who has always explored newer worlds,has cut adrift and set his schooner on a voyage to completely different lands. The work of a new generation of writers takes as its metier the impersonal machinery of the metropolis Adigas White Tiger and Last Man in Tower,Anjum Hasans Neti,Neti,K.R. Ushas Monkey-Man,and Manu Josephs Serious Men.

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Hasan says that while the fixed abode was central to the imagination in works such as R.K. Narayans Vendor of Sweets and Rohinton Mistrys Such a Long Journey,its hold seems to be lessening. People have started moving around more and they write more about people like themselves. Home is either something you dispense with as a trope or it becomes a kind of nostalgia the lost home,the home left behind. I think of Kaizad Gustads now-forgotten stories in Of No Fixed Address (1999) as something of a landmark, she says. The characters of her novels,Lunatic in My Head and Neti,Neti,she says,live in rented houses in cities to which they ambiguously belong, but are nevertheless fascinated and compelled by the idea of home.

For many writers in English,often faulted for the incestuous upper-class urban worlds of south Delhi and south Mumbai that they write about,a broader canvas of the Big City offers a way to capture a more urgent reality in both Adiga and Josephs novels,the faultlines of caste and class drive the plot. Novels about feudal families,how they marry and love,are no longer adequate in the face of the great economic and social reality of contemporary India. Certainly there is a sense that these small worlds are not interesting enough, says author Rana Dasgupta,who is writing a non-fiction portrait of 20th century Delhi. The family is no longer the true centre of life,and if you restrict yourself to writing about it,you are missing out on an awful lot of reality, he says. He believes that the project of Indian literature in English,both fiction and non-fiction,has changed from the 1980s and the 1990s,its concerns no longer about defining an Indian voice and sensibility to the West,but trying to map and connect the energies of 21st century India,a sentiment echoed by Adiga several times. This commitment to the contemporary is accompanied by a sense of rupture from the past,and is reflected in the impatience with long timelines. Salman Rushdie in Midnights Children,and Vikram Seth in his novels,were in a sense trying to understand what constitutes modern Indian life through the evolution of families. But current novels are not interested in going back to 1900 anymore. They go back to the crucial years of 1980s or 90s because what happened before seems not to be as important, says Dasgupta.

Merciless and bewildering as it is,the city is at the heart of a new sensibility. Its alienation is the stuff of modern fiction but Hasan warns against its lack of poetry. Were still discovering our cities through our fiction so it is an exciting time. But there is also something deadening about the displacement caused by big cities, she says.

In Last Man in Tower,Masterjis walks offer him both wisdom and a sense of connection to strangers. But an older sense of community and family life collapses around him. This is a novel about the defeat of Home at the hands of Property,and the blandishments of Rs-Per-Square-Feet. The last man in tower never had a chance.