Customer Reviews

Looking Through Glass

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Walking my dog in lawns of the Old Fort in New Delhi early one morning in the summer of 1998, I froze in my tracks as I remembered the line from Looking Through Glass, "The fort is a sump, said Angrez Mashriqi, into which the Mussalmans of Hindustan are being drained."

1947 and the following year are the darkest years in India's recent history. India's independence and partition in the August of '47 was followed by upheaval that left a million dead and made refugees of over 10 million. A nation was torn apart not only physically but also psychologically. The wounds fester unhealed to this day.

To people sensitive to India's history and psychology, Mukul Kesavan gives a book that, more than ANY other, transports the reader to India's most important years of the last three centuries. The book does not tell a story. Nor is it a history book. It is meditation in which the author takes the reader on an odyssey through the events and times that were India's trial by fire. This work is much more an experience than just a book.

Forget the stylistic pyrotechnics of Salman Rushdie and the heady exotica of Arundhati Roy. This is a book by a writer who knows how to tell a straightforward (or backward ... in time, that is) very well indeed. Its very, very funny and highly evocative of its time (pre-independence India) and locations (Delhi, Shimla, Lucknow, Benaras of those days). Its a bright and sunny book, ideal for a good old-fashioned read, which will transport you completely. Of all the talented Indian writers in English, Mukul Kesavan is one of the most underrated. I feel he is the best of the whole lot- and I have read Rushdie, Roy, Seth, Chandra, Ghosh et al. You won't regret reading this book, specially if you have lived in the time or places described. You should read it if you weren't there - its the next best thing to being there and living there from day to day.

The nameless narrator of this Indian author's first novel, is a modern young photographer on route to deposit his grandmother's ashes in the Ganges when he falls from the Mail Train and lands in 1942.

Pretending amnesia, he is taken in by a Muslim family which includes a young revolutionary, Masroor, his sister Asharf,i and Ammi, the mother who is waiting for a husband who disappeared some years before on a Haj, a pilgrimage to Mecca.

At first terrified, our narrator refuses to stir from the house, in fear he may change history, until finally he is impelled out of doors by the discovery that he has head lice.

It's the day of the Quit India Resolution, voted by the new Indian Congress, a result that Masroor has feared because he believes it will lead to partition of the country between Hindus and Muslims.

Taken by Masroor to a barber, the hapless narrator is immediately embroiled in Indian politics when he is the only witness to Masroor's disappearance - into the recruiting poster on the side of an army truck.

Kesavan combines magic realism and outright farce in an energetic, even frenetic, story of the displaced narrator's life in a time not his own. At first the narrator feels only the futility of political effort - for him, history is already ordained and the fervor of people like Masroor seems futile and puppetlike.

But once he is caught up in life - earning a living as a waiter, developing attachments, saving a young, unwed, pregnant actress from the clutches of a pornographer, meeting his grandmother, doing his inept best to manipulate the lives of his friends for their own good - history becomes a backdrop to life.

Beautifully written, funny, sometimes raunchy, sometimes sly, the novel's only real flaw is its meandering story line. Some events (as in life) seem to have no real purpose and no goal. Others serve only to introduce figures of history whose walk-on parts intimately affect the lives of those who've never met them.

An unusual and entertaining novel with layers of meaning, many of which I suspect eluded me as they may elude other American readers.

A camera is an interesting thing, you can take pictures with it. But imagine how interesting it would be if it could squeeze you through the funnel of time, and drop you on the other side. Mukul Kesavan was peering through such magical ground glass when he found himself transported right into the middle of history-in-the-making, into India in 1942 when popular ferment against the British was building up, and the script for the drama of Partition was being written up. With extraordinary inventiveness, Kesavan presents us with a mosaic of the ordinary lives that peopled our extraordinary times. To begin with, we are steeped into the sights and smells of Lucknow, only to be rapidly transported to Benaras and onwards. The plot demands that we do not tarry awhile in any place as we are inexorably propelled towards our destination - a post-Independence refugee camp in Delhi.

The clouds of history are at the horizon. And our protagonist struggles against his clairvoyance to hold together his carefully constructed life as the nation would be torn asunder. And thereby he posits the question - was Partition inevitable ?

Kesavan present us with a chain of stories strung together by the thread of his life. He populates his book with all manners of unlikely characters who live out their mostly miserable lives without the benefit of the author's "foresight" of what was to come . And somehow through this extraordinary tapestry of enmeshed lives, we are to ponder the million dollar question of whether India had to be brutally chopped up in the manner it was. But therein lies the flaw of the whole enterprise. While the authors style is a sound literary device to conjure up vivid, delectable imagery, it is hardly capable of delineating the contours of the characters mind. In an attempt to recreate many ordinary lives and their petty concerns, Kesavan has washed out all the "extraordinariness" of the times - resulting in bland characters who dont have a mind of their own on the matter anyway.

Having said that, I must add that reading the book did afford pleasure afterall. The novelty of the plot alone merits some interest, and the writing is delightful. The narrative is well-textured and the imagery conjured up is striking at times (eg. the sunlit description of a very pregnant Parwana - "the setting of her toes behind her rising belly"). However, a personal quibble I have is with the author's obsession with things scatalogical, the "stink" of which permeates the first third of the book. All in all, a readable book, but not one that adds to our understanding of the ordinary folk who lived through momentous and tragic times of recent Indian history.

my only cosolation is that fortunately for me,I haven't bought this book -- borrowed a copy from the library. the rave reviews astonish me. this a snobbish book with an unbalanced sense of history. yes, the plot is somewhat innovative, but the history is all wrong, betryaing the author's political proclivities. i'm not sure I should file this book under fiction. it's a political tract.