[Reader-list] Trickster City : Review

[Jeebesh]

http://www.timeoutdelhi.net/books/book_feature_details.asp?code=86

Tricks of light

A group of Delhi writers from the working class brings you closer to  
the Indian metropolis than you've ever been, says Raghu Karnad.  
Photograph by Paroma Mukherjee.

Last September, an editor of the newsweekly Open, Hartosh Singh Bal,  
posted a typically provocational editorial on the magazine’s website.  
His wildly fired broadside accused Indian English fiction writers,  
“living in south Delhi and south Mumbai, writing for each other”, of  
being effete and lacking the guts to grapple with modern India. The  
names on the comment-stream that followed on Open’s website were like  
a roster of Delhi literati, who lined up to give Bal an eloquent  
thumping. Still, the episode exposed a nervousness in Indian English  
publishing, that for all the reviews and longlists, the writing just  
wasn’t catching fire. This fear is coldest in Delhi, which is quickly  
growing as both a source and a subject of writing in English. It’s a  
hell of atmosphere in which to encounter Trickster City.

In 2005, eight Delhi writers began meeting to discuss how to write  
about the city. The congregations were part of the CyberMohalla labs  
organised by Sarai and the Ankur Society for Alternatives in  
Education. The question of how to write Delhi was an urgent one , as  
the still-vague idea of the Commonwealth Games was starting to reshape  
the city in very real ways. The writers’ group grew and continued  
meeting: men and women, all Hindi-speaking, all below 30, all  
residents of that other Delhi, the city of the tenth-pass, the  
vocational course and the government OPD. Scenes, questions and pieces  
of overheard conversation ricocchetted between them.

Then, in early 2006 came a tragedy that scorched the book they would  
eventually write together. The High Court ordered the demolition of  
Nangla Maanchi, a slum colony on the Yamuna’s east bank. Some parts of  
it were bulldozed. Perhaps 30,000 people were displaced. A few of the  
writers had lived there, and they all haunted the place as the MCD and  
police slowly ground a living town into a mess of crushed brick and  
plastic sheeting. Visthapan, or displacement, became a hot word in  
their conversations.

In 2007 Bahurupiya Shahar (Shape-Shifting City) was published by  
Rajkamal Publications. This fortnight, as part of Sarai’s decennial  
celebration, it will be released in English as Trickster City. It is a  
collection of short pieces – “part reportage, part fiction, part  
conversation, part Sufiana poetry”, according to contributor Love  
Anand. The way Trickster City pours light on the Indian megacity feels  
similar to how Arun Kolatkar’s Jejuri made the Indian pilgrimage town  
visible, using a mix of mockery, devotion, observed detail and vast  
imagination.

The marvel of this book is difficult to pinpoint. It has a richness of  
recorded detail from the belly of a modern Indian metropolis. Its  
emotional range is large, from humour (as in the opening story, Jaanu  
Nagar’s Delhi Liner) to empathy (Neelofar’s My Mother’s Dread) to  
essay (Suraj Rai’s Having Seen it From Close). There is the sustained  
vitality of its translation into English by Shveta Sarda. Perhaps most  
impressive is the fact that Trickster City has no bad guys, not the  
police, not the state, not even the bulldozers.

Whatever its literary strengths, any reader accustomed to Indian  
English writing is likely to approach Trickster City like a meaning- 
loaded dance with difference. The different-ness of the authors can  
seem like the key, the lock and the room, all at once. But to them it  
is beside the point. The book is not based on a partition between any  
worlds, said Anand. The writers all agreed that it wasn’t written as a  
message to either the elite or the downtrodden, but rather to the  
stranger who is everybody else and even part of oneself.

“You haven’t picked up a stranger’s book,” said Nagar, who lived in  
Nangla Maanchi after moving to Delhi. “Or you have, but it’s a  
stranger like you find when you’re crossing the Ring Road, feeling the  
velocity of the cars going past. Then your hand reaches for a  
stranger’s hand to help you cross. They say in Delhi there are no red  
lights, there are only the hands of strangers.”

But there’s no point saying their difference is irrelevant. Much Delhi  
writing has tried reaching down from above, to grasp at the experience  
of the non-elite, most famously the Booker Prize-winning White Tiger.  
This book seems to lay its hand directly on the flesh and nerve that  
is the human content of Delhi. The fact that CyberMohalla incubates  
this kind of creativity is a reminder that Sarai, whose publishing  
flies high over most people’s heads, is doing work that’s utterly  
relevant.

Their difference also shows in the introspection that accompanied  
their writing. “Many people write in this city,” Nagar said. “People  
write in shop ledgers, write FIRs, write the change they owe you on  
your bus ticket. But I think a writer could be a person who uses words  
to expand his world.” To illustrate, he describes a day during the  
demolition of Nangla. “I approached a man sitting on the rubble that  
was his house, and I asked him to sing a song for me. He said, god,  
how can I sing now? I told him to sing such a good song that even that  
much sadness would be forgotten. So he sang, and he became a writer,  
writing over his own heart.”

Nangla and visthapan do persist at the heart of this book,  
figuratively and literally (in a tour de force middle chapter). But  
the point that the writers make with it is subtle, sometimes even  
uplifting. Shamsher Ali recalled a line by co-contributor Suraj Rai:  
“He said, how a house is built can be understood only in the moment in  
which it is destroyed.” Even the demolition is recruited into an  
understanding of the spirit that builds a city, a sentiment held by  
the epigraph of Trickster City: “So that affection for the city  
endures.”

Trickster City, Penguin, Rs 499.