THE URGE FOR CLOSURE
Nitasha Kaul’s debut novel is about a man’s elusive search for peace within and with the world
KAUL CLEARLY HAS A LOT TO SAY ABOUT THE SITUATION IN KASHMIR BUT IT DOES NOT MAKE FOR PARTICULARLY INTERESTING READING.
Leon Ali is an unfortunate man. Named after the Russian revolutionary Trotsky by a father who vanishes just before his birth, Ali is brought up by a high-strung, suffocating mother in Delhi of the 1990s. Because he is a Kashmiri Muslim and poor, Ali’s life is a self-flagellating litany of woe. He is bullied in school, friendless in college (“Status is like pee… it can be detected by smell”) and until his mother’s employer intervenes, no one is willing to give them an apartment on rent. To top it all, Ali is even unlucky in love. “My life in Delhi was an exercise in trying to successfully live with the stark reality that stared me in the face, no matter where I went. Me, whose father abandoned him even as an unborn, me the stranger in every neighbourhood in Delhi that I lived in. Me, the one people spoke about then hushed up as I entered the room. Me.”
An escape to England, the accidental country of his birth, seems like the perfect solution to this constant state of “otherness”. But soon after Ali arrives in London, the twin towers fall and he is once again plunged into a spiral of panic and fear. “I am a Nobody, I wanted to scream out in their faces. I don’t know any of you… Just let me be invisible! I don’t want to be marked. To conduct myself under scrutiny. I want to be free… I wanted to do what I had done before. Escape.”
This time he leaves for Berlin on a mission to find his long lost father Mir. All he has to go on are a few facts: Mir was a communist who wrote poetry and gave fiery speeches at Srinagar University denouncing both India and Pakistan and calling for an independent, peaceful Kashmir. He was employed by an AngloGerman firm and, soon after his marriage, posted to England. When his wife was eight months pregnant, he was summoned to Berlin on official business and disappeared.
Enter Keya Raina, a Kashmiri Hindu and “scholar of exile, an insecure immigrant who collects other people’s stories”. These two almost clinically depressed (she by the “oppressive history” of Kashmir) individuals meet, mate and then set out to solve the mystery of the missing Mir. A hundred pages later and Mir is still nowhere in sight. Instead we are now reading the “Unwritten Autobiography” of Shula Farid, the half-Muslim, halfEuropean bohemian wife of a dour-faced Bengali diplomat who appears frightened of horses and says things like “The pant-shirt was not becoming, nothing is left to the imagination in those clothes… the outlines of your ample breasts were bursting…”.
Needless to say, Mir is never found but closure is essential. Our globe-trotting duo now set off on yet another journey where, hopefully, Leon Ali will find his peace and then “begin a new life and find my place in the scheme of things”.
Shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize, Residue is a debut novel by poet/economist/independent scholar/traveller/artist Nitasha Kaul. Promoted as the first novel in English by a Kashmiri woman author, Kaul clearly has a lot to say about the situation in Kashmir but it doesn’t make for particularly interesting reading. She writes best when she stays close to memory. A few paragraphs about growing up as a Kashmiri Pandit shine but they are few and far between. Otherwise the book is a meandering mess bogged down by an excess of overwrought prose and an attack of the Crazy Capitals (Pain. Loss. Sorrow.).
In the hands of a better writer and firm editor, this material could possibly have been refashioned to tug at your heart strings or turned into comic gold. Instead, with its endless narrative of identity neurosis, Residue leaves you simply exhausted.