THE MASTER HAS SOME MARGARITAS
FEATURING A DRUNK WRITER, SIDDHARTH CHOWDHURY’S SATIRICAL NEW NOVEL IS FUNNY AND PHENOMENAL
AA friend recently remarked that Siddharth Chowdhury, whose fourth offering is a novella, The Time of the Peacock, is India’s most underrated writer. Perhaps, instead, it’s India’s literary ecosystem that’s overrated. Chowdhury’s mind is like a glacier that is melting due to the zeitgeist. We readers are swept along in his torrent of words: fast but never hurried, the words are cleansing, and translucent so that the riverbed is visible. Each sentence carries so much imagery and information that you marvel at his craft. If a narrative propels you forward effortlessly, it is the mark of a great writer. Chowdhury does that.
There was recently also a mention of “Delhi” writing without a mention of Chowdhury. Amazing. A writer who follows a thread from a provincial capital (Patna) to Delhi University hostel life to the shattered dreams scattered around South or East Delhi—such a writer speaks for a significant chunk of Delhi, unlike some others. (Anuja Chauhan is another admirable Delhi writer in my opinion. Or the late Shovon Chowdhury, RIP.) Siddharth’s last work was The Patna Manual of Style and the collection of his first three novels, Ritwik & Hriday. In his fiction, characters recur—Ritwik Ray, Hriday Thakur, Mira Verma, et al—and they return in Peacock. This is not to say there is a lazy avoidance of sketching new characters—indeed, each of Chowdhury’s fictions can be read as standalone—but each character is reimagined as ageing, like wine. Each reflects, in their own way, a coming to terms with the great cosmic joke that God plays on us.
Briefly, Peacock is told in three acts, each through the eyes of a different character—John Nair, publisher of Peacock, a Delhi-based agency; Angika Raag, a backward caste writer on a writer’s retreat in Scotland; and Ritwik Ray, the bard of Patna, whose new novel Godse Chowk is hanging in limbo at Peacock. They converge at a book launch in Delhi, where a drunken Ray threatens to show everyone his “Aadhaar card” by unzipping his trousers. However the three acts are not chronological. John’s takes place two years earlier, Angika’s shortly after the launch, and Ritwik’s current story is where all the pieces come together. The centre is the end.
Peacock is not just a light-hearted look at Delhi’s publishing scene (a “south Delhi industry”, as literary agent Sukanya De puts it), but is also set firmly in our current era (a few weeks after the 2016 demonetisation) and thus a subtly political novel. (Peacock might be a play on Penguin, but it also refers to a bird that fondly roams the gardens of power.) So, the centre really is the end. Do read. ■
—Aditya Sinha
Apart from being a lighthearted look at Delhi’s publishing scene, The Time of the Peacock is also subtly political