The thrum of righteous rage
Suhit Kelkar
The boundary between “literary” and “genre” fiction is semi-permeable in the literary thriller. In the accomplished hands of Upamanyu Chatterjee, the thriller engrosses and excites with adrenaline surges even as it presents insights about society and sparks cultural epiphanies.
Chatterjee’s new book, Villainy, depicts a city, Delhi, where badness is embedded in everyday life. Not that virtuous folk are missing from the story – they are protagonists. But they are outnumbered.
Young Pukhraj, high on liquor and drugs, pockets his father’s handgun (unlicensed) and commandeers his father’s Mercedes (licensed) for a joyride. On some road, a school bus tries to overtake him and the Merc is grazed and its headlight smashed. Before you can spell “disproportionate response”, Pukhraj gets on the bus and shoots the driver dead with the handgun.
To complicate matters, Pukhraj has passengers in the Mercedes – his father’s friend’s son and the boy’s puppy, whom he’d taken along for the ride. To stop them from escaping and talking to the cops, by way of encore, Pukhraj runs them over and shoots the boy dead. Eventually, Pukhraj is arrested, along with the remaining occupant of the car, his friend Parmatma, who is his father’s driver’s son. Parmatma had tried to save the boy and the puppy.
What happens next you might see coming; it seems to have been drawn from life. Pukhraj’s father, the rich jeweller Nemichand, bribes the presiding judge to let his son off and Parmatma is framed. Money talks. Pukhraj is released as the evidence is deemed inconclusive. But Parmatma also goes free.
Next thing you know, Pukhraj has set off on another drug-addled joyride and run another man over, and been caught again. This time, he gets a full sentence from the same judge. He serves many years in jail. When he is released, the protagonists Parmatma and Durga, the sister of the murdered boy, must figure out how to save themselves from Pukhraj. What they fear is not his desire for revenge, which is absent, but his recklessness. What they do ends the story.
That’s the plot, which is fleshed out so as to be immersive and evocative. The novel
Villainy
Upamanyu Chatterjee 336pp, ~699
Speaking Tiger lives up to its “thriller” billing, delivering a narrative that is vivid and visceral. But the story is more than a thrill pill. Villainy points out the ubiquity and nature(s) of badness, flags the fact that a healthy sense of guilt and shame, friendliness and compassion, are rare, and does all this without sermonising or moralising.
We get strikingly sharp depictions of the main characters. Pukhraj abuses alcohol and drugs, gambles away huge sums of money, has issues with father figures and lacks a moral sense. When his mother visits him in jail, he says: “Everyone stinks, mummy, oof, how everyone stinks, their damn mouths smell like public toilets without water. It’s too unfair, just because I shot that smelly bus driver and that annoying little runt when I didn’t even mean to”. Dialogue like this that illuminates the character without telegraphing the point home are aplenty.
“You did not shoot anybody, okay? Get that into your head, beta… Before convincing the judge, you have first to convince yourself, beta,” says Pukhraj’s mother Ghazal, who is also a habitual shoplifter.
As for her better(?) half, Pukhraj’s father Nemichand lusts after more and more wealth as well as “aggressive, bullying sex… preferably with tarts with rich tastes with whom he could drive some hard bargains”. There is not a smidgeon of moralising in all the characterisation, which drives home the fact that this family are not gangsters, nor comic-book villains; they could be your neighbours.
The novel’s protagonists are virtuous, though ambiguously so. Parmatma and Durga make you root for them. But even they have to eschew morality and legality to save themselves from Pukhraj once he gets out of jail. Both are underprivileged in some way. Parmatma is the son of a poor driver, Durga a girl whose power to gain justice, for most of the story, falls short until the right occasion arrives.
A few pages into the book, you might think the story is cynical, even despairing. But as you read on, what comes through is a thrum of righteous rage leavened by dark humour. This is far from cynicism. As for the ending, some might call it justice delivered and others retribution. Either way, we get a satisfying “Click!” of closure.