OUT OF THE ORDINARY
TANUJ SOLANKI’S QUIETLY SAVAGE THIRD NOVEL DIGS FOR HIGHSTAKES DRAMA UNDER THE SURFACE OF DULL OFFICE LIFE
Awork of Indian literary fiction has rarely engaged with the office. Unless it’s glamorous or powerful milieus like big business, entertainment, crime or law enforcement, fictional workplaces often remain unidimensional backdrops, the wings from which characters emerge on stage to fight their real psychological or ethical battles. Drawn from his own experience in insurance companies, Tanuj Solanki’s The Machine is Learning makes a conscious departure from that norm, and does so with aplomb.
Solanki plonks us into a sea of office-speak that a less ambitious writer might not have risked, while crafting a plot thick enough to keep us afloat. As we find ourselves suddenly au fait both with standard corporate selfinflation (“business process excellence”, “strategic projects group”) and more specialised insurance terminology (underwriting, reinsuring, local operations executive), it becomes clear that the zone-out dullness of this linguistic universe can mask very real drama. One begins to suspect, in fact, that the masking may be intentional. In Solanki’s splendid pacy telling, office politics emerges as an undeniable microcosm of politics in the deepest sense.
The book’s appeal is aided by its narrator, a 29-year-old who combines corporate ‘dudeness’ with an aspiration to good spelling and nonconformism, his cockiness tempered with just enough insecurity to make him interesting. In his corporate bubble, Saransh Malik is a rising star and he knows it. But he is also smart enough to know what he doesn’t know; willing to let his “ex-journalist, do-gooder” girlfriend Jyoti stoke his uncertainties. Saransh is the perfect hero for a novel of ethical
Solanki captures aspects of a brittle new India that’s only just starting to find place in fiction
questioning: someone with something at stake, but not yet frozen irredeemably into the guarding of turf.
Since his Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar-winning Diwali in Muzaffarnagar (2019), Solanki’s prose has become cleaner, and his insights sharper. There is a pared-down quality to this book, though it never avoids the self-reflexive detail—Saransh implicitly contrasting his boss Mitesh’s arranged marriage wife and “this year’s bonus” life with his own Tinder-dependent one, or marking the class difference that separates him from Jyoti, even as she pushes him to confront his role in the capitalist juggernaut. Thoughtful but never ponderous, scrupulously deadpan in its descriptions of sex as much as office spaces, this is a great book about aspects of Indian life only just finding their way into fiction.
—Trisha Gupta