City of the good, the bad & the ugly

Aradhika Sharma

She Will Build Him a City by Raj Kamal Jha. Bloomsbury. Pages 339. Rs 599

Raj Kamal Jha’s book is equally about Delhi as it is about the people who live in it. However, if you reach for the novel thinking you’ll find the touristy or historical Delhi within the pages, you’ll be rather shocked.

The underbelly, over-belly, subways and channels, passages and pathways within the city of Delhi find a resonance in the lives of the people who populate Jha’s disturbing book, She Will Build him a City. The book is about the lives of his characters, yes, but it is equally about the frenetically paced, hot, dusty and sultry city. The fragmented rhythms, sounds and the collective smells of the metropolis and the people blend together into one amorphous state of odour and being. ‘Each body softened, warmed throughout the day in a marinade of sweat and odours, hair oil, dust thrown up by diggers, cement mixers, earthmovers, dumptrucks.’ 

There are three characters in the book, primordially introduced to us as Woman, Man and Child. The Woman sits in her home and reminisces about her life while her daughter, distanced from her, sleeps in the next room. The Man wants to kill, ‘He is going to kill and he is going to die’. The child, named Orphan, who has been dumped on the steps of an orphanage wrapped up in a red towel, will craft his own way through the book. Another remarkable element that almost takes on the mantle of a character is the subway. Jha seems to have forged a visceral relationship with it. The subway is menacing and fundamental and much happens in it. 

The stories of the Man with murder on his mind — he’s killed a dog before — of the Woman who tells of her estrangement from her daughter because of an extramarital affair that she had and the surreal saga(s) of Orphan intersperse but if you are looking for a linear story, you won’t find it in this book. On the contrary, if you allow yourself to take a ride in the subway along with Jha, you will find yourself journeying through a land of oddity and surrealism — grotesque and disturbing. Don’t ask the reason of the ride if you allow yourself to get involved in the experience. 

The characters overlap, they are dysfunctional in a city that’s growing and changing at an unplanned and crazy rate, trying to leave them behind. The struggle is within themselves as well as their environment as they try to fathom the breathtakingly morphing landscape. 

Jha uses bleak imagery that’s nearly bruising in its candor. Through it, he projects the stench and squalor of the town and of the people — the smells and sights that we may have experienced a thousand times, but would rather shut our senses to. While describing the subway, for example, he says, ‘The train pulls in, pushing, in front, a wave of warm air from the tunnel to the platform. Doors open, people spill out. A smell like rotting vegetables, bread and bananas gone bad’. There is an oppressive air throughout the novel, that’s unrelenting in its starkness. 

Don’t be surprised if you find Man, a lethal and damaged character, bringing home a ‘Balloon girl’ and her mother, to wash and feed them and let them go again, only to fret about them later. On the other side, Orphan finds his way out of his orphanage, in spite of not being able to walk yet, finds his way to a movie hall and is taken care of by Ms. Violets Rose. ‘He will be the shadow beneath your seat. Certain evenings, when you are watching a movie, you may feel his head move underneath you, his small hands scrape your armrest …’ You really don’t know where reality ends and fantasy begins. The lines are blurred.

Certainly, Jha, author of four novels including The Blue Bedspread, has created an experimental piece of fiction, breaking out from the mould, challenging the accepted methods of Indians writing in English.