‘The Elsewhereans’ by Jeet Thayil: The landscape of eternal migrants

It is a moot question: how Indian is the Indian English writer/writing, today? If we look at the growing tribe of the post-1947 generation of Indian English writers, such as Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh, Jhumpa Lahiri, Sudeep Sen and others, we realise that they are Indians only by birth, not so in their thematic preoccupations.

Their sensibility is cosmopolitan, their presence international, and their readership global. As residents of ‘imaginary homelands’, they have crossed all barriers of race, region, religion and/or nationality.

Like many contemporaries, Jeet Thayil is an Indian only by default. While his ancestors had roots in Kerala’s backwaters, he was raised and educated, and has lived and worked in several cities across the world, i.e. Mumbai, New York, Berlin, Paris, Hanoi, Hong Kong, Shanghai, et al. We find him delving into literary forms as diverse as poetry, fiction, libretto and journalism to quell his creative restlessness with great panache.

Often Thayil explores, in poetry as well as fiction, the predicament of the migrant and the marginalised communities around the world. As a writer, he is concerned with the Baudelairean theme of urban decay and angst, and how it dissolves identities, making us ‘eternal migrants’ or survivors.

Migration is central to the whole experience of Thayil’s poetic as well as fictional landscape. In his work, ‘homelessness’ often turns into an existential, nay a metaphysical, reflection on the basic human condition. In ‘Elsewhereans’, he pushes the idea of migration to an extreme, suggesting that all human beings are essentially migrants or Elsewhereans. We are all condemned to face the double burden of fashioning an identity in a fractured world, and worse, create hope to survive in an utterly hopeless universe. Much before his first novel ‘Narcopolis’ in 2012, Thayil already had a formidable reputation as a poet, having won critical acclaim for all of his five poetry collections. His other two novels, not as well-known as the first, are ‘The Book of Chocolate Saints’ (2017) and ‘Low’ (2020). Not surprisingly, themes of loss and grief, identity and belonging, sexuality and addiction, art and life, which Thayil explores in earlier novels, come together seamlessly in ‘Elsewhereans’.

Though Thayil conceived this book as a ‘documentary novel’, it is a family saga at one level, and a confessional novel at another. Built around the story of how his parents met and married, it maps their peaks and troughs in different cities of the world, struggling to stay afloat while raising their two children.

His father, TJS George, a well-known journalist and author of some 20 books, is portrayed in the novel as an anxiety-ridden, struggling writer. His mother, Ammu, with whom he enjoyed a more enduring relationship than his father, is a woman of grit. Despite their peregrinations, she holds the family together and as a money-manager also stashes away enough to invest in stocks and property.

Within the larger frame of his parents’ story, Jeet compresses ‘little stories’ of ancestors, uncles and aunts, their eccentricities and failures; stories of their children and his siblings, even strangers, who all travelled around the world, searching for stability. An interesting story is about a son who goes all the way to Vietnam to search for his father’s one-time girlfriend, only to be disappointed that the girl who “once used to ride a motorcycle” (and whose picture is reproduced on the title cover) is now ravaged by time.

With perfect control over his narrative, Thayil moves effortlessly from Kerala to Mumbai, Hanoi to Hong Kong and Berlin to Paris, as characters struggle to hold on to dissolving identities, make sense of strange, harsh spaces they find themselves in. As he excavates family archives, stories, memories and photographs, long forgotten, ghostly characters become real. By disrupting chronology and collapsing the timelines, he creates a fast-paced, richly textured narrative.

In this no-holds-barred, tell-all tale, he occasionally conceals what he would rather not dwell upon. For instance, while talking about his father’s days at Madras Christian College, where he had developed love for books, Thayil is intriguingly reticent. He fictionalises as well as holds back facts, his prerogative as a ‘documentary novelist’.

Thayil’s poetic sensibility is reflected in his half-humorous, half-sardonic turn of phrase, his imaginative use of language and penchant for distillation of thoughts. Not that his narratorial skills are any less impressive.

‘Elsewhereans’ is both a joyful and a thought-provoking read. This is where Thayil’s success as a ‘poet-novelist’ lies.

— The reviewer is former professor of English at Panjab University