‘The Last Dragoners of Bowbazaar’ by Indra Das: Fantasy consoles, disturbs

Like speculation in philosophy, fantasy in art functions to complicate our perception of reality. The certitudes soften. We experience dread, and then a thrill of renewal.

A Kafka or a Marquez offers entry points into reality. The dream does not replace reality but makes holes in it, and unfurls stairways into the unfamiliar. Indra Das may not yet possess the art and audacity of the masters, but he seems driven by a similar intent. He weaves a gossamer quilt of dream and reality, and stitches the two, significantly, with the thread of memory. Memory helps him keep fantasy on leash and provides a safe perch to write from. This way sanity is armoured against art’s ‘insane’ demands.

‘The Last Dragoners of Bowbazaar’ is a novella about growing up in a sort of void: the narrator craves the certainty of identity in an indeterminate reality. What holds the narrative together like a witch’s glue is the fantasy about a dragon world. But it only holds the narrative together and does not explain it, which gives the narrative its philosophical potential. Is the fantasy an ancestral myth, or just a family game? Or some obscure inherited pathology? Is it a refuge from unbearable reality? And what if reality itself is no more than a fantasy? The reader cannot pick easy answers.

Perhaps ‘the dragoners’, as they call themselves, are immigrants trying to survive cultural alienation by seeking solace in the tales of their nomadic clan’s inter-galactic migration. After all, we are the stories we tell ourselves.

Yet to know we are no more than stories is both tragic and comic. Perhaps it is an enigma of our existence, if at all we exist and are more than mere figures in God’s dream, or in someone’s mind. It is important that no character here has the necessary clarity to speak of reality with conviction. Lives are lived on a see-saw of memory and forgetfulness, but neither prevails. And in the twilight meeting of the two, fantasy consoles as much as it disturbs.

The wish of Reuel’s mother that their ancestral house should survive them carries a heart-breaking poignancy, for this is the only place in which the dragoners could be themselves. The only space where they could at all be. And yet she once told him: “You deserve to be real in this world. It’s not an easy thing to be stuck between worlds.” She wanted him to renounce the ancestral memory and enter a reality that is not theirs but which they now inhabit out of compulsion. The grandmother, on the other hand, frees him from the need to forget. He is thus fated to carry a conflicted burden.

To embrace the ancestral memory is to enter fantasy, he finds out. He is happy and has, moreover, his friend Alice’s momentary companionship. But the happiness is shadowed by a dark knowledge: that loss is inevitable and that all our stories are ‘flimsy’. Even the book he has written, this novella, is no more than an event in a flimsy story. So, what comes after the end of illusion? Perhaps nothing. “I must have faith,” he braces himself.

The idea that inspired the book had greater potential than the writer is able to actualise. But he has chosen the safety of a contained fictional world over the turmoil of emotion and thought the idea demanded. The result is a lack of nuance, depth, and narrative vigour. The vagueness of imagination further diminishes the fantasy. The suggestive power of a faintly scribbled political subtext is lost in the odd glare of wokeist flares. There are memorable phrase-length enchantments, but too many sentences rattle when they could have sung.

A close study of the craft of Ursula K Le Guin, from whom Das takes the epigraph, would have equipped him better for the insane but necessary demands of his art.

— The reviewer is former professor of English at Punjabi University