‘The Pretenders’ by Avtar Singh: Emerging from dark shadow of pandemic, locked-in lives

Cataclysmic events often give rise to great literature. Sophocles’ classic ‘Oedipus Rex’ was inspired by the plague and so was Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear’.

Tolstoy’s genius shaped the horrors of the French invasion of Russia in the early 19th century into a timeless masterpiece, ‘War and Peace’. Bertolt Brecht brilliantly crafted ‘Mother Courage and Her Children’ out of the Thirty Years’ War that had ravaged the entire Europe in the mid-17th century.

War, disease and famine leave behind horrifying images of human suffering, even reset the calculus of imagination. Sensitive, imaginative souls reshape the spectacle of suffering into art, spurred by watershed events.

The pandemic, a recent historical event, turned our lives upside down. It was a living nightmare, with isolation, social distancing, home quarantine, frequent lockdowns and disruptions, sudden hospitalisations and often unseemly departures. The fortunate ones survived, and from those a fraction of the imaginative ones documented the pandemic in fiction and/or non-fiction.

The ‘literature of pandemic’ has emerged as a distinct category. How much of it will become great literature will be settled by time, the ultimate critic/arbiter.

Avtar Singh’s latest novel, ‘The Pretenders’, is set within the time-frame of April to July 2021, those crucial three months when most parts of India, including Delhi, were in the vicious grip of the Delta wave, unleashing hell and fury. The pandemic was at its worst, but this is not the impression one gets while reading this novel.

Throughout, Covid-19 is only referred to as a ‘sickness’, as though it was as ordinary as it sounds. Only once in a while, we get to see Sewa Singh, true to his name, going to the gurdwara to feed the homeless hungry, or offering the prasad of oxygen to the patients queuing up in their cars.

None of the characters in the novel ever get infected, except Mei’s mother Nina, who is quarantined in a Beijing hotel for three weeks, or Farid’s father, who escapes to the hills along with his daughters and grandchildren much before the pandemic strikes. He recovers faster than we expect him to.

Once in a while, we catch Farid and Sammy, who stay on different floors of the same building, though, watching through the windows one of their neighbours being hauled away into an ambulance by a group of masked volunteers. For them, it’s just another spectacle.

For most of the characters, even for the reader, the pandemic remains a distant reality, hovering like a dark shadow. The only time it moves closer or creates a spine-chilling effect is in the opening sequence when Rahim, a poor Muslim, is pushing the corpse of his friend, Umakant, on a handcart miles on end, searching for a pandit who could, at least, ensure a dignified exit, with rituals and mantras. This scene reactivates memories of the pandemic, even reinstates faith in humanity.

Another way the pandemic impinges laterally upon the lives of the characters is how they are shown caught in a series of locked-in relationships. Whether it’s the frustrated romance of Farid, a young Delhite, and Mei, an Oxford-trained Chinese, dividing her time between Bangkok and Beijing; or the abortive bids of an ageing Sammy, living out his sexual fantasies with Ursila, now his neighbour but once his childhood sweetheart; or Nong’s desire for Chengez, complicated by her own sexual ambivalence; or Nina’s struggle to free herself from cobwebs woven around her by Jaap, her second husband — most of the relationships in the novel are shown to be in a state of permanent lockdown.

Some individuals like Noor and Khan do find their way out of the logjam. While the action of the novel moves freely across several cities, even countries, from Delhi to Jakarta, Bangkok to Beijing, Lahore to Germany, a constant sense of locked-in relationships impinges upon our consciousness.

The rapid-paced narrative imparts a sense of urgency to the events, while the lives of the characters move at a snail’s pace. Repetition is inevitable, reinforcing the desultoriness of the quotidian.

Occasionally, one gets the feeling that the novelist has bitten off more than he can chew. Partition, the Delhi riots, the farmers’ protest are all there, even if they don’t meld into the overall design. One wonders if the novelist is telling a story or is the story merely a handmaiden to ‘ideology’.

‘The Pretenders’ is a good, one-time read. Whether or not it’s more than that is best left to the readers’ discretion.

— The reviewer is former professor of English at Panjab University