‘The Tiger’s Share’ by Keshava Guha: Breaking into male sanctuary

Man vs wild. Man vs woman.

Brahm Saxena, a retired CA, rattles his lawyer daughter Tara and son Rohit, a student, saying they shouldn’t expect anything from him anymore, because, anguished by mankind putting itself at the “centre of everything” and plundering all life forms on earth, he’s decided to do something about it. And a year later, when the family realises what he has done, the fact consumes, like a black hole, everything that has happened before, so you remember Keshava Guha’s second novel only from the end since time starts to move backwards.

The other axis of the novel are the childhood friends of the Saxena siblings — the Chawla siblings, Lila and Kunal, among the uber-rich of Delhi. Kunal, who was adopted, decides to be the head of the family after the patriarch’s death because he believes he’s the rightful heir, not Lila, since being biological, her birth was “random, accidental”, while he was “chosen” from hundreds of other orphanage boys. Lila, a private equity deal maker, fights this usurpation with Tara’s help, triggering surveillance and spying into Kunal’s organisation that infuses desh-bhakti into school history books.

Earlier, stung by his father’s refusal to hand down his wealth and instead serve all forms of life on the planet, US-educated Rohit quips: “Daddy, you’ve gone all Greta [Thunberg].” But Saxena appears to have gone all Dersu Uzala (the real-life Siberian hunter immortalised by Kurosawa in his 1975 film), who apologises to tigers, speaks to fire and, attuned to the rules of the wild, understands the helplessness of humans in front of it.

Rohit soon starts making YouTube videos ranting against animal conservation and espousing our right to dominate the rest of the species. Told in the wry, mocking voice of the daughter Tara, who has an opinion on almost everything — from Delhi’s inverted urban planning and pollution to the sufferings of the super-rich and the quality of single men — the novel also becomes a mini-autobiography.

She pries open everything about herself like she does of the city — her under-developed relationship with her family, the years living with a Pole obsessed with his physique, the court cases that brought her glory, and money, and her encounter with uber-uber rich bachelor Vicky, who can’t understand why his assistant has accused him of rape while he was scouring Japan with her to understand how to construct at his Delhi bungalow “the world’s only perfect toilet”, envisioned by writer Junichiro Tanizaki in the 1930s.

Through Tara, the male author is questioning male privilege in the voice of a woman. But does he get the voice right? In most places, yes. But more importantly, the voice gives him a wider range. As writer Katie Kitamura said in an interview: “Writing male characters is not very difficult because there is a vast canon of male characters written by men, for men. Writing female characters… feels almost inexhaustible.”

The character of Brahm Saxena, though a male, too seems inexhaustible — a poor orphan boy from the UP heartland who builds a prosperous life for his family in Delhi, realising one day the actual purpose of his existence when face-to-face with the sheer, absolute and immutable force of the wild.

— The reviewer is a marketing professional