Unravel a murder, the many suspects, the motivations and speculations in ‘Love is Participation in Eternity’ by Udayan Vajpeyi

Udayan Vajpeyi is better known as a Hindi poet and storywriter, and ‘Qayas’ is his only novel published hitherto. It has now been translated into English by Poonam Saxena, a journalist and translator.

Vajpeyi has the felicity of extensively invoking nature and its various moods, not only as backdrops for various situations, but also as a match for explications of mindscapes. This unique quality of his poetic sensibility is visible in his fiction as well, making it very different from the run-of-the-mill prose narratives.

‘Love is Participation in Eternity’ unfolds through a narrator who speaks about a person — his name is later revealed to be Sudipt — who comes to a small place, rejuvenates an abandoned public library and turns it into a hub for social interaction among the residents. Sudipt is suddenly found to have been murdered and speculations begin to fly around as to who has done it and why.

As the narrator withdraws, it becomes clear to the readers that the objective of the author is not a detective story with the culprit identified at the end. Rather, he wishes to delve deep into the psyche of each of the characters related to Sudipt: his wife Mridula, his servant Lakhna, his child daughter Noa, his friend Vandana with whom he was allegedly having an affair, her friend Sneha, her mother Sushila, brother Biddu, uncle Kishore and many more.

Each of them speculates — in their thoughts — about the possibility of another having committed the murder and their motivation in doing so.

It is through their self-reflections that the plot evolves and the story moves forward, revealing, among others — bit by bit — the lifestyle and the character of Sudipt and their own relations with him. However, in doing so, they lay bare their own unconscious, its preferences and prejudices. That resolving the mystery of the murder is insignificant for the writer is evident through the chapter, ‘Thief’, wherein the murderer and his motive are identified.

It is in this sense that the story becomes universal with a message: that no human can grasp fully the reality or the truth about something, but perceives only partly according to one’s own circumstantial makeup — physical and psychic.

Remember the story we all read in our childhood about six — or was it seven — blind persons and an elephant, each guessing about its identity according to the part of its body they touched? To me, the book also reminded — as it did to an earlier reviewer, Khalid Jawed, of the original in Hindi — of that classic film ‘Rashomon’ by Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, which I saw many decades ago, wherein the mystery of a man’s murder and the rape of his wife are speculated upon by various characters.

It is only a matter of conjecture that Udayan Vajpeyi’s book is inspired by Kurosawa’s film, but his novel is more complex and equally gripping.

The self-reflexivity of the young child Noa, who is very upset over ‘Baba’ going away and not returning, is very touching and so is that of the servant Lakhna, who, being poor, is the natural suspect and is thrashed by the police, but remains loyal to the family of his murdered master.

However, a chapter titled ‘Hall’, allowing a physical space to speculate the absence of Sudipt, is too contrived to be natural and so is the chapter titled ‘Marg’, which is in the nature of metafiction — in fashion when Vajpeyi wrote his discourse.

Frequent allusions to nature and relating them to various situations, a hallmark of the poet that Vajpeyi is, are also irksome at times, although it has made others designate the narrative as a “poet’s novel”.

The translation by Saxena is competent and very readable. In short, the novel is a must-read.

— The reviewer is former professor of English at Jawaharlal Nehru University