‘One Love and the Many Lives of Osip B’: Of victims and their victims

Bindu Menon

Somewhere in the beginning of the novel, Anand admonishes his school friend, partner in crime and roommate, Osip Bala Krishnan, for having fallen helplessly in love with his teacher, an

Englishwoman: “Stick to your race. There is a reason why you are brown and she is white. We are colour-coded for separation.” Separation, us versus them, victim and victor, and the Age of the Mob that amplifies this separateness are among the many threads running through CP Surendran’s layered, complex novel.

Osip, a precocious 18-year-old at a boarding school in Kasauli, is named after Russian poet Osip Mandelstam by his grandfather, a Stalinist ideologue with a murderous past. Why would Mr Menon name his adoptive grandson after a poet persecuted by his hero is unravelled in the course of the novel as it navigates histories, memories and stark contemporary realities.

When his teacher Elizabeth suddenly vanishes, a lovelorn Osip is determined to seek her out. Even if it necessitates executing the madcap idea of kidnapping the school priest’s corpse to extort money and fund the trip to England. All aided and abetted by his friend Anand, who will later go on to acquire an extra ‘a’ in his name and an army of worshippers as a promising new entrant in the godman industry.

Along Osip’s journey, one meets a motley of characters, both real and imagined. Stalin and Mandelstam are regular visitants to Osip and his grandfather, who share a psychotic condition (foie a famille) that causes them to hallucinate incidents of an erstwhile Soviet era. There’s the iconoclastic columnist Arjun Bedi, waging a losing battle against accusations of sexual harassment, and his detractors, the activist couple Dev and Diya, who mobilise opinion against him on social media. Surendran’s long journalistic career gives him a ringside view of the media industry, and hence an unabashed portrait of the corporate newspaperwallah in the form of Alok Jain.

In an age of fake news, hyperventilating anchors and surveillance raj, truth is a casualty and myths are manufactured. Something that Osip’s grandmother Gloria Innaley knows only too well. Innaley means yesterday in Malayalam and the irony is never lost on Gloria. As she pens the hagiography of her husband, a revolutionary hero despite his politics of bloodshed, she laments that it is full of grandiose half-truths: “No one can speak the truth. Because there is no such thing.” And even if she were to, she “would have been lynched out of the nostalgia for what was not there. The Party here is the Mob”.

Surendran’s humour is at its wryest best when he describes Kerala as a state “where the Revolution was always about to happen, but did not, at the last minute, so it can happen again”.

As the novel follows a non-linear narrative, straddling continents, Osip flits from one dystopian world to another, peopled by persecuted poets, separatists and lynch mobs. These are worlds he cannot inhabit — of correctness and groupthink, where there is no place or legitimacy for misfits, for outsiders, for dissent. A world where the Right and the Left offer no choice really, only an illusion of it.

The novel isn’t an easy read, and cannot be when it mirrors the complexities of life. What stays long, though, is the lyrical power of its language, something which Surendran, the poet, has mastered over the years. What lingers too is a heavy despondency. In one of his moments out of time, Osip sees “the isms march in mud-caked boots. Whole nations in search of continual tragedies, uniformed men who plod on through slush and snow over often imaginary borders — rubbish strips of land where the wind flees without stopping and silence reigns emptied of heart”.

Surendran dedicates his novel to the victims and their victims. Beyond the personal subtext, it could well allude to the worlds inhabited by Osip, where they may not be victims and victors. Only victims and their victims.