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BookReview

Dizzying depths

S. MANZOORUL ISLAM
Vertigo by Ashok Banker, Penguin India New Delhi, 2005
reprint, 392 pp, Rs. 295
1. The setting of Vertigo is Bombay, or rather slices of it: the financial district, a few suburban areas, the Marine Drive, a couple of hotels, the two flats Jayesh or Jay Mehta, the protagonist, lives in. Bombay is not yet Mumbai, since the time is early 1980s, and the milieu the novel describes consists mostly of denizens of a Darwinian corporate underbelly where money and power and glitter rule. Ashok Banker has meticulously kept to his time frame, drawing generous references to the happenings in the Indian and global corporate worlds, politics and culture of the time to authenticate his narrative: Indira Gandhi, Lee Iacocca, Dirty Harry movies, Dan Aykroyd and James Belushi, Grease 2, Gigi, Bruce Springsteen's Brilliant disguise, Ayatullah Khomeini, Automatic Teller Machines, 386 liquid crystal display laptop selling for under Rs. 1 lakh Say it again? Yes, ATMs and LCD laptops. But in Bombay circa 1982? Why not? ! However, but the reviewer, who was in Bombay for a week in 1983 doesn't remember seeing even one ATM in the crowded bank para of Bombay where he went to cash his US dollars, and had to wait endless hours while lethargic clerks conducted the whole business absolutely manually, writing down bank note numbers ever so meticulously and counting Indian rupees over and over again. But then the reviewer may have missed the laptop clutching grey suited executives from the world of advertisement zapping past him in a frenzied race to be the number one rat in business.
The ATMs and laptops, whether real and authentic, (the burden of establishing the verisimilitude should be left to more assiduous researchers) are an important part of the elaborate discursive setup of Vertigo, which aims to capture every subtle shade of the fiercely competitive canvas of advertising and direct marketing. This is the world where the workday Jay belongs, and willy nilly, is drawn into its vortex. Banker draws this world as ruthless, cruel and fiercely challenging. It's a world where big fish routinely make a feast of small fish. Jay, a small fish, would have been swallowed whole by fish even slightly bigger than him, had he not been protected by a woman roughly his own age, but one who had bloodied her teeth and claws in corporate warfare early and knows the trick of survival. She also happens to be the woman who feels an emotion akin to love for Jay. The woman, Meera, is liberated in the late 1990s sense, and is guide to Jay while he! tries desperately to pick up the fragments of his life, which include his non-functional love life for, his fiancee, Tuli, a Gujarati girl who believes she does not exist outside a family relationship, is predictably cool on questions of carnality. Now, the rather sombre account of Jay's life should place him in the age range of late 20s, but he is only 19 or 20 when the story opens and is only 24 when it ends.
So why is he seen picking up the fragments of his life that early when, even for most corporate minnows on a salary of Rs. 2000 per month, life should just begin?
Answer: It's because Jay has to look after his mother, an abandoned wife, an incorrigible alcoholic, a temperamental and
pathetic woman. With a Halaku Khan for a father (who once left Jay a ten-rupee note when he had pleaded with fearful eyes for his help in looking after his mother) Jay has absolutely no other choice except to live with her, nurse her, sometimes feed her, wash her, suffer her neurotic outbursts, and earn a living good enough to see them through the month. Balancing the two lives, both equally traumatizing, Jay begins to break down. At the ripe old age of 22!
It is this elementally sad and tragic, gripping and unforgettable tale of Jay's balancing act that rather than the fast-paced narrative of Bombay's competitive, do-or- die corporate world produces the real vertigo. Ashok Banker appears unrivaled, except for the likes of Anita Desai (remember her Clear Light of Day?), the very best of the lot, really, in his sensitive description of fractured and tragic lives. A 20-year-old young man, alone and abandoned by an indifferent father, the burden of the love and patience he can muster, tries to salvage some sanity in his and his mother's lives. In this he is not helped by his mother, who rather makes his life more difficult. But the young man persists, driven by no particular passion, but burdened with the memory of a mother's desperate attempt to bring him up, put him through school and generally shelter him from the slings and arrows of fortune. Added to this is the constant neglect of his father and the annoyance he shows wherever mother's name comes up. Driven to desperation, and in search of a life away from mother that he so desperately deserves, Jay moves out to a flat in the suburb, urged on by Tuli who wants a clean break from the past. But before he makes the move, Jay muses on what it would mean to him, staying apart from his mother. What will she do then? And, more important, what will he do?
There can't be an answer to that, except saying that both would be more miserable, in their own, different ways.
2. Vertigo's plot line is uncomplicated, and lends itself to easy retelling. Jayesh Mehta,
20, and his sick and alcoholic mother are forced to live on their own, having been driven out by a successful businessman father, who then quickly remarries. Jay, fresh out of school has to find a job, and takes on the task of looking after his mother. His job at a DM company is not easy, given the dog-eat-dog work ethics prevailing there, and he struggles on, forever unhappy, forever feeling deprived. A distant relative, Meera, a woman of great personality and charms, turns up at the same company, occupying a higher post, and takes a fancy on Jay. She quickly becomes his surrogate mother, while expecting to be his lover, guiding him through the jungle of life with patience and poise. But Jay has a fiancee, Tuli, who is divided sharply between her loyalty to her parents and family, and her lukewarm liking of Jay whom she cannot imagine to be approved by her family for marriage. Yet marriage is what she desires and eventually gets . . . but not with Jay. What can Jay do? He can be more drunk, more miserable and more desperate. And to compound matters, Meera is away somewhere in Dubai, doing an overseas stint for the firm. Jay begins to flounder. He had left his mother, if you recall, and begun to live his own life. Only it proves to be a shadow of a life. He changes his job on better prospects, but cannot bring it to himself to go back to mother, or even visit her. He had fixed her up with a caregiver, and he forces himself to forget her. Indeed, the last time he had seen her, she had thrown a glass after him, which shattered and showered splinters all over. When he had closed the door behind him, it was the sound of glass breaking that chased him away.
After months of lunatic loneliness, irreconcilable but inescapable the mother dies.
Back at his mother's flat after the funeral he sits on the floor of his mother's bedroom and muses: so this is what it comes to finally? This is the price? [He had sold the flat to a neighbour at a good price.] And what is he supposed to do with the money . . .? This woman has suddenly
thrust him up to the top of this paper mountain and here he stands now, alone, looking down at the city, at the puny people toiling mindlessly, at the hordes trudging homewards every evening . . . But wait. He will not be alone for long. Because up comes Meera, who is in town and knocks on the door. Jay doesn't open, but she says she'll wait. All night if I have to. He looks down at the latch and after an eternity debating who he really loved, and what this sleep-around bitch [meaning Meera] really is, he relents. Slowly, as if of its own volition, the latch begins to turn, to open.
Two stories, two lives. They finally merge at this point.
3. The Bombay story of Vertigo is about a ferocious, cannibalistic cult which considers money the sole god, and power and pleasures his two outstretched hands. This story is single minded and because of its commercial association, slightly global. It is also strangely Anglo-Indian, as the novel's early eighties ambience doesn't include any Indian or local cultural markers. More Hollywood than Bollywood. No local celebrity is mentioned: Lata, Mohammad Rafi, Gavaskar, Dev Anand -- none. In keeping with the upper-crust Bombayites' craze for a western life, the cultural markers are also imported. The mother-son story, on the other hand, with all its Indian connections and connotations, is a genuinely home-grown one and is the stuff that contributes to the novel's enduring appeal. It is vicious but simple, elemental but enduring. The story has an air of inevitability about it -- it just happens, it doesn't have to be willed into place. Banker knows the power of this archetypal, Indian tale, and weaves his other story around it. Jay's rejection of Bombay at the end is an indication of how the more local and timeless story has the power to pull us into its deep centre. And the force with which we are pulled leaves us with a strong feeling of vertigo.
S. Manzoorul Islam teaches English at Dhaka University.