Book title: How to Fight Islamist Terror from the
Missionary Position
Author: Tabish Khair
Publisher: Fourth Estate
Pages: 529
Price: Rs 450
Is it possible to like and not like a book at the same
time? There is candour in the way Tabish Khair chooses to tell his story that
is endearing. Here, it seems, is an author who does not take himself too
seriously, and can treat grave matters of the self and others with levity. But
this quality is about all that can instigate one to go on till the end of How
to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position without losing interest
midway. Khair tries very hard to be funny, and while the humour works in some
places, in most cases, it doesn’t.
Besides, the plot is too scattered for the novel to
create a lasting impression. If the reader really loses the plot in the middle
of the novel, it would be quite ironic, since Khair talks constantly of
beginning in medias res (which he chooses to call “in media res”) as a
narrative and survival strategy. He does try that tactic out in this novel,
which begins in medias res alright, but also seems to end there.
It is difficult to say what Khair’s novel is all
about. There is a lot about Islamist terror, real and imagined, faith, love,
disillusionment, and Denmark, where, incidentally, Khair lives. While the
comments on the first few topics fail to add up to anything substantial, those
on Denmark have a surprising directness that makes one feel that the expatriate
author is trying to explain the mores of his adoptive country to himself and to
his readers.
The deadliness of Danish nicety is concretized in the
perfect Lena, who is rejected by Ravi because she seems frozen in her unfailing
courtesy. Ravi — the disgruntled son of an upper-class Hindu family from India
who goes to live in Denmark with his Pakistani friend, the unnamed narrator —
stands for the warmth of disorder that is the hallmark of both India and
Pakistan. At the novel’s end, he returns to India to be greeted by “trishuls,
spears, lathis, crescent-shaped swords” in the narrator’s dream. Perhaps chaos,
and its extreme effect, rebellion, are sometimes healthy for life, as for love.
They are certainly preferable to the tedium of structures.
The other point of the triad at the centre of the
novel is Karim Bhai, a devout Indian Muslim who holds Quranic sessions every
Friday in his flat, which he rents out to Ravi and the narrator. Ravi, the
scourge of propriety, the drifting bohemian with a heart of gold, the rebel who
is ever alone in his difference, attends the sessions diligently because, as he
says, “They discuss matters of significance and do it honestly: how to make
sense of the world, how to make it a better world. They still have a
conscience, these young men and women, not just a bank account like the rest of
these people.”
How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary
Position would have stood better as a short story than as the novel that it is.
It is a well-intentioned work, which is why one tends to like it. But one also
wishes that Khair had been less anxious to bring home the reverence in his
irreverence. An intelligent reader would have got Khair’s point even if he had
not made a god, of the Dionysian kind, out of the cheeky Ravi.
By ANUSUA MUKHERJEE
Published on June 1, 2012
No comments:
Post a Comment