The Nairobi-born author Manesh Rao’s first novel The Smoke is Rising offered multiple points of view on a rapidly developing urban location: Rao’s adoptive home of Mysore. One Point Two Billion, his subsequent short story collection, similarly provides a diversity of voices encountered in a range of situations. In Rao’s debut fiction such parts might have seemed to “coalesce into a single articulation” and “character” (namely, the Indian city) as critic Sam Jordison has observed. In his later selection of 13 stories set in locations scattered across India, however, Rao’s widely dispersed narratives remain unconnected, save in the wider sense alluded to by his title, as minute but potentially microcosmic contributions to the overarching story of a nation teeming with people and consciousnesses, as insights into the inner lives of a sample of India’s ‘one point two billion’. Although of course not necessary, such individual tales’ lack of sustained stylistic or narrative linkage seems somewhat disappointing. The result is a slightly uneven and unwieldy selection, whose disparate parts, though of merit in themselves, combine to offer no satisfying sense of a whole.

Rao’s stories take the reader from an international yoga centre frequented by peculiar foreigners on the outskirts of the southern city of Mysore, to an austere camp for displaced people somewhere in the state of Odisha, on India’s eastern shores. Meanwhile, mutilated bodies suspected to belong to Dalits are unearthed on a feudal family’s extensive property in the central Indian village of Neelgarh — evidence that “family secrets could leak and corrode” — to the disturbance of few excepting the faded haveli’s New York-returned daughter. Further west, a jaded, second-rate former star of Hindi cinema runs an acting academy in off-peak hours from a studio situated off Mumbai’s polluted arterial road, and in the collection’s penultimate story, a timid primary school teacher plots his petty revenge for the censorship of alphabet textbooks in Kashmir, in the country’s extreme north.

A baker’s dozen of singularly inconsequential lives that make up the billion souls populating Manesh Rao’s India.

Themes familiar to readers of postcolonial South Asian fiction recur. The first tale entitled ‘Eternal Bliss’, offers a wry perspective on the single woman Bindu’s anxious quest to retain employment in a dubiously spiritual tourist industry that panders to Western tastes and is regulated by an intricately bureaucratic and unpredictable native system. In this story, ascetic, other-worldly foreign guests are viewed from a humorous, ironic and secular narrative perspective which conveys the local staff’s and population’s bafflement and emphasises the weight — in the midst of all this pseudo-spirituality — of their more prosaic, quotidian concerns. These are in evidence following an excursion to a neighbouring orphanage laid on for the yoga centre’s guests, quickly pronounced a disaster by the story’s unamused narrator, whose voice is surely inflected with the disapproval of the weary Bindu. She comically observes, “The sight of so many strangers … with shaved heads and tattoos ... unsettled the children and one of them suffered a fit. The foreigners returned … crestfallen and exhausted.” Such scenes, concisely and vividly rendered, are further enhanced by oblique references to anti-colonial figures from Indian history, which may tickle knowing readers. We are informed that a visit to the palace of Tipu Sultan (patron of the “white man eating tiger toy machine” immortalised by poet Daljit Nagra, and a fierce opponent of the British) is offered along with the unfortunate trip to the orphanage. Thus Rao threads a sense of native resistance and resilience into the national and neo-colonial, rural, urban and industrial landscapes and contexts conjured by his short narratives, even as he charts the struggles and frustrations of his Indian subjects.

Some of the stories offer rather clichéd vignettes of (post)colonial encounters, for example in ‘Eternal Bliss’ when an illiterate maid frames a five-dollar note bearing the likeness of Abraham Lincoln and incorporates it in her daily prayer rituals. Certain voices, such as that of the embittered, elderly co-wife in ‘Drums’ seem a little forced; her coarse, gendered metaphors indicative of the waxing and waning of the camp’s “manhood” seem overdone. Interestingly, Rao’s most sophisticated stories may be found in the book’s later pages. ‘Hero’, for example, draws the would-be voyeur into the world of an apprentice pehlwan as he sweats and strains in his akhara. Yet it replaces the titillating tale of “savage beatings”, “fanatic” devotion and homosexual nocturnal activities which, Rao suspects, the reader might anticipate with the quite compelling story of a sensitive novice perplexed by the strength of his feelings for a talented new muscular addition to the akhara, who challenges the boy narrator’s understanding of his own masculinity.

An only child’s slow realisation of his widowed mother’s delusion, set against a backdrop of tribal and sectarian violence, is also poignantly rendered in ‘Minu Goyari Day’. The boy, whose nickname is “Shona”, and whose chief companion is the Best Children’s Encyclopaedia, offers a naive perspective both on his own “alien” status in Guwahati, Assam, on account of his Bangla-speaking parentage, and on the descent of his affectionate and resourceful mother into madness. Consumed with the task of honouring the memory of Minu didi, the “true heroine” of the violence-riven northeastern state, whose purported mission was to unite its people, the parent Shona knows slides from view as he grows into adulthood. Rao conveys both the absent presence of the grief-stricken mother whose physical “warmth” when she “lays her head on [her son’s] shoulder” will continue to “flow into his body” despite the detachment of her mind, and the irony of his inheritance of her obsession, in a few succinct lines. We are left haunted by the plight of this boy-turned-man, who is destined to “think about Minu Goyari and carry out his own investigations”, searching vainly for a reference which will unlock his mother’s mystery and prove her sanity.

Censorship and oppression is the theme of the second to last story in Rao’s collection, ‘The Word Thieves’, in which the solitary and retiring Kashmiri schoolteacher Farooq commits a small act of defiance against bureaucratic authorities. He harbours an alphabet book banned by the Board of Education for its inclusion of an image of a man bearing a “bamboo stave” under the entry “zoi se zalim”, ambiguously poised in terms of appearance between Hindu film hero, Rajput warrior and Maoist peasant. To Farooq and his fellow teachers, the “locus” of this simple drawing’s “insurrectionary power” is uncertain, but the danger of retaining it is not in question. Yet retain it Farooq does, and with it grows a desire to protect it from “vocabulary bandits, plunderers of the lexicon”, which leads to sedition. The metaphors used to describe the causes of his mounting and feverish resentment are evocative: “He saw his favourite phrases rolling up their mattresses, … handing back keys and queuing for trains and buses that would transport them to places far beyond the Valley”. One can almost see this surreal imaginary exodus, and Farooq’s final, guerrilla art protest, in which the story culminates, sketched out like a scene from a graphic novel, perhaps by the Kashmiri cartoonist Malik Sajjad.

The stories contained in One Point Two Billion are of variable substance and interest, and by no means representative of the Indian nation. Yet Rao, at his best, appears to have a gift for conjuring vivid pictures, establishing tensions, and portraying mental states through which a powerful sense of the diversity of subcontinental lives and the forces that animate them may be conveyed.

The reviewer is a research lecturer in the School of Design, Culture and the Arts at Teesside University and author of Writing Islam from a South Asian Muslim Perspective: Rushdie, Hamid, Aslam, Shamsie (Palgrave, 2015).

One Point Two Billion
(NOVEL)
By Manesh Rao
HarperCollins India
ISBN: 978-9351774846
243pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, September 11th, 2016