Ostensibly, ‘Serious Men’ is cast in the same mould as Arvind Adiga’s Booker-winning ‘The White Tiger’ which explored the struggle between the haves and the have-nots of India. Manu Joseph goes one step further – he names his antagonists as Brahmin and Dalit; and then proceeds to subvert what could have been a predictable rant against social injustice, with politically correct depictions of ‘them’ and ‘us’, into a sharp, mischievous but compassionate understanding of the complexities of the Indian situation (while never losing sight of the savagery of history), where Dalit and Brahmin alike have an equal share of virtue and vice, and all men are engaged in making shift in a society whose traps are as labyrinthine as its possibilities.
Ayyan Mani, a Tamil Dalit, is a clerk in the Institute of Theory and Research and lives in BDD chawl- ‘the mother of hell’. Ayyan spends his mornings watching the ‘tired high-caste faces’ of women exercising on the beach, imagining them all ‘in the ecstasy of being seduced by him’. He also watches his wife wilting under the crassness of life in BDD, and despairs of his son ever having a fair chance in this unequal world.
On the other side of the battle line are arrayed Arvind Acharya and his cohort of Brahmin scientists, immersed in the disinterested pursuit of scientific truth, more specifically, the search for evidence of extra terrestrial life. Acharya is a proponent of the Big Balloon approach while the opposing Giant Ear camp is led by Jana Nambodri. Both camps jostle openly for power and funds. An unsettling element is introduced by Oparna Ghoshmaulik, the sole woman scientist, who proceeds to fall in love with Acharya when, in complete disregard of her flawless skin and moist lips, he studies her gravely and comes up with (arguably the best line in the novel) - ‘You were born after Microsoft?’
Ayyan rages against the self-indulgent pursuits of the Brahmins and bides his time to stoke the incipient conflict between Acharya and Nambodri into the War of the Brahmins. He also uses ingenious means to secure his son’s future.
In the War of the Brahmins, Acharya’s undoing proves to be love. His trysts with Oparna are discovered; his Balloon Mission too closely follows the fortunes of his affair-he is unseated by Nambodri and then re-installed with help from Ayyan. Ayyan gets his heart’s desire when he inflames the War of the Brahmins into an actual conflagration, establishes his son’s future in the Institute and clasps Acharya’s Brahmin tuft firmly in his grasp.
We see, as Ayyan does that ‘In any given situation in this country … someone was the Brahmin and someone was the Untouchable’- and this is the framework of the novel, that these identities are, in a way, interchangeable, depending on which side the balance tilts. What perhaps favours this balancing of unequal is Bombay, the city in which the novel is set, where, as Ayyan notes, ‘the congestion of hopeless shuffling human bodies (is) … also … the fate of the rich.’
Of the many dimensions of this novel, the most subtle is its meditation on conjugality. Ayyan believes that ‘a man’s bond with his wife should not be corrupted with too much rationality’. But he sees the magic dwindling before his eyes, and if he does not make amends, his marriage will harden into Acharya and Lavanya’s, a bond so inured by habit that when Acharya is taking his wife to the doctor, he leaves ‘something’ behind in the car and then recollects that the something is his wife. And yet she is his email password, and this ‘dedication of passwords was the new fellowship of marriage. To each other, couples had become furtive asterisks.’ One of the most sensitive scenes in the book is when Acharya abruptly reveals his affair to his wife. Still bleary from sleep and thinking she has heard wrong, she gropes for her glasses to hear better.
Now for the caveats. Of all the characters, Oparna Ghoshmaulik is the only one whose identity is defined by her gender, or rather, her sex. Oparna represents the new outcast, the new underclass, the educated professional woman who does not belong to any man, but is doomed to furtive affairs. In this world of seriously self-seeking men, Oparna alone is cast adrift with no professional options, no exit strategy.
Joseph’s comic irony, delightful as it is, teeters too often on the edge of farce. Moreover, Ayyan is too much his creator’s shadow; going by the logic of the dimensions the author gives him, he cannot quite be the kind of man he is, with his lucid understanding and articulation. Also, given the author’s promise one would have hoped for a more dexterous interweaving of the two strands of the plot - Ayyan’s devious plotting and Acharya’s downward slide.
But these observations notwithstanding, ‘Serious Men’ could well be the most exciting debut in Indian writing in English since Arundhati Roy’s ‘The God of Small Things’.
Serious men
Manu Joseph
Fourth Estate
2010, pp 326
Rs 499