Blurring boundaries

This is a novel that seamlessly shifts between the fantastic and the real to make sense of the foggy world that sits in between.

The Light at the End of the World is, in a sense, a state-of-the-nation novel, its four parts poised at critical junctures in the history of the country; only, the telling is neither linear nor realistic. Deb implies that for individuals to make sense of where they are placed and how things have come to be, “a gradual dissolving of the boundary between the fantastic and the real” is called for; or he may simply be a teller of phantasmagoric stories with a substratum of the real.

The first part, which anchors the novel, is set in Delhi, a city of “demonetisation and brume”. People queue up to exchange their expired money for new magenta banknotes; the glossy-haired anchor of a primetime TV show harangues his guests; a superweapon, a Brahmastra, is being hatched by Ombani Labs.

The fog envelops the city which festers in its embrace. The city is rotting even as it is growing. “A giant sign for Boeing Aerospace Corporation looming over a new city coming into being, its boundaries edged by corrugated tin walls and low plastic tents around which small, dark figures clear rubbish with primitive tools in the blistering heat.” Among the tropes invoked across the novel is Delhi’s Monkeyman who is projected as an embodiment of all the marginalised people feared by urban, upwardly mobile India.

In this city lives Bibi, working for a shadowy company, in a dead-end job. Bibi is quite faceless — no husband, no boyfriend, no children, no savings, no property, no mentor, no godfather, not even young anymore, as a sinister man describes her. But Bibi has a past, and it catches up with her when a strange creature leaves a pen drive in a client’s office, and in it is incriminating evidence of her journalist avatar. Her last exposé has revealed a deep state conspiracy — a detention centre where clandestine clinical trials are being carried out. Bibi is now tasked with locating her former colleague and comrade in arms who she believes is dead.

In the second part, which prefigures the 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy, an unnamed assassin, devoted to Manu’s laws, is sent by a mysterious patron to follow a man, an operator at an American-run chemical factory. As the assassin waits restlessly for instructions, he ponders over his mission and the first misgivings begin to form.

In the first two sections of the novel, even as the protagonists hover between the real and their delusions, they have a sense of being moored in their context, they are vested in their places. In the next two sections, Deb’s characters’ dissociation from their worlds is extreme and the narrative spools in tandem with its people.

Das, a veterinary student in Calcutta, fails his exam when he cannot mount a horse, and that leads to an unravelling. He thinks he is receiving instructions from a compassionate Committee that aims to spread peace and love in a city beset by famine and riots on the eve of independence, by creating an anti-bomb aircraft, the Vimana. Even as Das sees a psychoanalyst as directed by the Committee, he believes he is destined to pilot the Vimana since he alone is in possession of its secrets.

Two years after the Sepoy Mutiny, Sykes, a British officer in pursuit of a rebel is thrown off course when he runs into the hypnotic White Mughal and ends up in the man’s Ajaib Ghar, house of magic, in thrall to its curiosities. In this section, as in the rest of the novel, there are references to figures literary and historical, flavours of other works, and some doffing of the hat. Here Coleridge’s wedding guest meets Alice, with Kafka thrown into the mix as a hallucinating Sykes is led into a mysterious Zone reminiscent of Tarkovsky’s Stalker.

Multiple threads

The challenge in a loose, baggy, freewheeling novel is to make the multiple stories with their many voices cohere enough to get a sense of where it is leading. If one were to pursue the slim threads of association between the sections that could stand alone as novellas in their own right, it would be that each of the protagonists is on a quest, a journey that grows progressively more bizarre and disconnected from reality. Deb’s people are misfits who withdraw into their own frantic heads, except for Bibi, who is granted some measure of redemption and makes some sense of the world.

In the epilogue, Bibi flies to the Andaman Islands to the erstwhile penal colony set up by the British to jail the prisoners of the Sepoy Mutiny. Her detention centre story may have come full circle but in a world where there is little hope and less to distinguish truth from fiction, Bibi understands that we would do best to listen to the voices that speak to us in our deepest dreams and in many tongues, “asking us to listen to our deepest selves, to whatever in us yearns to be most liberated.”