Delight, decay & decadence

This novel is 899 pages long and invents a new level of torture for the unwary reviewer. It also brings to the surface that simmering query: what is a novel? Increasingly, publishers act as gatekeepers and narrow the margins of what a book is. Thus, many a book is today mostly mediocre, jargon-infested, easily ingested and easily forgotten. Whatever Great Eastern Hotel by Ruchir Joshi may be, it is written by an author who knows what he wants to say and dominates the vision of what his book must be.

The book is foremost a paean to Kolkata; of proportions epical. It is over-indulgent but critical; it is timeless though shrinking time into multiple blueprints. The food is relevant, the multitudes here are a cultural mishmash and the buildings are of note: all have their own story much like Joyce’s Dublin, in Ulysses. The background and history seep into the narrative like moss. It is not the glamourous parts alone that find mention here but the seedier, dustier, forgettable and forgotten strips as well. As everyone in Kolkata will tell you — it is the concept of the city, not reality. “And, though the going of the wallet hurts, it’s not so much the material loss as the cut of realisation that it opens. Bengal. Bengalis. Calcutta-Kolkata-Kolikata. Lok. Jonota. People. These are words he has taken for granted, as he has the vast districts of meaning they represent but, today, he feels he has made his first real journey into the actual territories, and the trip has jolted him.”

The interwoven stories of activist Niru, privileged Kedar, daughter of a British Raj official Imogen and pickpocket Gopal provide a safety net the tale can bounce off from. And bounce it does, as it twirls, spins out in fragments and regroups. The narrative is accessible, while deeply reflexive, and brooding. It branches off to include Gopal and Aurangazeb as Gourangazeb. It goes into the minutiae of the lives of a bewildering mishmash of American and other foreign soldiers, as well as into early Indian aviation. It folds history from Rabindranath’s death to more sinister events into neat parcels. It visits places now reduced to ghostly memories. The era is quaint but familiar; for the Calcutta of the 1940s and beyond is still a living thing.

“If you happened to be flying in a small aeroplane over Calcutta on the morning of 14 August 1942, the first thing you’d notice would be the plumes of smoke rising from different parts of the city. … Before all that, however, just as you bank left from the smouldering mess of the five-way crossing at Chowringhee and Dharmatolla, you would fly over the sprawl of the Great Eastern Hotel with the warren of cabins and storerooms on its roof terrace.” A concentric circle of war, mayhem, politics, unrest and unease. Lying within was Kolkata in its tremulous beauty. The innermost locale here is as the name of the book suggests. For one aspirational Calcutta dream was to dine at this Mecca, for the world it represented.

Through a rather leisurely story arc with numerous digressions and points of view, quite like an impressionist painting, the author paints a consolidated image that stays with you. There is a Mashima, a radhuni and words like chomotkar scattered over. Calcutta then stood tall on the world stage and was a meeting ground for cultures of the world, each of which left scars on the city. It was a time for the fractures and hurt lines that have made the megapolis what it is today; in a sense, mourning and covering wounds. Ultimately it is about millions of people who lived, loved and hid secrets. And it is about a hotel that saw it all.

All along is the faint warning that history will repeat itself. “Gopal notices a signboard in English — Hotel Pakistan — which someone has scrawled over with some sticky black substance. Across the road, the board for Jinnah Biryani House has escaped with a few faint marks, the correctionists clearly having run out of redacting material.”

And as the author poignantly says, some things could never change. “This was Elko and Missus’s little joke, their little nod not just to the hotel but also to Calcutta, the greater Great Eastern Hotel. As I look at the sign, it occurs to me that this Great Eastern Hotel is not a ruin, not dead, it’s alive and constantly moving across the planet….”

There is a minor footnote to this magnum opus: it has taken 20 years to write. In this world of overproduction and waste, 20 years is insane. Yet, every phrase and image has been honed to perfection. Every bit is in the book because it is placed there by choice. Rarely does vision match execution and this comes pretty close. Read it for a masterclass in the joy of writing from the heart.