Distorted realities

Raj Kamal Jha’s latest book, The Patient in Bed Number 12, is both a pandemic novel and a state-of-the-nation novel. Jha’s day job as a senior journalist gives him a better vantage point than most fiction writers from which to write a book that functions as both.

The patient in the title is a dying father who’s estranged from his adult daughter. They have been estranged ever since she ran away from home and married a Muslim man. Now, as he lies in the ICU with only the head nurse Sister Shiny Mathew to talk to, he’s trying to re-establish contact and ensure that he’s also able to see his granddaughter before his inevitable death. On his nurse’s suggestion, he starts writing notes to his daughter. What starts out as personal missives, however, soon turn into explorations of the lives being lived on the edges of a nation that is failing its most vulnerable.

There are stories of men being lynched, young women who are brutalised, a teacher who loses a job during the pandemic and instead becomes a security guard in a mall, and more. The most powerful man in the country appears to the dying father in bed number 12 as “Our Great Doctor” quoting Peter Pan and reminding the patient of long-forgotten bits of his personal history. When questioned how the Great Doctor could know such intimate details of an ordinary citizen, he replies “…I know the pulse of every Indian, I listen to each heartbeat, I know all.”

The first part of The Patient in Bed Number 12 is told mostly from the point of view of the father before shifting, in the second and third parts to the daughter, Nisha. Here, a mounting sense of dread comes upon the reader — the novel’s prologue mentions a video and as you read Nisha’s and her daughter’s journal-like entries, you know that the culmination of this story isn’t going to be a happy one.One of the more puzzling creative choices that Jha has made while writing this novel is to include photographs at regular intervals in the story. Yes, we are told that the narrator(s) are taking these pictures and they are not professional photographers — but I am not sure that including two pictures of a computer screen showing an online exam adds anything to the narrative. Especially when the pictures, on facing pages, are barely legible and taken from odd downward angles.

Dream logic

The use of the dream structure to explore individual and collective consciousness is not a new concept in fiction. The interconnected chapters of the first part of the book follow a dream logic, and to a large extent, these are constructed well. However, you question the intention of the writer when you read the descriptions of lynchings and violence and the forced migration of the poor during the pandemic lockdowns. The reader is forced to confront some of the ugliest incidents of our recent past; all laid out in gorgeous prose. And one cannot help but think whether such trauma that continues to affect large swathes of the population needs such pretty words. Poetic descriptions of broken bodies and heads may please the writer while they exercise their craft but is it really doing justice to the victims to give the violence visited upon them an aesthetic sheen? These sections veer dangerously close to trauma porn.

While it is set in the pandemic era and characters are affected by the restrictions imposed on day-to-day living, Covid and its miseries are just another in a list of incidents that are strung together in the narrative.

Worryingly, they do not serve to make the text any more coherent. At several points, while reading the novel, I couldn’t help but think this would have worked better as a series of oral histories compiled and edited for another, more interactive medium than just a printed book.

Yes, these are troubling and stressful times, and yes, our societal problems long predate the pandemic, and yes, the ease with which technology and vigilantism mesh together to torment ordinary people should make anyone despair. But I am not completely convinced that The Patient in Bed Number 12 succeeds in giving a unique perspective on these matters — which is what sets a work of art apart from the many attempts on the same themes and topics.

Writers and creatives are continuing to work on and produce stories about the pandemic and our current political environment.

Two recent, vastly superior works of fiction that address these themes separately — Parth Saurabh’s feature film Pokhar Ke Dunu Paar and Devika Rege’s debut novel Quarterlife — succeed largely because they choose to limit their narrative to a specific time and place, anchoring them in locales and milieus that are authentically realised and fleshed out.

Maximalist fiction — Jha’s novel can definitely be considered a maximalist narrative with its crowd of narrators and a mishmash of content forms — that prefers to throw in everything but the kitchen sink can be extraordinary when executed well. However, more often than not, political fiction that examines the fault lines of a society and its culture is perhaps most effective when minimal in scope.