'The Complex' book review: Hollow at the core

Karan Mahajan's much-anticipated novel tries hard to weave together the citizens personal history and the state's political evolution, but fall short of elegance, writes Saudha Kasim.

In an interview with Electric Literature about his new novel The Complex, the author Karan Mahajan explains that while he has written a story about a family, he doesn’t want it to be categorised as a “family saga”. He has instead tried to tell a story where “…the characters are linked to each other through violation rather than by patrimony or inheritance.”

The family at the heart of The Complex are the descendants of S P Chopra, who was one of the framers of India’s constitution and a Reserve Bank governor. SP’s legacy is etched into the nation’s consciousness — his picture, one character observes, is “…like that of Mao in China, [hanging] on every wall”. SP’s children and grandchildren live together noisily and messily in a two-building residential complex in a posh Delhi neighbourhood. None of them has emulated the achievements of their illustrious patriarch. The violations (there are more than one) in the story are sexual assault and rape, with the rapist being SP’s youngest, Laxman, the very definition of a failson.

Using the narrative device of the found manuscript, the book begins with a note from Mahajan describing the circumstances that led him to find the text of The Complex in the drafts folder of a Gmail account belonging to Mohit Chopra, SP’s great-grandson. Mohit was an aspiring writer, troubled by his family’s poisonous legacy. Writing The Complex was his way of explaining their decline, starting with what happened to his aunt, Gita, who’d moved to the US in the 1970s after marrying his uncle, Sachin.

Sachin escaped the toxic swamp of the complex, going to the US to study and work as a packaging engineer specialising in plastics. Gita, unlike Sachin, still holds on to a romantic notion of their homeland — she keeps pressing her husband that it would be better to return to India rather than continue in the cold emptiness of small-town Michigan. On a trip to India on her own, however, this attachment to India is shattered when she attends a wedding at the complex and is raped by Laxman.

Mahajan (thankfully) doesn’t dwell on the violent act itself; the horror of it is conveyed clearly through its impact on Gita’s psyche and her helplessness — none of her in-laws is ready to listen. Laxman, his sister Vibha sickeningly suggests, was trying to help solve Sachin’s and Gita’s problems in conceiving a child. When Gita tries to broach the subject with Sachin without mentioning the actual rape, he waves it away, saying his relatives are “…just like that, they’re all complexed.”

Laxman then embarks on a years-long affair with Karishma, who is married to Sachin’s older brother Brij and is Mohit’s mother. Karishma — a fatal mix of Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina — is as much an instigator of this confounding relationship as Laxman. The Chopra clan turns a blind eye to this transgression as well until it reaches its inevitable, violent end.

The Complex is a baggy novel that encompasses multiple points of view, but there is a hollowness at its core. The perspectives of its most interesting characters, Gita and Karishma, are often sidelined to dive into Laxman’s vacuous “double consciousness” and greasy venality. He’s singularly charmless on the page (even if characters claim otherwise), always trying to start up a business (manufacturing bobby pins and, when that fails, ayurvedic balms) and initially heads the austere sect that SP once led.

He isn’t a spiritual person; instead using his position to embezzle donations and access a room atop the sect’s temple where he carries out his sordid affairs. After failing to get into Congress (he’s blocked by his older brother), he aligns himself with the Hindu nationalists, the Trishul People’s Party (TPP) and finds success in the polarising years of the Ram Mandir rath yatras and the Mandal Commission protests.

Mahajan’s prose tends towards over-description, some of which leaves the reader floundering — when two characters fly to London from Cairo, they doze with “…their heads forming a tent against the propeller roar”. Americanisms abound in a story set for the most part in India: a character rubs “a stick of butter” on a roti in Delhi, and the Mandal protests are described as “anti-affirmative action”. Female characters repeatedly shriek or are otherwise shrill.

The choice to name the Congress Party and its leaders, as well as the RSS and VHP, while disguising the BJP as the TPP, is a head scratcher. One can understand that the Congress’ vulnerability these days makes it easier to dissect their historical political failings and violence (the 1984 riots are part of the story), but then why not fictionalise both parties if there’s a fear of repercussions?

Another novel published recently is also set in almost the same historical timeline as The Complex: Rahul Bhattacharya’s Railsong. Both books braid the personal history of the citizen with the political evolution of the state, but Railsong does it with greater elegance, wit and a generosity of spirit. My suggestion would be to give Mahajan’s claustrophobic Chopra complex a miss and spend time on the rails with Bhattacharya’s Miss Chitol instead.