Myth, muse, mirage, a romance and a lament -- the metropolis is a protean beast haunting the dreams of its writers. In Rahman Abbas’ Rohzin, Mumbai serves many of these functions, now a watery canvas floating the boat of first love and now a cesspool of emotional traumas.
The story begins in Mabadmorpho, a coastal village where Asrar
has just finished high school, and decided to go to Mumbai to learn a trade. Living
in ‘Jamat ki kholi’, along with other boys from the village, the teenager is introduced
to the glitz, the stink and the contestations of identity that have defined Mumbai
in recent decades. Seen through his eyes, the city comes alive with details
such as a gold tooth with a yellowing one right next to it, a commode that
looks like a bursting and blistering ulcer, a drain in Kamathipura and its
sustenance of animal and insect life.
Despite its sensory shocks, Asrar is willing to be seduced
by the city and is not disappointed. He finds work with a manufacturer of
costume jewellery and embraces new experiences, though the sadness and
confusion that had infused his life in the village continues to inflect his moods.
That is, until he meets Hina, the daughter of a perfumer. The romance that
unfolds is marked by sweetness and a lack of calculation typical of teenage
love, but the novel is saved from the cliches of love-at-first-sight through
other, less idealized sexual encounters and the quiet grief of the young men
who live and work together. Feminine grief and desire are pencilled in rather
than detailed, and ultimately subsumed or made serviceable within an
overarching masculine fantasy.
The perfumer, Yusuf, has also been shaken from his moorings
through an encounter with an Algerian woman, whose beauty and erudition lead
him to reconsidering his faith and his marriage. He leaves his wife, whom he
has treated less like a partner and more like a field to be ‘ploughed’, and
enters a circle of Luciferians. Here, one set of rituals is exchanged for
another, replete with candles and speeches, and sexual encounters are unencumbered
by responsibility. The novel frequently segues into philosophical conversations
about sex and strictures that may limit human experience, and the question of
whether one can liberate oneself from civilization. However, it stops short of
building a serious debate about such questions and it is never clear whether
Abbas portray the ‘reptiles’ of the unconscious ironically or as a conscious
commentary on cults that may emerge from grief, guilt or ennui.
The writer addresses upfront the role identity plays in
triggering external and internal crises. The average Indian wears a multi-layered
identity, constructed from historic and ongoing migrations. Asrar, for
instance, has Zoroastrian heritage on one side, Konkani on the other, and is
Muslim perhaps only as an accident of birth. Similarly, other characters are Gujarati
Muslim or Arab, but connected to a pre-Islamic Egyptian or Algerian heritage. Linguistic
identity complicates matters further. On the train, Asrar and his friends are
initially dismissed as ‘bhaiyya’ by a group of Gujarati passengers. In
response, they immediately assert their Maharashtrian identity by speaking in
Konkani, thus shutting up the Gujarati group. Later, Asrar notices burqas and
bearded men at one station and wonders if the area is ‘ours’. However, this
identity is complex too, since these people are identified as Qasai or Chilya,
and not Konkani Muslims.
Mumba devi is another major character in the novel. Through
history, dream and surrealist asides, Abbas weaves in legends about the
goddess, myths surrounding the seven islands that make up Mumbai, and a
foretold catastrophe. The novel draws on a modern literary tradition and the
influence of Urdu writers like Naiyer Masud is apparent, with realism and
surrealism colluding to create a strangeness that manifests as mourning
dolphins, Djinns who eat hearts, mysterious books that may turn the world on
its head, and conversations between a tree and a monster.
Unfortunately, the translation is more literal than literary.
While the flavour and flow of the original text is suggested, it does not
always translate neatly into the English idiom. The use of phrases such as
‘temporary tiles’ and ‘looking at the fort from a very exclusive angle’ tend to
jar, as does the use of ‘votive promise’ for what one imagines was ‘mannat’ in
the original Urdu. Such phrases are entirely unnecessary in a book otherwise peppered
with Hindi words and where whole sentences have been retained in Roman script.
The inconsistent use of translated text within brackets is another inexplicable
editorial decision since most of the dialogue has been translated into English
and it is apparent that the characters converse mainly in Hindi, Marathi or Konkani.
Worse, where translations are provided alongside the original text, they show
themselves to be only partial faithful. For instance, when a character talks to
a beggar boy, he addresses the latter pejoratively as ‘Abe Saale’, which has
been omitted entirely in translation. I sympathize with the translator given
the task at hand was so difficult (how does one faithfully translate a
Bambaiyya phrase like ‘Eda ban kar peda khane ka’?) but bilingual readers will
find it hard ignore such bumps and elisions.
What makes it worthwhile is the interlacing of closely
observed lives in contemporary Mumbai and the fantastical elements of the Urdu
imaginary. The novel also recalls the trauma of the 1992-93 riots and subsequent
bomb blasts, the Dockyards tragedy of 1944, the custodial death of Khwaja Yunus
in 2003, and even the future terror attack of 2008. Some of these events muddy
the timeline of the novel, disorienting readers who are familiar with the
city’s history. Still, the incorporation of such memories means that, despite
its occupation with sex and love, the novel never strays far from the city’s
socio-political wounds. For those who know the city, the novel may thus serve
as ‘sheher-e-ashob’, a literature that laments even as it recognizes the beauty
of what is lost.
Published in The Hindu: