This stunning novel re-states the erotic in Indian fiction with beauty, imagination and the power of truth

By Paul Zacharia

The alchemy of desire Tarun Tejpal HarperCollins India Rs 500

Tarun Tejpal’s first novel takes on what could be called near-impossible ground in the Indian cultural situation, or, for that matter, in a lot of ‘advanced’ cultures all over the world. It is the depiction of sexuality in fiction in words that squarely face up to their task — or in words, so to say, that are accountable. Khajuraho and Kama Sutra may be recalled fondly, but Indians in general, in public, wince when they run into sex in writing. It’s such a traditionally treacherous ground and tread by so few, including the rebellious ones, that the space has been almost entirely occupied by the slummers of pornography. Giving writing about sex a more shady name by their lack of aesthetics and, shall we say, hygiene.

But that doesn’t mean that Indians do not want to read about sex. They do read, but secretly. Cinema is fiction too. Indian cinema specialises in images that play hide-and-seek with sex. Indians are quite comfortable with that. Their problem is with sex as word. Is it perhaps because we, as a race, rely heavily on the word to embellish our central hypocrisies and are embarrassed to see the same word used to uncover the most hush-hush area of our legendary double-standards? Who knows the Indian mind? That is, if there’s an Indian mind.

I don’t know how it is with other Indian languages, but I know that, in Malayalam, which is supposedly liberated language because of its revolutionary associations etc, it’s very hard to depict sex in the so-called mainstream segment of writing. Malayali writers have veered clear of body-sex with such a sanitary strictness for so long that there are hardly any Malayalam words to write about sex with. Words are empowered and enabled when writers use them with beauty, imagination and the force of truth. In Malayalam, words for sex continue to remain chained in the ‘dirty’ realm. Tejpal may be considered to be on safer ground because he is writing in English. English literary genius — as also European — crossed the Laxman rekha of sex long ago. But those were societies where capitalism’s de-construction of Christian ethics had, by and large, brought sex within the threshold of public tolerance. Here in India, Tejpal may be using English, but he is writing in a society where the name of the game is Double-Speak.

Guts and the Glory: Tejpal

Those two journalists, Hemingway and Marquez, will be proud of their tribesman Tarun Tejpal

That’s why I admire his guts and grit in writing The Alchemy of Desire — in deciding to be accountable for his words and his genius. And he powers his words with an exhilarating energy and force, making them re-state the erotic in Indian writing. Tejpal’s novel is easily the most beautifully sensuous work by an Indian that I’ve ever read. His narrative of the body’s desire shines with a heart-warming vibrancy.

But this is much more than a novel about love. I stressed the erotic aspect of the novel because that, in particular, is a remarkable breakthrough in India. I say this keeping in view the work of the two famous path-finders: Khushwant Singh and Shobaa De. Tejpal brings to his narrative a dexterous paradigm-shift of concerns that sets him in a special place in contemporary Indian fiction. In a cunning artistry of transformation, he manages to coincide the physical language of bodies in love with the word of the writer. A host of body-matters and things consigned to the absurd realm of the ‘obscene’ resurrects in his hands to create a sexuality that’s almost hallucinatory in its tonality.

It might be said that this is limited by the fact that it’s a one-sided experience: only a man’s desire for a woman. But Tejpal transcends the gender-barrier with a leap of feeling that explores love as a common territory. Actually, the novel is about how a man discovers that he is no more in love at all. And the woman he had haunted and possessed with his body and mind without satiety, is forced to walk out on him. In the process, Tejpal captures the indescribably wispy and fabulous contours of sexual energy with words that seem to be magically in place. It was high time that somebody did it. What’s most fascinating is that he brings to the exercise an Indianness that’s contemporary and sharp. Finally English seems to be able to speak to us about even those things we hide so assiduously!

The novel deals with two love stories: one is about the break-up between the narrator and his wife Fiza; the other is what the narrator retrieves from a set of old diaries and describes the triangular relationship between the American woman Catherine, her husband Syed, an Indian nawab and Gaj Singh, who was a lover of both. The border-line between erotica and pornography being so thin universally, Tejpal performs a grand sleight of hand, of word and feeling, of touch and smell and sensation and posture to mediate a stunningly direct position that is both lyrical and explicit.

I found Tejpal faltering only in the second half as the plot thickens and the story from the past enters the narrative. The process of picking up the mysteries of that story, its threads and clues, and moving them forward to a unity, sometimes exposes the covered artifacts of plot. And Fiza’s impending return to the narrator’s life seems a bit too pat. But these are small matters before what is achieved by this first novel.