Marginalia

Saikat Mazumdar’s debut novel is an impressive attempt at portraying ordinary people’s lives that are lived quietly on the margins, writes OMAIR AHMED

India remains a land of untold stories and undocumented lives, especially of those who live their lives around the edges, the non-achievers, almost what you would call the failures. Saikat Mazumdar's Silverfish is an attempt to document two such lives, running parallel to each other, about two centuries apart, in the Calcutta-that-was and the Kolkatta-that-is.

Milan babu is the retired school teacher, running from uncaring pillar to indifferent post through a maze of government offices in the futile hope of receiving his stalled pension payments. He lives in the present, partly, because his life has been spent, and partially still exists, in the world of letters, with two books to his credit, and a number of submissions to literary journals.

Kamal is a widow in the Calcutta-that-was, cloistered behind high walls in a palace reminiscent of scenes from Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam. In the prime of her life, she has been forced to turn away into a non-life. Saved from joining her husband on his funeral pyre by the laws of British rulers, she is given a small space for a life to be spent in abnegation and some thoughts of her only son. Except that she has acquired, stunningly, the ability to read and write, and her thoughts survive on a yellowed manuscript to live and speak in the Kolkatta-that-is.

The thread that connects the two is a bookseller, a silverfish of a man by the name of Moidul, who makes his living off the very manuscripts he loves, and is the

Silverfish Saikat Mazumdar, HarperCollins India, 293 pp

father of Milan babu's favourite pupil, Sabeer. Except that such links are unhappy ones. Moidul is made an example of by the goons who collect their 'protection money' from shopkeepers. Battered and broken, he commits suicide, and Milan babu receives Kamal's manuscript when Sabeer decides to try for a job in Dubai, and offers Milan babu anything he wants from what Moidul has left behind.

The ideas, and linkages, are lovely. Unfortunately the narrative does not really live up to the full potential of them. Milan babu's explorations through the corridors of a dysfunctional bureaucracy, his inability to save Moidul, or Sabeer's academic career, his efforts to confront a corrupted political system, are all told through a variety of clichés. There is the street smart slum kid, the school bully who has become a political fixer, and none of this is particularly new, nor presented in a novel form. Kamal's voice sounds forced, and the language of her manuscript sounds stilted and inappropriate. Phrases such as "the liveliest, baddest imp of the whole mansion" or, "I felt pretty stupid in that frantic toe-hop over fire" hardly sound like something written in the 19th century. Worse, when a limb of a cow is left behind the alleyway of Moidul's shop to implicate him, one of his supporters claims that the limb isn't chopped 'halal style'. Halal is a method of slaughter and may, possibly, be detected on examining the neck. It is impossible to do so with a hind leg.

Despite these flaws, Mazumdar does have the ability to create real characters with interesting stories. Gautum, the reserved son of Milan babu, who has the uncanny ability to enjoy his petty job, is one, as is Shirin, the daughter of Milan babu's friend who has gone on to teach English in far-off America. The section of the book dealing with Milan babu and Shirin has much of the authenticity and authority missing in parts of the text but it is only a small section, and near the end.

As a debut work, Silverfish shows ambition and tries to present the lives of ordinary people in extraordinary situations, the core goal of a novelist. It is heartening that Mazumdar tries to bring to life the many 'ordinary' people in our midst, and hopefully his next work will show greater mastery.