When The Centre And The Periphery Meet

AMITABHA BAGCHI reviews Ankush Saikia's debut novel, Jet City Woman

Rupa 200 pp; Rs 195

Ankush Saikia's debut, Jet City Woman, begins with the image of auto-rickshaws waiting in long queues for CNG at a pump outside a five star hotel, while inside artists and buyers move quietly past paintings at an art exhibition. This juxtaposition is the essence of Saikia's Delhi. Suffused with this feeling of outside-inside comes this 190-page narrative of a boy from somewhere else growing into a  troubled and uneasy man in a big city.

Delhi, in the second half of the 1990s, contains many charms for a narrator who comes into town with a second division BA in English Literature from the North Eastern Hill University and a Scheduled Tribe certificate. Not least among these is Naina Rathore, tall and fair, blessed with long hair, a mysterious past and an incipient future as a news anchor. Naina gives herself to the narrator quickly, and withdraws her favours equally fast. She will not be his, but neither will she leave him in peace. For masculinity in formation, this book astutely implies, success must be expressed as success with a woman. And so Saikia's  narrator, while scoring with more than one girl back home in Shillong, still longs for that unattainable Jet City Woman.

The city of Delhi suffers from being overly explicated in this book. To take just one instance, we are told why Majnu ka Tila is named so, although the story of that naming doesn't seem to have any significance in the scheme of the novel. This studied view of Delhi is made more unpalatable by the ease with which the writing inhabits Shillong. Saikia picks an exciting time in the evolution of Delhi: the last years of the last century and the early years of this one. It is a time of immense transition, and like most transitions not every facet of it is accessible to every reader. Those who went through the phenomenon of auto-rickshaws lining up for CNG may know what it connotes, those who didn't don't. There is, perhaps, some meaning to be found in the cultural and economic churning of the time this novel visits but Saikia doesn't quite succeed in finding it.

Where Saikia does succeed is in delivering a particular variant of the diaspora novel that, we now realize, is needed by a nation that lives very much in its centre and far from its periphery. The novel of displacement is normally reserved for those who cross national boundaries, but this story of people who came from the North-East of India to the nation's capital had not been told at this length till now. Their disaffection in this city is an echo of their region's disaffection with the nation it is joined to. It would have been easy to sound shrill about this but, to its credit, Jet City Woman speaks quietly. For example, by identifying several minor characters by their tribe as well as their state, Saikia performs a subtle political manoeuvre. After all, the distinction between a Bomdila from Arunachal and a Khasi from Assam is not one the average Dilliwala would readily make.

There are several radical possibilities inherent in a novel about an immigrant group coming from the periphery of the Indian imagination to the centre of the Indian nation. Saikia has staked a claim to these possibilities by being an early mover. But, in the final analysis, his prose does not rise to the challenge and his storytelling is clunky. He has an ear for dialogue but hasn't developed it enough. Jet City Woman may eventually reach cult status amongst people from the North East in Delhi or those who know them. But Saikia has the sensibility to lure readers with more than merely the shock of recognition. Let's hope that sensibility produces a worthy second novel soon.