In an Unequal World

AT SOIREES IN our metro cities, it is considered hip to bandy lines like, ‘Whatever you rightly say about India, the opposite is also true.’ While speechifying and debates can often euthanise such statements, a novel can bring it to life. Neel Mukherjee’s A State of Freedom does precisely that. If the book is about suffering, it is also about resilience; if it is about poverty, it is also about those who strove out of it; if it is about desolation, it is also about unlikely partnerships; if it is about migration, it is also about home.

London-based Mukherjee has already made a name for himself with his two previous novels, A Life Apart (2010), which won the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Award for the best novel, and The Lives of Others (2014), which garnered plenty of attention as it was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

His latest novel, A State of Freedom, is a collection of five independent sections, which are tied together by a delicate common thread. The parts that deal with Renu and Milly (two domestic helps working in Mumbai) make for compelling reading as they pick apart the façade of master-servant relationships in India. Mukherjee’s triumph in the strongest sections of the book is that he implicates each of us; we are all guilty. We prefer wilful ignorance over acknowledging the injustices that permeate our society, which we observe, and often perpetuate, around us. He is adept at getting into the heads of his characters and perceives, with heart and intellect, how they understand ideas like space and time, money and work, joy and sorrow.

The book is at its weakest when it chooses devices and artifice over simple storytelling. The last 10 pages or so, that recount the final hours of a mazdoor, are devoid of a single full stop. The author might have intended for the reader to rush through these pages in a single breath. But it is more likely that the reader will simply tire of this play and exclaim, ‘Give me a break’. In a bid to be clever, here the novel loses out on honesty. The section that deals with Lakshman, an abusive husband who chances upon a bear cub and tries to train it, is so soaked in violence that the reader will be tempted to wring out some blood.

The first section tells of an NRI sightseeing in Agra with his six-year-old son. From the start, impending gloom and doom hangs over the chapter. Something terrible is to happen, we sense; something terrible does happen. At a little over 20 pages, it is the shortest section in the novel and delivers a punch to the gut. But the descriptions of the Indian Standard of Poverty get a bit trite, and the NRI gaze—on beggars, shamans and dancing bears—wearies. It is hard to empathise with the discomfort of the desi East Coast academic who considers the deprivations and complications of India a personal affront and a unique inconvenience.

Part II, told in first person, details a London-returned son navigating a vacation at home. From his parents’ Bandra apartment, he has an unimpeded view of the Arabian sea, and he is also privy to the privations of his domestic help who must line up for a bucket of water. Here we meet Milly, from Jharkhand, a Christian convert, who cleans and washes for the family. While his parents take the hardships of their cook and cleaning lady (their jhopdis flood in the rain) for granted, the son is interested in their lives. Like the other NRI segment, this too could have become ponderous. But the first-person voice makes it more conversational and less judgemental. In numerous upper-middleclass households, a similar conflict between generations plays out, where parents perceive that their ‘politically correct’ children have ‘crossed over the wrong side of the ‘us versus them’ equation’ and chosen to advocate the cause of the ‘domestic help’.

Mukherjee adroitly lays bare the contrasts and inequalities of Indian society, where sahibs and memsahibs, you and I, depend on our domestic help to run our lives, yet choose to simply tolerate their presence, and no more. The worst amongst us treat our helps no better than slaves. The better amongst us have no interest in how they live. The best treat them as allies. Mukherjee unpacks how even well-intentioned curiosity can often fall short when it comes to the ‘dissolution of certain impermeable, separating membranes’ between sahib and servant. Intrigued by ‘cook aunty’, the narrator decides to visit her village called Medinipur. Seeing their spartan home, plastered with mud, and their generosity which extends beyond their means, he quickly realises, ‘I could apologise for putting them to so much trouble—and, I would imagine, embarrassment and shame, too—without drawing attention to my understanding of their stretched lives. Better to go through the remaining hours feeling like an insensitive ogre of privilege, trampling through their hardbitten lives. Not for the first time I wished I had listened to my mother; I had failed to imagine how other people live.’

The failure of the Indian elite is that we cannot imagine the lives of others. So we must depend on journalists and novelists to do that job for us. Much of A State of Freedom is devoted to the story of Milly, a girl with a burning desire to learn. In her village in Jharkhand, fathers stumble around drunk, mothers roiled by pain commit suicide, friends become Naxals because they are raped by officials, and the hands of brothers are hacked off by rebel forces. Despite the horrors and gross inequalities, Milly salvages ‘unity and coherence’ in her life. She is not ‘a terracotta doll, easily broken in transit’. That is her triumph.

booksNeel MukherjeenovelistsocietyThe lives of others