The Wall Street Yogi

Prima facie, Karan Bajaj is a textbook example of that peculiarly Indian species of successful writer—the IIT-IIM novelist with more entrepreneurial chutzpah than literary ability, more interest in formulas and numbers than sentences, and the vacuous self-assurance of people who know they’ve won at life, or at least life on Shaadi.com’s terms. But Bajaj takes what in middle-class India would be an ideal endpoint, a blue chip US business school and a career in investment banking or management consulting, and makes it his starting point for an antic collapse, a free-fall into failure, and rejection of convention.

Both his previous novels, the bestselling Keep Off the Grass and Johnny Gone Down, feature Ivy League-educated protagonists who turn tail when faced with worldly success, corporate princes who chuck it all up for adventure, for danger, for unpredictability. Out of this blueprint emerges Max Pzoras, protagonist of The Seeker, Bajaj’s new novel and perhaps the first English-language novel ever to take the spiritual and physical discipline of yoga as its subject (and just in time for the inaugural International Yoga Day). Max, six-and-a-half- feet tall, Harvard-educated, an executive at a private equity firm on Wall Street, is at a crossroads. His mother is dying of cancer, he is bored by his job, worried about his sister Sophia, and unable to reconcile his materially gilded present with his deprived childhood in the Bronx.

A close childhood friend is wheelchair-bound, caught in the crossfire in some gang fight. Max finds himself to be ‘standing in the middle of two worlds, between a world where Andre crawled on the floor to get to the bathroom each day and a world where people agonized whether to buy a summer home in Martha’s Vineyard or the Hamptons’. One night, on his way back from visiting his mother in hospital, Max gets into a fight. He is stopped from doing significant damage by an Indian falafel vendor who is shirtless on a gelid Manhattan night.

Inspired by the Indian’s talk of Himalayan yogis, Max decides on impulse soon after his mother’s death to quit his job and head to India. The setup is laboured. Bajaj’s grim projects, all ‘crack fiends’, prostitution and gangbanging while ‘Tupac and Nas songs blared from the apartments’, emerge fully formed from tabloid headlines. Max’s mother too is a cultural cliche: the hardworking single mother (White, of course) who holds several jobs and takes her children to Manhattan so that they can see and aspire to the lives of ‘educated, well-bred’ people.

When the novel moves to India, particularly to the Himalayas, some energy returns. The plot, overly deterministic, loosens its grip in the Himalayas, and becomes oddly compelling. What forces you to pay attention is Max’s spectacular descent into lunacy. Max is not a likeable man, prone to both self-glorifying and self-pity. He blames himself at tedious length for ‘making’ his high school girlfriend abort their baby so that inconvenient fatherhood would not impede his advance to Harvard, thereby becoming the unwitting catalyst for her spiral into addiction and prostitution. It’s a typically silly plot machination that serves the sole purpose of giving Max yet another ‘reason’ for his spiritual flailing.

Must one suffer a dead mother, a paraplegic best friend, a needy sister, a soulless job, and a girlfriend driven to drugs by a teenage abortion before one asks existential questions? Bajaj makes liberal use of Pascal’s 400-year-old point that if men were able to sit quietly in a room by themselves our world would not be so beset by problems. Yoga is an attempt to make men do just that, quiet their minds, to not be so restless and covetous.

But Max, for all his arduous asanas and deprivation in a south Indian ashram, for all the time he spends alone in a cave braving bears, leopards, and avalanches, for all his protestations of self-knowledge, does not seem a particularly enlightened soul. The signs of his success, his yogic fulfillment come not in philosophical insight but through impossible yoga poses, through the rubber-boned malleability of his physique, or in acquiring miraculous superpowers, from walking on water and levitating to reading another person’s mind and communicating with snakes. The goal of his yoga is not understanding, empathy or compassion so much as messianic detachment.

Perhaps, the reason Bajaj felt it necessary to overload Max’s personal story with melodrama was because the extreme yoga he valorises in The Seeker is a form of self- obliteration, of suicide, an opting out of the world and all its baseness for the illusion of the divine. Perhaps, Bajaj, unintentionally, has provided an answer to Pascal. It might be for the best that so few of us can bear to sit in a room quietly, for that way madness lies. Left to ourselves, we might start to believe that we are God.

booksKaran BajajliteraturePenguin Radom House IndiaThe Seeker