Writing in the Dark

IT’S ODD THAT Raj Kamal Jha is being called “the Novelist of the Newsroom.” Yes, his daytime job is as editor of one of the nation’s most prominent newspapers, but his novels are anything but “newsy”. They are, in fact, the very opposite of the news. Though triggered by real events, the books are always long in the writing (his last novel, The City and the Sea, was published in 2019), complex in form and structure, and the event itself appears refracted and fragmented, scattered through the narrative. I like to think of his work as a meditation on the zeitgeist, a slow churn of the twenty-four-hour news cycle with the patience to watch it turn from a frenzied, angry whirlpool into a calmer, reflective surface which mirrors the world.

The years between 2019 and 2023 were devastating for individuals and communities the world over. The pandemic threw up not just new crises in ways of thinking and acting, but also brought into sharper focus systemic in­equities and our attitudes towards the poor and the disenfranchised. In our country, during this same period, we also had to contend with the conclusive rooting, as it were, of religious nation­alism and the transformation of our political and social landscape. These seismic shifts are part of Jha’s new book — they impinge on the lives of the characters and provide a definite and identifiable backdrop to the ways in which the individual stories meet in a dystopic collage of un­ease. The unease is amplified by the way the stories are put together. They rupture and bleed into one another, they sit close with their jagged edges chafing, some remain incomplete, others have imag­ined happy endings. But there is little or no comfort in their company.

The Patient in Bed Number 12 speaks most often in the voice of a dying man who is estranged from his family, which now consists of only a daughter and granddaughter whom he has never met. The daughter is named Nisha. Her full name is Nisha Kumar Rehman, which indicates that she has crossed at least one problematic threshold. The man knows his granddaughter only from a truncated video where parts of a child’s face are seen in extreme close up. The man is in the ICU, he is in pain, on a ventilator and heavily medicated. He has a somewhat tenuous hold on his waking consciousness and slips from memories into dreams and nightmares. Sister Shiny is the bustling and good-hearted nurse who tells him that he needs to hold on to one piece of reality each day if he is to stay alive to meet his daughter. If nothing else, he is to write a few words. On his first attempt, he writes “Nisha/Video/Sea/ Three/Rock/Child/Hurt”. And therein lies the nub of the central story which unfolds through voices that are confes­sional and accusatory, clear-sighted and blurred with anguish, resigned as well as demanding.

Around the story of the man and his family curl other stories of hope and distress as the world crumbles under the weight of both cosmic and human cruelties. There is the maths teacher from the village who is a now a security guard in a mall where a lonely woman owns a Baskin Robbins ice-cream store, there is the father who begins the long walk home with his young son when the pandemic leaves him with no work and no money, there is the ambulance attendant whose dreams of a better life do not interrupt his acts of kindness, there is a couple’s increasingly tired fight against a rampaging, virulent disease, there is a star-crossed romance that blossoms in the tiny spaces and moments of freedom afforded to it. These hyper-real stories rub shoulders with tales of children whose job it is to fill empty bottles with darkness that will be sent all over the world and the story of Our Good Doctor who also works at night, stealthily rearranging the information in our brains while we sleep so that we wake to a different understanding of the world. Jha’s great talent as a writer of the imagina­tion, his capacity to change water into wine is that, however fanciful and delicate his phantasmagoria, we recognise the truth and reality of each and every one.

The book is spotted with apparently mundane photographs which acquire a poignancy and gravitas as we wander through the collage, following the different narratives that try to come to terms with and repair the universe that has been broken. I wondered about these pictures and where they came from. Perhaps they are a legacy, an inheritance from an ageing parent or the gift of a young person learning what a camera does. I feel as if Jha found them and wrote his stories around the moments they have captured, in much the same way as his fictions are built around moments in the real world that have become news events. The big events that shape our world have con­sequences for lives that are considered unworthy of attention, but every life has meaning, every death is significant. So, every photo is also real, every story is also true.

People whose stories we have been privy to meet other people whose stories are also in the book and, the subtle link between the stories is there for the careful reader to find. These interwoven episodes where strangers interact are chance encounters that the larger narrative creates, but I think these collisions of characters are Jha’s way of reminding us that we all inhabit the same place, be it the planet or a country or a city. Our paths will cross, our actions will affect each other, we are as likely to meet the bigot as we are to meet the saint. Some lives will be ir­revocably changed, others may simply stop and go no further.

Jha’s novels are not for the faint-hearted—not for what they say, nor for the ways in which they say it. In this book, too, Jha stays away from melodrama. He underplays the explicit violence of words and deeds, leaving the reader to intuit what has been done or left unsaid. Or said and left undone. Because some details are always missing or blurred in the stories that he tells, the horror is extricated from the specific incident or event, leaving behind its dark shadow. Thus, disem­bodied, the horror is no longer about a particular person or singular encounter, it becomes an amorphous terror that fills the air and blocks out the sky. The sense of foreboding that permeates The Patient in Bed Number 12 might feel like an unbearable weight, but that weight is a discomfort that we must acknowledge. One hundred years ago, Bertolt Brecht told us that in dark times, we would be singing of dark times. The dark songs of the 21st century are now being written by those who are parsing that foreboding, that unbearable weight, separating it into the many parts that constitute it and revealing its true meaning. Jha is one of those, a grammarian of our time, pars­ing the news in his novels. His fiction transforms the news from something that fades into the past and is forgotten into a hologram of the present. More power to him and others like him—we need to see the truth even if we decide not to carry its weight.

booksfictionnovelRaj Kamal JhaThe Patient In Bed Number 12