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Literary Review
A history of the present as a whodunnit
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Aniruddha Bahal's seductive cool represents the triumphant upward mobility of the Indian middle class for whom the nation, and even a part of the world outside, is up for grabs, writes AMITAVA KUMAR.
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"A CLASSIC," Mark Twain had once said, "is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read." Bunker 13 is not a classic. It is an eminently readable debut novel by the investigative journalist of Tehelka fame, Aniruddha Bahal. Although the book has been described as journalism by other means — that is, journalism offered as thrilling fiction — it is more useful to read it as literature by other means. A literary novel posing as a spy thriller. The book's success as well as its failure on that count easily makes it one of the most important works by an Indian writer published this year.
The novel's hero is Minty Mehta or "MM", a journalist working with a Delhi newspaper. MM is on a training mission with elite paratroopers of the Indian Army and even though he is tripping on heroin when he leaps from the plane, he offers the reader nuggets of advice like the following: "The thing about jumping, you remember, is to go with a thrust. That stops the slipstream from getting a hold over you and banging you against the AN-32 body, loading your face full of aluminium rivets."
The racy tone, the worldliness of the technical military jargon, the generous use of expletives (this is bound to be the only book dedicated to the Shankaracharya of Sringeri which has so many four-letter words in it) — all of these promise a new voice in Indian fiction. To jump into the narrative is a bit like a leap taken by a paratrooper: you feel the rush of excitement and danger.
But, as the pages turn and the plot gets more entangled and sometimes implausible, the reader is compelled to examine his or her responses more closely. The novel is narrated in the second-person subjective: "You have soldiering boots stuck between your teeth so you don't maul your tongue." Although the speaker is MM, the "you" is meant to include the reader. This is a tricky narrative device. For example, when MM goes to Kashmir which is presented as a land crawling with Muslim terrorists — his slang for them, ostensibly shared by the much of the Indian army, is Mossies — the reader might ask why he or she must identify with the narrator.
It is not always easy to resist MM's voice, and this is not only because of his charm. His seductive cool represents the triumphant upward mobility of the Indian middle class. In the novel, it is the voice of an aggressively Westernised and global elite with a taste for American slang and a variety of brand names. Of course, if you don't buy it, then what you are left to sympathetically examine is the touching pathos of such desire — and the pull of the unabashed gaze that is forever fixed on the upper rungs of the social ladder. MM confidently lays out brief manuals for drug-use, sex, and different types of lethal weaponry. He also presents a manual on torture and the use of chemicals. All such manuals are on the same moral plane. They offer the middle-class readers the chance of self-improvement in a fast-changing world that is opening up to them in ways previously unimagined.
It is for this mapping of a social milieu and its faithful characterisation that I am unable to call Bahal's novel simply a thriller. Bunker 13 gives flesh and blood to the ingenuity and rapacity of India's successful new entrepreneurial class. MM resembles others that Bahal himself has written about in his journalism. When trying to explain the phenomenon of match fixing in cricket, Bahal had said in an interview that the bookies always go for the best players, "not just because they can influence the match, but because the best players also have a higher risk-taking psychology." Such players were often also heavy gamblers themselves, he had said. "It is the way they are wound up. It gives a kick."
MM is no social meliorist. He is in it for the money. Writing is a game of high commercial stakes. The staid world of Nehruvian socialism and protected markets is gone. The Indian nation, and indeed, even a part of the world outside, is up for grabs. Everyone is suspect in the book because everyone is on the take.
It is refreshing to find early on that the journalist is a crook — and the book's charm comes from having a narrator who is suspect in more ways than one. The novel's ending serves a disappointing surprise, but you are almost tempted to forgive Bahal for finding a criminal who, it turns out, is not at all like you and me. It is perhaps healthy to discover the fiction that we are not as guilty as we had thought or perhaps even wanted. The middle-class nation can go about its business in peace again.
Bunker 13, A Novel, Aniruddha Bahal, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003, p.340, $24.
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