The laugh at the end of the world

Though set in the future with a narrative that moves forward through looking back, The Last Jet-Engine Laugh seeks to engage with the present. And it marks an ambitious debut for Ruchir Joshi, says SUPRIYA CHAUDHURI.

WRITTEN by a writer preoccupied with the shadow that the future casts over our presents and our pasts, The Last Jet-Engine Laugh is a remarkable first book. It is a novel of reminiscence, using the shuttle of memory to weave the material of the familiar into the texture of a world we have not yet begun to experience. Ruchir Joshi is as gifted in recalling the minor details of our own and our parents' lives as he is in the arts of estrangement which render these moments already unfamiliar and out of reach, locked in a past that will never return to the narrator.

Joshi's narrator is 70-year-old Paresh Bhatt, a photographer living out his old age in a Calcutta which has chaotically survived into a post-nuclear holocaust world. The year is around 2030, city transport is by overcrowded helicopters, the Pujas are sponsored by Japanese business houses, and the water is so contaminated that one can neither bathe in it nor drink it. Has this happened because of the Device, as one cryptic reference suggests, or are the chemical pollutants sprayed on the Siachen glacier by Pakistan responsible for such far-reaching devastation? Post-globalisation, geographical boundaries are unclear, but India and Pakistan continue to fight their wars in space. The Japanese own whatever clean water is left in the Himalayas and little remains uncontaminated in Europe and America. Elaborate gadgets take care of personal hygiene and water tablets control thirst in a world where the narrator can still recall the Lake Gardens water of his childhood.

Like Joshi himself, Bhatt is a Gujarati who has grown up in the Calcutta of the 1960s and 1970s. Much of the novel describes these years of childhood and adolescence in a city we recognise: schools, streets, cinemas, restaurants, food and drains, all trapped in the perspective of a backward view. Through this retrospective gaze, the narrator also filters for us the lives of his parents, Mahadev and Suman, their pre-Independence love affair, the increasingly set patterns of their married life, and their responses to change. Joshi's treatment of this family clearly draws upon his own, transferring the small change of domesticity, the minor crises and triumphs of daily existence, memories of the freedom-struggle, political hopes and ideals, even the conflict of agnosticism and piety characteristic of his father's generation, to a fictional setting. Much of this is vivid and believable, much more so in fact than the central figure of Paresh himself, who grows out of this background into a less densely filled-in adulthood of sexual maturity, marriage, fatherhood, fame as a photojournalist, relationships with friends and lovers, loneliness and ultimate bereavement.

The world of Paresh's adulthood and aging, carrying him to a time beyond our present, is more insistently defamiliarised. Technology has already created its dystopia of computerised war games against a background of urban violence. Paresh's daughter, Para, plays with attack simulations before she grows up to be a fighter pilot. Joshi's technique in the novel is to graft the recognisable on to the alien, producing that shock of estrangement that marks our entry into the future just as it proclaims, as in all good science fiction, that the future is unknown and one way of imagining it is as good as another.

But Joshi's novel is not science fiction, though it offers us a version of apocalypse. Most of all it seeks to engage with the present, wanting to read in it, as in an imaginary palm, the shape of things to come. It is here, rather than in the novel's strong depiction of the past, that we may become conscious of confusion, even weakness. Like the adult Paresh himself, the world he inhabits at the turn of the century is shadowy and imprecisely rendered, caught in accidental encounters with old friends, letters from Para, recollections of anxiety, grief and embarrassment. What has happened politically, even socially, remains to be inferred: the world seems simply to have drifted into catastrophe. The ubiquity of war might indeed foreshadow the bleakness of Paresh's old age, but in the end his situation, however vividly rendered through mock-contemporary detail, is one of personal loss.

It is this register of personal feeling, ironic, sentimental and self-deprecating by turns, in an unembarrassed mix of English with Gujarati, Hindi and Bengali phrases, that is the novel's strength. What is used by way of historical substantiation, like the episode of Netaji Subhas Bose's imagined death in the Gulag, or of fantasised future, like the Calcutta of 2030, is less important in the end than the sense of a life lived through other people, and in the end, lived beyond them. There are few gains from survival for Paresh Bhatt, whose obituary is already written: only the ambiguous gift of fictional language, that is, the narrative itself. Joshi's novel marks an ambitious debut.

The Last Jet-Engine Laugh, Ruchir Joshi, Flamingo/HarperCollins India, p.384, price not mentioned.

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