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Manjula Padmanabhan's review of Home
Products.
Published in Outlook, March 26, 2007.
On the very first page of Amitava Kumar's Home
Products, there's a scene which exemplifies what I liked so much about this
first novel. An elderly woman opens her front door to the protagonist, a journalist
called Binod. As she did so, she "began to cover her head with her cotton
sari when Binod introduced himself". It is a gesture so slight and so
familiar that it might easily go unnoticed.
Yet by noticing it, Kumar instantly conveys
so many messages about the relative positions of the two characters: that
the woman is conservative and middle-class, that the young man is a stranger
to her and that she is uneasy but not afraid by his presence at her door.
It's a fragment of visual poetry which, like the best documentary films, allows
us to forget the camera, lights and sound recordist, so that we enter the
situation unaware of the craft that has brought us there.
The narrative shifts back and forth between
small-town Bihar and the big city—specifically Bombay-Delhi. Binod is
the main actor in this drama, but three members of his family share the stage
with him: his father Baba, his father's sister-turned-politician Bua, and
Bua's son, the colourful jailbird Rabinder. The cousin spends much of the
novel's pages behind bars, yet dominates the story with his larger-than-life
presence. He is more passionate, more vital and ultimately more successful
than Binod. But this book isn't about cousin rivalry, sizzling romance, dazzling
success or terrifying despair. It's about the adrenaline rush of humdrum survival
eked out within the casually chaotic, blood-drenched mobocracy of today's
India.
The novel is shot through with cinematic moments.
I have many favourites but one sharp-etched in memory is the journey in a
hired jeep through the streets of a small hamlet during a power cut. "In
the vivid darkness of the night, their presence was an intrusion. Lives had
been carefully constituted...around a routine of darkness.... Again and again,
they surprised people who were eating or resting. Women turned their faces
away and men shaded their eyes...."
Kumar's credentials as a non-fiction writer
stand him in good stead: real-life events and real names enter the novel with
unselfconscious ease. Laloo Prasad Yadav and Ajay Devgan, Bill Clinton and
9/11—they're all there and many others besides—but this book is
about the supporting cast, not the stars. Binod yearns to write a workable
screenplay for (fictional) Bollywood director Vikas Dhar, but he can't make
himself turn tricks for the industry. His own love of classic cinema, for
elegance and honesty over cheap melodrama makes it painful. His father was
once a documentary filmmaker, who used to make the flickering black-and-white
films in which footage of smiling peasants winnowing wheat were once the absolute
image of Eternal India.
Binod's vision is at once lyrical and dispassionate. He sees the filth and corruption that define the lives of so many millions of citizens, including members of his own family, but he neither winces nor retreats into fantasy. He holds the camera of his heart steady as he teaches us to see the truth with our moral compass intact, and yet not hate what we see.
