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However, as soon as Lev, the Russian scientist, lands in India,
his briefcase (full of bio-terror secrets) is stolen and his
plans go haywire. So what does he do? Hard to believe, but he
promptly falls in love and moves in with the first attractive
woman he claps his eyes on! The object of his affection,
appropriately called Maya, more of an illusion than reality,
lives a bohemian life, sharing her flat with Morgan, a TV
newsreader, who is also her silent admirer. The chain of events
that ensues hovers around the relationship of this trio.
To complicate
matters, plague breaks out in the old city and Lev, the
outsider, is a key suspect. All semblance of order breaks down
and chaos reigns supreme. The Russian scientist must now think
of an escape route. And fast.
Simultaneously, a
parallel thread is unraveled, taking us into the remote recesses
of history, to a period when the Slave Queen, Razia, ruled
Delhi. This historical saga is enacted through a puppet show
organised by Maya who is a maker of puppets. Not mere rag dolls,
for her they are more real than her fellow mortals. She is the
creator and narrator of their lives, by her will they live or
die, play their parts and retreat into their closet lives again.
Speaking of
puppets, while turning the pages of the novel, it often seems
that the human characters of the story, too, are puppet-like in
the routine motions of their lives. Lev and Morgan seem
controlled by invisible strings in the deft fingers of Maya
while Maya herself is manipulated by the master narrator, Allan
Sealy, the sutradhar of the entire show. So what Brainfever
Bird presents is a narrative with several frames, a
play-within-a-play-within-a-play, if you will, or puppets
controlling puppets who control other puppets. At the end of the
novel one of the characters is dead, another partially
disfigured, and the third a mere shadow of the former self. The
reader, too, is left with a feeling of being let down, a sense
of having been manipulated.
The puppet theatre
itself would call to mind a scene in Vol. II of Cervantes’s
masterpiece, Don Quixote, where the hero, the crazed
knight, watches the performance of a puppeteer called Pedro.
Even before the act can come to a formal close, Don Quixote
rushes on to the stage with a raised sword, insisting on
re-telling the story his own way, his action symbolising a
refusal to be a passive spectator. Some such protest rises
within the mind as the narrative shifts between New Delhi, the
Red City, and St. Petersburg, the White City. You, the reader,
are tempted to make a protest-leap on to Sealy’s stage.
Watching the
master-narrator as he moves and mates and slays his puppets, at
times it is hard to swallow the entire story submissively. How,
for example, can a hardened criminal (hell-bent on selling
bio-weapons) undergo a change of heart at a mere glance from the
flashing eyes of a woman? Indeed, what a peaceful world it would
be if all terrorists were similarly overcome by Cupid’s arrows
and ended up making love not war! "Bas, yaa, Mr
Sealy", you are tempted to say (in Maya’s words), let’s
have some more of reality and less of illusion.
To put it simply,
the reader, too, has a life, a will that comes alive when the
magic world of the master-puppeteer recedes into the background.
But as long as the strings are controlled by the story-teller,
the illusion prevails, the make-believe is the real thing and
one floats along, suspended by those invisible threads in the
nimble fingers of Allan Sealy.
And then, just
when one is hooked to the story`85 "bas yaa!"
says the puppet-king. Like the President of the Immortals, the
author decides to wind up the show, brings the commentary to a
halt, packs up his paraphernalia and puts away all those
creatures at his command — human and puppet — to hibernate.
There they will remain until called back to life another day,
for another show, another story. Another novel.
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ALLAN
Sealy’s last novel, The Everest Hotel, is still fresh in
the mind — that elaborate song of the seasons, reminding us that
the poetry of the earth is never dead, be it spring or summer,
autumn or winter, the minute observations of the myriad forms of
life, the falling of the first drop of rain on parched earth, or the
crunch of dry autumnal leaves underfoot, or the slightest shiver of
a blade of grass in a breeze as soft as an infant’s breath. This
penchant for detail surfaces yet again in Sealy’s latest offering,
The Brainfever Bird, but with a difference. For here, instead
of the uplifting poetry of the earth we have the recognisable
pullulating rhythms of human existence — the heave and throb of
life as it is lived in an overcrowded pocket of Old Delhi, the
narrow cobbled lanes, the congested tenements, the nosey neighbours,
etc.
