Sunday, April 13, 2003		Books

Love, war and the hyphenated self
Arun Gaur

A Twisted Cue
by Rohit Handa. Ravi Dayal, Delhi. Pages 434. Rs 450.

HERE the problem for the novelist is to mingle love with war (perhaps like Hemingway). The incongruence of such a mingling within the structure that the present novel proffers is marked in the impossibly longish name of the main character—Lieutenant-Colonel Quintin Reginald ‘Mulkally’ Oxley-Protheroe.

On a self-appointed mission to dig out his genealogy in the English graveyards, he is caught up in the affairs with Narayani and Erica, goes through his fourth war experience (1965 Indo-Pak conflict) and ends up almost lamely in the ambiguity of Australia.

What conjoins the elements of love and war is the probing of the hyphenated self almost at every nodal point of the novel, in almost every situation and character worth the name. Such a probing is initiated quite prognostically in the still landscape of an English cemetery at Kasauli, guarded by a leaping and grunting mastiff. Here Mulkally wanders looking for a suitable epitaph to adorn his white forefather’s burial place. But there is no succour for his bifurcated Anglo-Indian self. The very order of the grave-placements to tilt the celestial benedictions in favour of some chosen few marginalises the hyphenated souls.

Consequently, in the end of the novel, Mulkally faces otiosity: "What would be gained by putting a marble slab over the grave of an unclaimed white soldier?" Sandwiched between these two barren ends are the two primary experiences of love and war that help Mulkally in gaining two different perspectives about his identity. That ultimately reduces him to an otiose being, his decorations in the three deadly wars notwithstanding.

It is difficult to escape this dilemma of reductive double being. There is no possibility that any search for the past would connect fruitfully the future with the present. Horst and Emily—the elderly couple—the tottering remnants of the Raj at Kasauli no option but to get caught in the heathen cycle of rebirth and death." Even the British Railway Station of Ambala picks up this stain of half-blood. It is "both a cantonment and a junction: the combination of shining bayonets and well-scrubbed steam engines."

Narayani concludes reflectively that "it took the most sacred of Hindu invocations to mentally rid oneself of the everyday muck of life, and Saint Jesus to express a more tangible hope in the future." And Erica, too, conscious of her "chutney origins," vacillates between salwar-kameez and her European attire.

The identity crisis prevents the affair between Mulkally and Narayani from reaching its logical conclusion. Despite her avant-garde display of defiance of public opinion by holding a cigarette in a closed fist and drawing on "through the hollow between the thumb and the index finger," Narayani is a fragile woman torn by an inner-conflict. With a dread of the future and a great concern for her four-year-old daughter Lakshrni, she prepares herself to face her dissolution into an unacceptable existential non-being.

There seems to be a vague and forced rapport that is built between Erica and Mulkally. Erica is a flimsy shadow of Narayani, not purged by the scorching experiences of life, well preserved from the holocaust of deep passions of selfless love (unlike Narayani) by her pragmatic worldview, and she does not develop the promise that is expected of her in the beginning of the novel. Her meeting with Mulkally in the last chapter carries a vague impression of finality. Quite insufferable, this union is responsible for the weak ending of an otherwise fair novel.

The front is a place to act. But here one gets ample time to ruminate about the failures of love, the blindness of political wills, the Lacial arrogances, and about the hyphenated selves.

A Twisted Cue is the second novel of Rohit Handa (born 1937), who was a war correspondent in 1965. Evidently, he has woven the story from first-hand experience. He has given a philosophy of war, and has attempted to develop characters in some detail, deftly handling the dialogic components. Though love and war have not been harmoniously synthesised, and the ending of the novel leaves much to be desired (it should be re-written). Though on occasions the fiction tends to change into factual deliberations, one positive quality in the novel is entertainingly maintained—a strong vein of humour.