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Fireproof by Raj Kamal Jha. Picador. `A312.99
He found Gujarat’s old capital with 80,000 Muslim refugees, a thousand dead and many thousands of homes and businesses burnt. This "remarkable restraint" was applauded by Gujarat’s Chief Minister after the "grave provocation" of an unexplained fire on a train carrying Hindu pilgrims, in which 59 people died. I read Jha’s article gratefully in the disturbing quiet following Gujarat’s pogroms. I had witnessed armed police smiling as clean-shaven men sent their neighbours’ livelihoods— and later their lives —skyward in blackening towers. Five years later, Fireproof disrupts another silence: just 10 convictions have resulted from 4,252 cases filed with police. Fireproof focuses on three killings, elaborating on the article with statements from dead characters, a playlet, footnotes and talking street-fixtures. Jha’s narrator, Jay, is awaiting the birth of a child in Ahmedabad. The hospitals choke with charred bodies as the city burns; a malformed baby, which Jay believes is his own, forces him to confront events and himself. As the truth looms, the sky rains bodies, and he loses all bearings. Fireproof is written in Jha’s signature style; elliptical fragments accumulate sense while incidental things and words are mined for effect. This worked well in his debut The Blue Bedspread, rooted in a modernist Bengali literature. But Fireproof’s problem is dramatised in the word "betrayal", used by a credible Indian critic. The betrayal is twofold. Jha’s novel obtains substance by revisiting the notorious rape and murder of a pregnant woman. He pays witness to this horror in accomplished passages before losing its import in a gratuitously distended novel. He also betrays himself, as acts of ethnic cleansing by Nazi-inspired Hindus become human tragedies. Jha folds responsibility for events into individual excess and the power of "the mob": the banality of evil minus the Nuremberg trials. He has lost sight of any original outrage. The story in Fireproof began in Islamophobia and led to Gujarat’s ovens. Its perpetrators were not "hangers-on", but "confident and educated": I saw this myself. In Jha’s novel, these men and their allies emerge fireproof — as in life. — By arrangement with The Independent
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