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My Magical Palace by Kunal Mukherjee
Kunal Mukherjee recreates the world of 13-year-old Rahul Chatterjee in My Magical Palace, his debut novel. It is about feeling of love, loss, betrayal, and a constant sense of being an outsider; of the impact of being different and being punished for it. Yes, Rahul learnt early in life to let things be, not question them, but how to let go was a lesson deferred each time he thought of himself, and his growing-up days in a middle-class Indian family. His adolescence was spent in an unadorned yet magical dwelling in Hyderabad—the Mint House. Believed to have been belonging to the Nizams of Hyderabad, though never inhabited by the royal family, the house offers an apt setting for a boy who finds himself in an enchanting world— history, heritage and nature— but only to feel lost in the outside world. And when the family must leave, allowing the decrepit house to be pulled down for expansion, Rahul questions.
But loss of home is only one of the themes of the novel. At the other end, heritage may be lost but history is not forgotten. Prejudices and intolerance, courtesy the Partition, tears into the world of Rahul when his sister’s friend Mallika falls in love with a Muslim boy. The loss and betrayal she faces is shared by Rahul too. Is what is expected of one is of greater value than one’s desires. Be it the bullying at school, attraction or infatuation, practice of faith, experiencing the unexpected, the gossip`85 the shades of life are find place in the pages and fit well in the narrative. It is rather a relief that the novel is not communicating at an abstract level. The conversations between characters not just take the story forward, but also give an inkling to the thoughts, point at other ideas, and invoke new perceptions, while question a few. For Rahul, an obsession with Hindi cinema star Rajesh Khanna is not as innocuous as he thought which he realises when a fellow student is expelled for writing a love letter to another boy. Rahul gathers what is not normal: "`85understand the shame and humiliation of being an outsider and outcaste in the society I’d grown up in, a society where the individual comes last?" While grappling with his own unconventional sexuality, he fears parental disappointment and social disgrace. Mukherjee brings out, in a subtle way, the larger questions about what is normal and what falls outside its precincts. The book deals with homosexuality quite frankly but never does the tone become one of ridicule. As the novel oscillates between the past, 1970s, in Hyderabad to the present in San Francisco where Rahul lives with his partner Andrew, it is hard to let pass the understanding of a relationship with oneself and the outside world that the author is attempting at. "Many years after I left Hyderabad, I finally realized that, to follow one’s heart, one has to take break the rules sometimes`85 And sometimes, one has to leave and go far, far away." Moreover, the novel is not just a product of the author’s imagination, taking a shape of fictional story; rather, the expressions put in black and white have been part of the subconscious of many of us. Well, what makes the novel a better read is the fact that a reader would end up say at some point that ‘I know what this feels like’.
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P
Mukherjee, through the
passages on Mint House, transports the reader to the erstwhile era and
along with Rahul, a reader’s imagination takes a flight: "As a
child I could imagine the grant old dowager going from room to room,
marvelling at the tall ceilings, the marble floors, the spacious
portico`85 ‘Bahut khubsurat,’ she probably said as she gave
her regal approval`85 Razia Bano was dressed in a glorious
sharara`85"