Book Review | Brevity and black humour soul of poignant tale set in Punjab of 1980s

Speaking at one of the sessions during the Hyderabad Literary Festival, Gurmeet Rai, who talked about her book with famous photographer, Raghu Rai, Amritsar: a City of Remembrance, said how it is not just British but also the Government of India that must apologise to the people of Punjab for the way they failed to make a memorial out of Jallianwala Bagh, and instead made it into a spectacle. The city has indeed witnessed a great amount of anguish including the pain of Partition. That said, the state of Punjab as a whole, has been witness to a lot of violence, and change. ‘The state named after the five rivers that flowed through it — is no longer true to its name, says the author of Two and a Half Rivers, Anirudh Kala.

In his volume published by Niyogi Books, he refers to what is left of Punjab as “P3” for convenience (P1 being the undivided Punjab, P2 the Punjab after Partition, P3 Punjab of the present day, after the creation of Haryana and Himachal Pradesh), which he says is ruled by the “government in exile from the capital in exile”. The ministers and politicians prefer to rule from the much more modern shared capital Chandigarh, ruled by the central government, he adds in his story set during the time of insurgency in the 1980s.

Far from Chandigarh, lives a doctor, alone in an old house by the river Sutlej. And he is the narrator of the story. Despite being a doctor, he is hardly interested in treating patients, which is a sign of depression, according to his psychiatrist.

However, he does end up meeting his patients, who come to him more because another doctor is miles away. And one such patient who is brought to him is the dalit girl Shamsie, when she has had an epileptic attack. Going forward she lives with her childhood friend Bheem. Both reach Bombay to pursue her dream of becoming a dancer. She learns to dance and manages to be a part of a couple of group dances in films as well. But eventually, they return and form an orchestra group.

Punjab is in the throes of militancy. People being killed for being clean-shaven, and at times the bearded ones too, have become way too common. Even though the locals are increasingly annoyed by it, the boys as they are referred to because of being quite young, receive support from Great Britain and Canada, and go about the killings in the name of their holy mission — “Henceforth they shall be known as Grenada for Brevity”, says the author, while referring to the Punjabi diaspora outside of India.

Anirudh Kala has an uncanny way of weaving into his fictional narrative facts and situations that have affected lakhs of people in the land that has for over 1,000 years witnessed wars, ravages, violence alongside casteism, backwardness, extremism… The most poignant of issues, he packs in elegantly using dry humour and wit, and simple prose that says a lot without saying much.

“The bombs that went off in crowded trains and busy markets were faultlessly secular.” he writes. And he carries the readers along the familiar storyline, perhaps forgotten a little, told in his matter-of-fact style.

Set against this backdrop is the story of the dalit couple that is not a unique story either. It is the story of a million others, yet powerful and intense in the way Anirudh Kala’s pen takes it forward before it reaches its not-so-logical, but unfortunately often-repeated, ending.