'Neti Neti' - Finally a book that talks real Bangalore
Anjum Hasan's 'Neti Neti', 'Not this, Not this' tells the story of a girl from Shillong who comes to Bangalore in search for herself only to get further lost in life's reality. The book has been short listed for the Man Asia Literary prize.
IT HAS always been difficult for me to find the geography of my own life in literature. Urban, upper middle class, mostly Bangalorean, Anjum Hasan’s Neti Neti captures the city that is in a maddening flux in some parts, stagnant and seething in some parts and in some parts traditional as it would have been fifty years ago, with sensitivity and a nuance I haven’t read in writing about Bangalore before. Sometimes poignant, sometimes funny it is the story about a young woman’s search for identity in a setting that is all familiar to us and yet rarely explored in literature. Then there are her friends. The dubious Ringo Saar whose job is to bash up people defaulting on loans, Anu who gets through life doing nothing and keeping a boyfriend and convincing him to move to Australia where the roads are clean. There is Shiva, who could be one of those few people we know who keeps tipping the parallel narrative that connects the lives of urban youth into conversations: The South Bangalore gang that hacked a 21 year old man of a rival gang to death, a man who forced his wife to drink acid, how the shit of the rich determinedly travel to the open sewers of the poor. And finally there is Sophie’s colleague Shanti Gouda who lives on the metaphoric other side of the city – lower middle class and working her way up, subtitling English shows for money but refusing to enjoy their vulgarity.
We meet the police men who tell the city’s migrants only half jokingly that in Karnataka they must speak Kannada. And we see the rich Punjabi father and son duo who get out of their air-conditioned car to beat up a local auto driver in their perceived right to exert their masculinity. Sophie is a witness to other people’s tragedies, forced to make a comment or two. A child dies in a mall, but when a brutal and unexpected murder ends it all for Sophie she imagines finding peace in her mountain home away from what she calls India. It is at this stage in the novel where it feels like Hasan clumsily put together news reports from Bangalore’s recent past and used these events as a backdrop for Sophie’s angst. And yet, her dull and cold family home which she believed could never change has its own share of, if placid, fissures. Her sister is on a teenage trip towards boys and gold earring gifts while her parents’ relationship is not what she imagined it to be. The elections are on, their politics suddenly revolving around a visit by Bob Dylan with every party wanting to capitalize on it in a rock loving town. Sophie chases her ideas of a man she has been fascinated by, if not in love with for a while. Nothing however is yielding enough for her to stay. I can feel Bangalore in Hasan’s prose, it’s fissured class dynamics, its confused youth, its gourmet shops, its migrants and its malls.
It’s not Amitav Ghosh’s Sunderbans or Arundhati Roys river polluted with world bank loans or Rushdie’s magic realism. It is at once an insiders narration of urban Indian life as it is in some ways a critique. This she achieves with a sense of humor and sometimes irony placing together the extreme contradictions of many worlds.
Sophie is at a spiritual meet with beer bottles in her bag, a woman who turns schizophrenic in the journey from poverty to relative comfort: ''She (Sophie) squinted at Cubbon Park (on a map) and tried to picture them separated by it- Sophie and her friends on the right half of this centre drinking coffee in Styrofoam cups, and Shanti’s mother and great grandmother on the left half, selling breakfast to lewd lorry drivers.’
It’s not Amitav Ghosh’s Sunderbans or Arundhati Roys river polluted with world bank loans or Rushdie’s magic realism. It is at once an insiders narration of urban Indian life as it is in some ways a critique. This she achieves with a sense of humor and sometimes irony placing together the extreme contradictions of many worlds.
Sophie is at a spiritual meet with beer bottles in her bag, a woman who turns schizophrenic in the journey from poverty to relative comfort: ''She (Sophie) squinted at Cubbon Park (on a map) and tried to picture them separated by it- Sophie and her friends on the right half of this centre drinking coffee in Styrofoam cups, and Shanti’s mother and great grandmother on the left half, selling breakfast to lewd lorry drivers.’
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