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[[Category:Literature |C ]]

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[https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/books/story/20141201-upamanyu-chatterjee-fairy-tales-at-fifty-charmy-harikrishnan-806017-2014-11-20  Charmy Harikrishnan, Nov 21, 2014: ''India Today'']


Upamanyu Chatterjee is taking a detour in an ultra-green Ambassador with blood-red seats. And what a fabulous journey it is turning out to be-across a mist-covered, myth-covered window, you glimpse the young boy who wants to wear a garland of fingers; Manasa, the woman with silver hair and bloodless skin who listens to Hindustani music and who is followed by a dark foliage of bats; Pashupati, the man/ogre who loves his perpetual fellatios and occasionally relishes a pate of babies' liver. Am I teasing you? Then get ready for a wicked literary teasing, the kind of which you have not encountered recently, in Upamanyu Chatterjee's new novel, Fairy Tales at Fifty.

There it is, a straight clue, in the title itself: the black bat wings of a fable flap for the first time in an Upamanyu Chatterjee novel. Away from the masturbatory fantasies and Marcus Aurelius fixations of Agastya Sen in English, August; away from the rage and raw effluent of middle-class life and lust; he creates a dark fairy tale. Most fairy tales are dark, but this one offers no happy ending, only an unhappily-ever-after.

In his book-lined, television-less home in Nizamuddin East in Delhi, Chatterjee, 55, strokes his 15-year-old cat, the bad-tempered Minou. He is a writer early morning and then a secretary in the Petroleum and Natural Gas Regulatory Board.

Chatterjee says, "In this novel, I wanted to take all the cliches of fairy tales and folk tales and put them together. And I wanted to ask: what if these happen in our world?" He plays on Mark Twain's novel The Prince and the Pauper. "The prince is very boring but so is the pauper in Twain's book. What a waste! So I took the pauper and made him interesting, I made him a rural serial killer," he says.

That is young Jhabua who-as the novel opens in a perfect pitch of irreverent humour and a deft inversion of myths-wants to be the new Angulimala. His father helpfully annotates the Buddhist folk tale for the boy.

"Fingers means penises, of course," the father explains. "He hung around his neck a necklace of nine hundred and ninety-nine penises... Of course, they can't utter the word 'penis' in the same breath as the name of the Divine One, and in a tale that children will hear and everything, hence little fingers."

The tale of poor Jhabua, a murderer on the move, travelling in a stolen Ambassador and then a sky-blue Maruti, on a rusty road trip towards his 50th birthday, is the tale of Anguli himself, reworked, but without redemption.

Running parallel to it is Nirip, the impotent prince, in his chauffeured car. He seems to be the mirror image of Anguli, both turning 50, both unsure of their origins. The first 150 pages of Fairy Tales -- tracking the twin stories --- is a testimony to Chatterjee's supreme imagination.

He also indulges in a wicked leg-pulling of the reader. You wonder, could Anguli be the happily-ever-before of Nirip? The dark fable becomes a highbrow mystery, as you search for clues that tie Anguli to Nirip. Then, finally, along with Nirip, you swim across the grey-green opaque water of a step well, towards the truth about his origin, in the glemonness of noon.

"I tease the reader." he says Chatterjee. "I have maintained in all my books, that you have to make some demands of the reader. I just can't write a Chetan Bhagat book. I have put in a lot in this novel, it is only fair to ask the reader to also put in a lot.”

Anguli and Nirip are two extremes of masculinity. It is a predominantly male world where women, for all their subversionary instincts, are just objects of men's fantasies. Anguli is as potent, with a garland of fingers aka penises, as Nirip is impotent. But it is Nirip's "filtering intelligence" that gives the novel its focus, says Chatterjee. "If you imagine the book without Nirip, then it is just a series of killings, an ogre who is over the top and a witch with her potions. Without Nirip, there is no reflection." The prose changes shape for the sections involving Nirip: it becomes languid and rich. "It suits his leisured life," says Chatterjee.

Midway through the novel, as it steps out of Pashupati's 12-storey mansion populated with oddballs, into a set piece involving dacoits, the novel loses its pace, its tautness. But stay with it and it rediscovers its touch. Chatterjee writes about the importance of fairy tales: "Lives are precious only in fiction wherein you may leave characters falling from skyscrapers in midair because you just don't want them to die."

Evil, though, has to be slayed. And it happens on a warm Wednesday night in late November just outside Leopold's on Colaba Causeway. "Anguli's end, to me, is extremely significant," says Chatterjee."It is the point where fiction clashes with fact. He dies in a terrorist attack. You can't imagine how difficult it was for me to say here is one point where a fairy-tale world meets this horrible world we know. Evil is just fundamental to us. The rest is just dross. So how do we get rid of a serial killer? One way to do this is to overwhelm it with something more evil.”

Fairy Tales is the journey from Angulimala to 26/11. Angulimala had a Buddha to offer salvation. In our evil times, there is only the possibility of a greater evil. It is the best Indian novel of the year. Read it. Then read it again.