The LURU Review: Jeet Thayil’s The Elsewhereans

The truth is stranger than fiction.

The documentary novel is a distinct, formal yet experimental departure from a fictional one. It sits firmly at the border between the factual and the fabricated; it doesn’t seek to blur out the edges between these two categories of storytelling. Instead, it proposes that in order to represent our realities — truthfully — the writer can skip back and forth between the mutually agreed-upon codes of fiction and empirical evidence. In Bengaluru-based poet, musician, and novelist Jeet Thayil’s The Elsewhereans, a documentary novel, we’re passengers strapped in for a wild ride through timelines and across time zones.

Time and tide wait for none

It is 1957. Thayil Jacob Sony George, a journalist with The Free Press Journal in Bombay, has shown up “unchaperoned” — unconventional at the time — to meet Ammu Thomas, a high school teacher in Alwaye, Kerala, leading “to gossip on both sides.” They’ve seen each other in black-and-white photographs; “the families have met, what more is needed?” This is the last time their “peculiar sense of romance” feels cute. Quite quickly, Jeet Thayil reveals to the reader that these two lives are complex and tangled up in the mythologies of their families, their individual ambitions, and the now-independent nation being built around them. Jeet draws from the felt, the remembered, the historical, and the imagined; he layers these many choral voices to tell nuanced stories of migration, belonging, mourning, and loss.

On first read, the novel coaxed out of the faint memory of reading AK Ramanujan’s “Small-Scale Reflections on a Great House.” Anniethotham (Annie’s Place) — the house at the heart of The Elsewhereans — reads similarly to the Great House in Ramanujan’s poem, whose opening lines are:

Sometimes I think that nothing

that ever comes into this house

goes out.

Things that come in everyday

to lose themselves among other things

lost long among

other things lost long ago.

After Ammu and George’s unexpected meet-cute, we are thrust into their wedding preparations at Anniethotham in Mamalassery along the banks of the Muvattupuzha, the “river-of-three rivers,” in Kerala. The wedding feast is being catered by Thommen, “a wedding cook famous for his bad temper and red meen curry,” and the menu includes everything from “appams fermented with a touch of sweet-and-sour toddy” to “batter-fried frog’s legs with tamarind-pineapple pachadi.” Here at the festivities, we meet relatives who search for “chunks of coconut as if…sifting for gold” in beef fry, who can endlessly talk about “the correct way of organizing society,” who never fall ill, who pray “in a mix of Aramaic and Sanskrit”; those who “vanish when emotion threatens”; midwives with an opium addiction and a penchant for “full moon nights at the cemetery” and poisoning husbands; and lawyer uncles who privately translate the infamous French poet Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal into Malayalam.

In the fast lane

Soon, the readers are on a whirlwind tour of the whole world. We are packed off to a shared apartment in Bombay, brought back to Anniethotham for the birth of this novel’s narrator, and then made to play third wheel to George and his friend Raghavan’s trip reporting on the war in Vietnam. We learn the name of the woman on the cover (she sits astride a motorcycle, looking into the camera). Three decades later, we return to Hanoi with the narrator to search for her; we get arrested with George and wait with Ammu for his release in Bihar; we’re in Hong Kong with George and Mike, his New Zealander friend, when they start the magazine Asiaweek over lychee ice cream and coffee; then we accompany the narrator as he retraces his teenager years in Hong Kong by writing for the publication his father founded. In Berlin, we get high with the narrator on heroin bought from a dealer named Obelix; we work in an ad agency in Beijing; we visit Baudelaire’s grave in Paris; we move through Delhi, take the ferry from Algeciras to Tangier, worry about a gardener walking home to Bidar while we sit in Bengaluru, we stop over in Dessie, Ethiopia, and then briefly again at Anniethotham — until, finally, we arrive at a hospital room in Bengaluru.

On this trip, we learn about the king of Travancore being “served a prize pig roasted with sweet bananas” and a daughter who dies of brain fever; we drive around Kerala in a sea-green Morris Oxford; we’re informed that the East India Company was “the world’s largest drug cartels and profiteers of the opium trade” and “to make themselves respectable” built services and structures. We are told the “big plus point” about the navy: you don’t have to shoot people; we eat a chicken Kiev at the Press Club in Delhi; we’re reminded that the Vietnam war was really the “American War,” and that Ho Chi Minh had many odd jobs in his exile but also “a girlfriend in every port.” We use the only bidet in Cochin, discuss German painters, stare at a photograph of a concubine with bound feet from China’s Song Dynasty, and dwell on the “several Thomases in the complicated history of Indian christianity”.

The man behind the mirror

This thrilling ride with Ammu, George, and the narrator, across flooding rivers and promising oceans, between rumour and revelation, is handled deftly in Jeet’s writing. We’re never out of step or overwhelmed by the details in The Elsewhereans, Jeet seems to have struck a fine balance between fidelity and flex.

It seems that in order to achieve this tightrope walk, he has reached into his past life as a journalist. The oft-forgotten truth about journalism is that it isn’t simply a dry, objective presentation of the “truth” — that is too damn dull. Rather, this vocation has always been about telling the truth really well. The form of the documentary novel acts as the perfect canvas for Jeet to show off while still exercising restraint as a writer in the age-old battle between fact and fiction. The Elsewhereans isn’t just unputdownable; it’s also the kind of book that one will want to keep returning to. That’s really the bestest bit.

The details: Jeet Thayil’s The Elsewhereans is out on Harper Collins. Price: INR 699.