by Indra Sinha
(Simon & Schuster)
The Web site of Khaufpur, India, makes much of the city’s scenery and sparkling lakes, even its quaint institutions. One such, the Lazies Club, is dedicated to the art of inertia: seated members take precedence over those standing, who are “obliged to pay for the drinks.” Aside from a brief reference to an unspecified past calamity, there’s no hint that life in Khaufpur is anything less than blissful. Or that Khaufpur does not, in fact, exist.
Khaufpur—and its very convincing Web site—is the creation of Indra Sinha, a former advertising copywriter, who uses it as a stand-in for Bhopal, the site of one of the worst industrial accidents in history, the 1984 gas leak from a Union Carbide chemical plant that caused the deaths of thousands of people and sickened hundreds of thousands more. It is also the setting for his fiercely polemical—and unexpectedly bawdy—novel “Animal’s People,” a finalist for the 2007 Man Booker Prize that reveals not a paradise but a blighted city.
Sinha’s narrator is a 19-year-old orphan, born a few days before the disaster, whose spine has become so twisted that he must walk on all fours. Known to everyone simply as Animal, he rejects sympathy, spouts profanity and obsesses about sex.
Styling himself a hard-boiled realist, Animal embraces his cruel nickname, claiming he has “no wish” to be a human being. It’s all bravado, of course. Although he says grimly, “I do not know what name you could give to the things I have done,” he’s really just a small-time scam artist, doing what he can to survive on the streets.
Fittingly, Animal’s lust, not his desire for justice, initially drives the plot. Animal pines for a girl whose boyfriend is campaigning against the company responsible for the gas leak. When a beautiful American doctor opens a clinic offering free medical treatment, these two activists, suspecting the American is secretly gathering information to discredit the company’s opponents, easily persuade Animal to spy on her.
Sinha is an effervescent writer, but he endows his characters with quirks rather than fully realized interior lives. And his forays into surrealism can be more disorienting than enlightening: Animal’s caretaker is a demented French nun who hears anything other than her native language only as grunts; among Animal’s acquaintances is a two-headed fetus in a jar, who begs Animal to free him. The American doctor is a caricature, a supposed idealist who has taken the time to learn fluent Hindi yet seems oblivious to the customs and strictures of local society—she wears skin-tight jeans and curses in casual conversation.
Writing about devastation without sinking to sentimentality is a treacherous task. Early on, Animal sneers at a journalist, accusing him of coming to Khaufpur “to suck our stories from us, so strangers in far-off countries can marvel there’s so much pain in the world.” Later an Indian doctor, describing the disaster to his American colleague, confides: “On that night the moon was two-thirds full. It was shaped like a tear and as it appeared through the clouds of gas, it was the color of blood.” The American’s response is equally hackneyed: “I sat there drinking his whiskey listening to him reduce the terror of dying people to a moon in a second-rate poem.”
Sinha veers between comedy and tragedy, awkwardly stuffing his story with improbable high jinks. Yet every now and then his prose achieves a plainspoken lyricism that brings his subject into sudden focus. At night, Animal retreats to his improvised home in the abandoned factory. “Listen, how quiet,” he remarks. “No bird song. No hoppers in the grass. No bee hum. Insects can’t survive here.”
The company made “wonderful poisons, . . . so good it’s impossible to get rid of them, after all these years they’re still doing their work.”
The New York Times Book Review, March 9, 2008
