When I say that one of the funniest words I have encountered in a recent Indian novel is ‘Franklin’, further explanation is clearly required. In Anees Salim’s marvellous Vanity Bagh—narrated by a young man named Imran, who lives in the Muslim colony that gives the book its title—a tree standing opposite a mosque is called Franklin, after the priest who planted it a century earlier. “The mohalla-wallahs are so obsessed with spinning yarns and naming things that they haven’t spared even this tree,” Imran tells us early in the book. But having provided this disinterested commentary, he himself continues to refer to the tree by its name. Soon I was grinning at every occurrence of a throwaway line like “we were idling our time away by Franklin” or “under Franklin stood Mary Pinto, seriously irritated”.
But there are deeper resonances to Imran’s remark about the naming or defining of things. He and his friends have the names of famous Pakistani politicians or cricket stars: “The mohalla-wallahs always named their children after people with successful professions.” And as he tells his story—including the sequence of events that leads to his group becoming pawns in a terrorist act—he adorns the text with little things said by various people, presented as quotations, complete with their name at the bottom and their year of birth and death in brackets. If the quote is from someone whom Imran doesn’t know enough about, the dates are naturally missing, but the brackets stay; like this:
“If this city had a WTC, they would have bombed it as well”
– Public Prosecutor ( – )
Imran’s obsession with numbers and dates is clarified later in the book: We learn that he tries to make sense of things and people by giving them finite shape and meaning and a back-story. At a broader level, this idea can be extended to the terrain of religion, which is an unavoidable presence in this story; yarn-spinning and labelling done by people thousands of years ago has created a situation where two human colonies in the same city, located just minutes apart, might come to see each other only in terms of their singular Hindu and Muslim identities. (If Vanity Bagh, nicknamed Little Pakistan, is the Muslim colony in the book’s unnamed city, its nemesis is a Hindu neighborhood called Mehendi.)
In Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny, Amartya Sen noted the hazards of “a solitarist approach to human identity, which sees human beings as members of exactly one group”. That each of us contains multitudes—we can be many different things at the same time, surprising others and ourselves in the process—is a central theme of Sen’s book. And it is an important current in Anees Salim’s work, over the four novels that have made him one of the most notable voices and one of the outstanding storytellers in contemporary Indian writing. Salim’s last three books—Vanity Bagh, Tales from a Vending Machine and The Blind Lady’s Descendants—feature lower-middle-class Indian Muslim protagonists and chronicle the minutiae of their lives, including things that get lost in the mainstream narratives and clichés about the community. He depicts cultural confusion with amazing lightness of touch, since his focus is on multi-dimensional people rather than on big statements and because he is effortlessly funny even when telling sad stories.
(This story appears in the May-June 2015 issue of ForbesLife India. To visit our Archives, click here.)