delhi noir

‘Noir’ is French for black. The noir mood in cinema and literature indicates a hard-nosed realism, a focus on the seamier side of life, and a wry, satirical, even bitter or despairing outlook arising from it. The noir series of short stories, originally based on contemporary low life in some US metropolises, has now spawned imitations worldwide, and some of them are good (look up this list). I have just finished reading Delhi Noir, and it made gripping reading – besides making me surer of myself that I have always been right about three things: a) big cities are increasingly becoming the same everywhere, b) I am very lucky not to have to live in one of them, and c) no country can hope for much in the way of long-term social peace and stability, leave alone progress in any meaningful sense, unless it goes all out to give a better deal to the vast under-class of down and out people who are always swarming, scrounging, fighting, cheating, robbing, mocking, killing, getting killed and otherwise interacting with their better off fellow citizens simply out of the primal urge to get along as best as they can through a life which loaded the dice against them from the very first. No moral codes apply, simply because, in Shaw’s immortal words, they cannot afford them. The wonder is that some of them not infrequently behave in such a way as to put us, their ‘betters’,  to shame.

Think autorickshaw drivers, bus ticket touts, roadside chaiwallah’s assistants, municipal sweepers, small-time hookers – and police constables and junior journos on the beat, resident doctors at government hospitals and petty shopkeepers and tenement landlords, the vanguard of the upper classes who cannot avoid rubbing shoulders all the time with the former (an ordeal from which the really privileged are insulated most of the time), and you get the brew out of which these fourteen tales are concocted. Only a long-time Delhiite with eyes wide open will be able to confirm how true to life they are, of course, but from what little I have myself known, they do, most grittily, even gorily. The only thing I am not sure about is whether the Delhi Police deserves such unrelenting bad press. Some of these stories even manage to do that almost impossible thing – make the reader laugh, or at least grin ruefully, even as she sighs over what a bad shape the world is in: How I lost my clothes by Radhika Jha, for example, and Hostel by Siddharth Chowdhury. Some, like The Scam by Tabish Khair make you wonder along with the author. Some, like The Walls of Delhi (by Uday Prakash, translated from Hindi) carry you away into a world of fantasy which does not have a happy ending. A few like Railway Aunty by Mohan Sikka would move even a jaded reader to pity: the poor boy had fun of a weird sort for a brief while, but in the end he stood no chance at all.

The last story in the collection (Cull, by Manjula Padmanabhan) stands apart from the rest, for it alone is set in an imaginary future rather than the present; a bleak dystopia set in a ‘New’ Delhi sometime maybe a hundred years hence, when the gigantic, almost-totally-planned urban agglomeration is aspiring to be a World City, but is challenged by the cancer within – brought back echoes of all sorts of books and movies, including Brave New World and District 9.

They are all accomplished writers, at ease with the language in its sahib and desi idioms and confident of their message. Only, they could use fewer expletives without seriously harming either their style or content, I think (it’s become such a cool thing to do post Chetan Bhagat that far better writers are deliberately stooping in order to catch the average reader’s eye), and somehow, they sound a little too alike, as though they have been cooked under the eyes of the selfsame chief chef. Something to do with the editing, perhaps, or is it just a personal illusion? … which reminds me, this is a book where the introduction written by the editor must be read for its own sake. Saying any more would be a spoiler; go read the book. And thanks, Dipanwita and Arani, for giving me this book to read. I should very much like to read Kolkata noir. If Didi permits such a book to see the light of day, that is.

[delhi noir, edited by Hirsh Sawhney, published jointly by Harper Collins India and India Today group 2009, ISBN 978-81-7223-853-7, pp. 289, Rs. 399]

P.S., Jan. 20: Do look up the latest post on my other blog.