In Prayaag Akbar’s new novel, a young man works for a right-wing content studio. Then trouble erupts

Mayank was not prone to falling in love. He liked to avoid such distractions. As he assured all who happened on his Twitter bio, appended, most recently, with three tricolour and one temple emoji, it was his nation he loved first. How he loved his country. When the anthem sounded before a World Cup game against the great enemy and the handsome old flag began to flutter and flick he’d feel a sure weight in his throat, as if pride had stopped his power to speak, and he’d have to fight back the ready drop that threatened to form at his eye. Yet here was today. This instant. A moment that seemed to pulse with the unmistakable message that he’d fallen feet first. The girl had a faraway look in her pale green eyes, dupatta demure around her head, an endearing mole, a light-brown diamond, on her left cheekbone. Strung around her as a canopy were hundreds of small and large metal bells darkened by age and swatches of thin red cloth with tasselled gold borders. The photograph had been taken at the Golu Devta temple. But where on earth was Ghorakhal?

Her bio gave little information save her age, twenty-three, and sign, Libra, the scales of justice rendered in a geometric symbol that Mayank remembered faintly from school and now looked up, falling briefly into a Wiki-hole explaining Euclidean equipollence. Once he emerged, confused and mildly regretful, he watched the first video Nisha had posted, set to a soft, rhythmic peal, a slow-motion clip shot from behind of her climbing the temple steps. He moved to the other video, self-recorded. In the thumbnail, Nisha was standing in front of a small rough idol. The video began with a close-up, an awkward face, a fleeting moue that made his heart jump, and then she forgot the nervous start, speaking in a respectful whisper about the importance of this god. “Jai Nyay Devta,” she intoned, four elegant fingertips placed delicately upon her sternum, and in her low throaty voice Mayank felt their connection burn afresh.

She hadn’t posted for months. More than a year, actually. A couple of selfies, towards the bottom, one from a shining steel elevator, most likely at a mall, in which Nisha stuck the rosy tip of her tongue out awkwardly. He scrolled back to the series that had first corralled his attention, pausing at a close-up where she was leaning on a railing in front of a waterfall – geotag Corbett Falls – just as a fine mist cascaded, producing a subtle consonance with her curls, free now of the dupatta’s constraints. The picture had something of an other-worldly quality. Mayank noticed now that Nisha liked to look away from the camera as if something in the distance had drawn her interest – it was probably this that had reminded him of the source image. His boss had sent a link the night before. A painting by Tagore. But not, it turned out, the famous one. That guy’s nephew, Abani-something.

“What do you think?” Mayank asked.

Sushil leaned over to consider the comparison. “Isn’t she a bit young?”

“In all the images I could find, she’s young, Bharat Mata. Mother India is always painted young, never old.”

Sushil glanced at the plywood cabin that dominated the dark and dank basement in which they worked. “Send the pics,” he shrugged. “See what he says.”

In the cabin was their boss, Vikram Kashyap, a thirty-four-year-old who had acquired a measure of online celebrity, known for his waxy handlebar moustache and charmingly implosive turns of anger. Vikram was the procreator and host of Kashyapji ka Right-Arm Fast, a one-person discussion show on YouTube that had grown in six years to a substantial following. On air he spoke directly to the camera about any range of issues facing the country that day; coded in the camaraderie was the suggestion that he knew his audience shared his outlook, gender, rank, disposition. Kashyap favoured vexed, mocking expressions, drawing upon the internet’s plenitude to scaffold his dark jokes, and it was towards this research that Mayank and before him, Sushil had been recruited, foraging Reddit, 4chan and various other message boards for clips, memes, screenshots and other supporting material.

Sometimes Mayank’s job demanded deep forays into Indian history. He found this amusing. After his tenths, when he was to choose his subjects for the last two school years, he’d asked for history, fine arts, psychology and economics. The principal summoned him to the office, informed him that he was wasting everyone’s time, anyone with half a brain could see Mayank’s only intention was to have his classes with the girls. Mayank took his place in the commerce stream, commencing a string of wretched struggles with calculus, and barely passed his school-leaving examinations.

His first job was at an event management company. Go in after parties at farmhouse weddings, collect the ashtrays and tiki torches, break down the tables, stack chairs, haul them to the trucks. He went by the title Service Event Assistant but the job felt a lot like manual labour. He worked for a while for a company called ScooterSerf, where he was a Delivery Executive. As he did not have a scooter he had to use his old bicycle, moving in long, sweeping circles around a little corner of the great city. He came to know the roads better. The muscles in his legs, shoulders and arms became incredibly hard, with little ridges and scarps in unusual places as if the muscles had muscles of their own, and the plates underneath his stomach tautened until they revealed themselves in the rough shape of a bar of chocolate. Sometimes he picked up lunch or dinner from a beautiful restaurant he could not before have imagined, a Chinese place with shimmering waterfall walls and enormous brass statues of the Buddha, an Italian cafe where you walked across a small footbridge inside the premises. In such places, they didn’t let him onto the restaurant floor. They kept him in the waiting area by the lectern at the front. As he exited, he would sneak a look at the bill of purchase, finding such figures that he even turned around once, convinced there was a mistake. But he came to admire the care such people took of their stomachs and their money. When he carried the bags of food to the magnificent homes to which they belonged, sprawling homes with sprawling gardens, the servant who came to the door never had a tip, and Mayank came to never expect any.

He kept his eyes open. Tried to understand without intimidation or envy these different places he was getting to see. Yet he would be overcome by a clammy mortification, sweat beading down his back, when he had to shoulder the insulated cube into his own neighbourhood. As his mother explained, in a somewhat strained tone, it is easy in this country to slip from the standing afforded by your community. Mayank could remember watching his father get dressed every morning in the bedroom mirror, his mother’s red and black bindis reflecting onto themselves on one side of the mirror-like soldiers facing off at a border. His father would comb his hair back and to the side with a pocket comb, tuck his shirt tight into the waistband of his trousers, adjust his belt, slowly scratch his trim stomach for reassurance. A government job, back when people could get such things. His father died on 12 July 2009. One among five in a chaos of imagined dust when a launching girder being used to build a bridge for the Delhi Metro collapsed. Mayank was nine. A couple of weeks after the funeral Mayank overheard his uncle tell his mother how lucky they were that it had happened while his father was on duty or the pension would’ve been half.

Mayank tried to experience his father’s absence with a kind of dispassion, but it flared in his consciousness from time to time. How proud and strange and faintly green he’d felt with the winter cold tingling his upper lip and cheeks that first morning after shaving until a classmate had cackled during the morning assembly, pointing out in a whisper that Mayank had failed to negotiate the groove underneath his nose, that it looked like a dark, minute caterpillar was climbing out of one nostril and into the other. He worried that it made him selfish if he only felt his father’s absence when he needed him. Now when people ask he speaks about his father’s death and its impact in a forthcoming, unsentimental manner. Any sense of injustice he disguises. The memory is too big, perhaps, it does not need to be thought about very hard.

Excerpted with permission from Mother India, Prayaag Akbar, HarperCollins India.