‘Our City, That Year’: The many tangled happenings that form the psychic context of communalism

So this was the novel. Our City, This Year.
No, That Year. Our City, That Year.
That year? This year?

This is no story of 1998, the year of the original Hindi novel’s publication. Or of 1992, the year of the masjid demolition, the tremors before and after which provoked this novel. This is the story of a year. A year we will spend with three characters who are “determined to bring everything to the fore,” as they strive to be unequivocal witnesses to the changing winds of their city: Sharad, Hanif, and Shruti. Sharad and Hanif, professors in the university next to the swelling, mutating ashram that spawns cults of Devi devotees, their “Jai Jagadambe!”s and cries for national revival. Shruti, the “writer who writes a lot if you don’t count that year.” And Daddu, too, whose laughter cheers the divan, whose words float, whose watchful ears catch the stirring of any breeze. Oh – and that narrator. Who is she, this “I”?

A year in which everything changes – so swiftly, so indefinitely, but so incrementally.

Hoarding her ink and pages, the narrator ferociously copies a scene, a thought, a dream, “whatever caught my eye, wherever.” Gathering them as fragments before they slip into the widening cracks of the city.

Not an academic like Hanif or Sharad teaching history, distributing speeches on secularism. Not Shruti, paralysed by how-to-write, what-to-write, couping with the other two, investigating gallis and ashram vans, foraging information on the streets. (Not Daddu either, though these two might make good friends.)

But each of them and each of their moves is known to our scribe.

Is she omniscient? Sort of. She sees the unuttered and hears the invisible – but her powers concentrate only on the quartet, and whoever among them she follows in particular. Is she the over-the-shoulder camera, then? No, she traipses into the city alone to restock her stationery. She’s a character herself, and seems to “live” with the rest in Daddu’s house, calling it “home.”

Is she real? Then why is she never seen or spoken to? Hers is an eerie presence; she haunts the novel into being.

“I” is no conventional narrator whose sole purpose is to relay a tale. This one is jolted by the currents of her city, and this ledger-keeping is deliberate for her. She could only ever be the narrator of Geetanjali Shree’s Our City, That Year.

For many, many pages we are reeling, trying to settle, find some anchor, hold the fragments together – what’s with the carrots, what do we do with these entries to and exits from the university department, why are sober conversations interrupted by Hanif’s absurd anecdotes, why are we overhearing banal chit-chat in the house, aur yeh Daddu ka kya kare?

But “what is happening here?” is not just a consequence of the novel’s formal madness; it’s philosophical perplexity. “Nothing appears clear or under control” not only for us readers, but even more so for those who live there, in our city, that year. Before they can grapple with one fluctuation, another is upon them, and another in the making.

In Our City, That Year everyone turns to writing as a response. And in turn writing turns into its own kind of agony.

The department incessantly debates the many handbooks the city needs: “a first-aid handbook,” “simple firefighting” manual, a report to “explain the misinformation,” pamphlets on “the role of the police, challenges for doctors, the role of rumours, the responsibilities of newspapers.”

Hanif and Sharad prepare articles and reports, letters to editors, gearing up their pens to battle the siege of propaganda.

Shruti frets as she tries to compose a fictional piece on the year, but no story emerges in full, only fragments. Hanif argues that she should not “dress it” – what? – “up as fiction.” In her rebuttal as to why not, she also prompts the question: what genre suffices?

In these scenes and preoccupations are Shree’s own questions: “Could I possibly write about anything but this? How could I write about this? Would it not be vulgar to think of aesthetics in writing about this? Aesthetics apart, could one understand what one was condemned to witnessing?”

Our anonymous copier, “cut” by the same thoughts, ventriloquises for Shruti and Shree: “Did our city need precious gems? Or a huge rock to hurl at people’s skulls so they could examine the blood and pus flowing from their wounds and understand how we’d changed?” Writing that tries to formulate with finesse, mine some value from the experience undergone? Or blunter words that unerringly force a self-confrontation, make us recognise the blood in the blood, the pus in the pus?

Herself a response to these questions, Shree’s narrator plays funhouse mirror for the other writers, claiming no mastery, annotating with sharp observation, logging her intense and fragmented feeling-thoughts. Shree’s only imperative to the narrator seems to be: keep writing, for “who knows what will come up” next? The novel dabbles desperately with genre, each entry of a fragment not consistent with another: a summary; two images juxtaposed; a lingering sense; transcribed speeches; announcements; a page-length rant; snatches of conversation; an interpretative paragraph. And these arrayed together, itself a new genre. Questioning, flinching, understanding, archiving.

There is no arc to this account, no spool around which to wind these different threads. Maybe the “proper worth” of these “incomplete, broken, scattered” scenes lies not in any immediate message, but in the narrator’s bid “to listen.”

The ashram loudspeakers trumpet far and wide, unleashing outright cries to reclaim power and assert identity, calculated riots and surveillance, hit lists and death threats.

The novel’s gaze spreads farther and wider, clocking how:

Modernisation only changes the forms of discrimination. We might eat “pakodas-kachodas” from anybody today, but the underlying fissures persist, perhaps etched deeper.

Department politics escalate without pause, their exchanges and hostility neatly mapping onto the majoritarian script. Colleagues envious of Hanif’s academic progress reroute the paths of their jealousy.

Interpersonal anxieties and uncertainties bleed into communal divides.

Religion becomes a handy rhetoric to one-up each other. The maid, when refused a bonus for a festival, insinuates that Shruti would of course only celebrate Islamic festivals instead.

Sometimes, smaller events, even those that are not immediate, those that have different sources and voyages, those without any such intention or logic or plan, become jigsaw puzzle pieces that fit together to produce the larger calamitous picture. Our City, That Year casts its net beyond cause-and-effect, origin-and-consequence, individuals and institutions, wandering its way around the many tangled happenings that have formed the psychic context for this scene of communalism.

The plots of the year swerve our way via a conversation, another eye, a person’s reaction. The speeches of the ashram’s head are translated by Sharad to Beverly (his companion), with some commentary about religious fervour – as though what we must witness is not only the Mahant’s tirade, but also how it inflects relationships. Updates about the university department reach us through Sharad and Hanif’s arguments – as though what we must see is not only the department changing but also the banter and the closeness and the growing distance between the two friends. It’s never enough to communicate an event. With it, the narrator sees hears thinks the feelings, reactions, responses of these characters inextricable from what befalls their city.

What happened to us that year?

Why are we so anxious when “I” pops up on the page? Because she reminds us, worrying about her copying, that we too have a worry at hand. The reader becomes the narrator as we try to keep pace and keep up. Together, we say: “I don’t understand,” “pay attention,” “to what?”, “what is important?” To read is also to witness, a task, one that we may have forgotten has demands.

This is the story of a year, a year that feels lived in its entirety. Moving in and out, in and out, of fragments, we inhabit with these characters the everyday, afresh. Each second appears intimately heavy, as we hear the repetitions of the day-to-day, each “come sit down” re-recorded without omission, alongside the perceptible feeling of each second being weighed down, a protracted transformation emanating somewhere, many things remaining mostly the same, but for a murmured rumour from another fragment that’s suddenly become the truth of the day, pages away. The slow changing of the days is fully fleshed out in a way that more narrative, even slice-of-life genres cannot always afford. Over the course of the pages, little by little, minute movements paint how, little by little, people are pushed in different directions, and the world itself is remade. If the experience of the year is “intangible,” Shree’s writing does not turn it tangible; she makes palpable the sense of that tragedy in the reading experience. This representation of our city, that year, more than anything, effects the texture of the infesting year: its incoherence, its paranoia, its helplessness movement towards…?

On one side is Sharad’s lecture on the co-option of history; from the same side blares the mahant’s sermon. The students hear both. The “I” records both, intermingling them: one line from the mahant, a rebuttal from Sharad. Or is it the other way around? The head buzzes. Who should one listen to, which will become “sweet to the ear”?

Such haze hits its foggiest when, in her bid to record a particularly frenetic conversation, the narrator skips the dialogue tags and quotation marks to save time. The clashing voices swell and meld breathlessly, rumbling together as though they are one. Questions and responses shoot off in impossibly different directions.

Maybe these are all the confusions of one person – of every person.

His colleagues keep telling Hanif: “The problem is with them, with those who are not us and not you; it’s those people, the ones on the other side of the bridge, the ones that riot: those people.” But the “you” in that sentence, still separated from “us” – is it a part of “them” or “us”? How tight then is this assertive distinction? Does not the slip suggest that “we,” safe in comfort and secularism and the university, are not that different from “them,” far away in rioting lanes and ashrams? Indeed, by the end, what’s “there” comes here, too – or it was always here, as Babbu Khan the tailor tells them, now simply “out in the open.”

Sharad and Hanif: once “brothers” in the eyes of the sabziwalla, a willing and witty unit backing each other against the ruckus of their department – “one minute, Hanif hasn’t finished”, “Thanks, Sharad.” Now, Sharad looks at Hanif talking with a Maqbool Haq and thinks “gang.” Hanif moves out of the hall when Sharad enters.

Even our narrator is not immune: she looks at her inkseller and her mind murmurs a query about his community.

“Us” – “them”?

Why write this novel? Why focus on this quartet? Because: “is the terror truly intangible, and are the incidents the only truly concrete things? Do those who didn’t die or won’t be killed have any presence in the tale?”

Yeh Daddu ka kya kare?

Daddu, rolling his eyes at the intellectual debates.

Daddu, waiting to let loose a droll remark about anything.

Daddu, who says, “Naalaayko, kya phaayda tumhara jeene ka?…jeevan bura nahin hai, tum bure nahin ho, isse dur rahakar badiyaa jee lo!”

Daddu, seemingly out of place.

But Daddu, keyed into all happenings – ears open to the world while reading a film magazine.

But Daddu, keeping up with the newspapers, “galti se.”

But Daddu, who quit his beloved village after violence knocked on his door (had he opened the door, welcomed it in?).

But Daddu, refusing to the parched ashramites preaching victimhood even a drop of water.

Daddu: apolitical apathy or a different politics?

Both Daddu’s presence and his words, perhaps the most profound provocations about our city, that year. His clear scrutiny of the world: trying, uncertain, broken. His posture: unrushed, testing, indeterminable, full of mettle.

At the ashram, at the pickaxed mosque, in the street, everyone wants us to “state our names, pull down our trousers, and show who we really are.” There are only two options: Hindu, Muslim. Everything fits underneath either column. Colours, names, clothing, appearance. Now actions, emotions, even expressions.

Even Sharad and Hanif forget – have we covered this? We’re afraid it’s “always the same flavour” – what they always laughed about: that they are both bearded and circumcised, that they converted to the other’s religion after their pehli mulaqat. “Do you consider yourself a Hindu?” comes out of Hanif’s mouth. Sharad wonders if Hanif has some “secret Muslim emotion” on his face. And Shruti says “good Hindus and good Muslims” instead of “good people.”

The “shrinking dictionary” whittles down to these two words, any others emptied of meaning. The people too are emptied of any other meaning, whittled down to fit these identities, any other fragments of them escaping notice or comprehension. No, now there are only two options available: “non-Hindu, non-Muslim.”

We must talk about what vegetables to buy. Hanif the fusspot hates brinjal but what else can one afford to buy these days?

Fifty pages later, the “lauki and brinjal and unripe bananas” show up and so do the women to “surround the vegetable cart.” Sometimes it rains, so the vegetable hawker is absent. Sometimes other storms are brewing, so we must (as Daddu knows to) store condensed milk in laundry baskets.

“I” scrambles to collect the moment before it’s gone. What if this too is important?

What Shruti does manage to complete are love stories. But why does she belittle them, hide them? Even amidst the violence, near a “rickety wooden bridge” are actual love stories, “amorous couples” hiding themselves. They must be recorded, too.

Recorded until they can be. This isn’t Shree’s earlier – later – novel, Tomb of Sand, where decades pass, but borders become bridges and love crosses over. In Our City, That Year, our bridge becomes “lonely,” desolate without its fugitive lovers. All relations slowly shrivel. Daddu says, somewhere, that here and there, even between you and me, hatred gives purpose. Oh, but why? Does the spirited optimism of love run out? Between Beverly and Sharad, too, who are only brought together because of that year, love could have bloomed maybe “in some other year,” not one in the future, but one that was in a different world.

If there is an Inspector Kapadia, non-partisan in deed but confessing his “dearest wish” to “once, just once, shoot straight at the enemy and quench the fire in my soul”...

if, as Daddu says, people are “already crazy,” “aadam, bhookha, janglee, havas se bharaa darinda,” and religion only the “attire” for that insanity…

if all it takes is a propaganda pamphlet to emotionally sway a whole neighbourhood…

if, that is, our inclination towards violence is waiting in the wings…

…how to do cohabitation, communication, consensus (or even dissent) – the work of democracy?

“Such dust swirled that year.” And that dust has kept on settling – even as it’s still swirling – becoming solid foundations for new buildings and statues, temples and parliaments. And do you remember Our Bloodstained and Horrifying History that was sold in the ashram bookstores? Now they are airport bestsellers.

“I don’t think I can read this novel in four days.”

“It’s only bearable in pieces.”

“Yeah…why do you think that is?”

“I think at some point you realise there’s no way out for these people. I don’t mean they’re going to die, but there’s a sense that they’re trapped in this.”

“And everything they’re doing feels….it all feels helpless. Like there’s nothing to be done.”

“Like the instigations and responses, they’re all already engineered.”

“Is the novel saying that we were never equipped?”

Geetanjali Shree’s is quite the cartography to traverse: clever sequence structures, bizarre collocations that fall into place as you turn the pages, sentences that sound like they were meant to be together. Sounds that sound like they were made for each other: “unki aavaz shruti par lahar-lahar laharati aa rahi hai. ab samundar hai, jiski lahrein hai, jo hava hai, jo aa rahi hai, us par cha rahi hai, laut ja rahi hai, uski jeb mein ret bharkar.” The phrases are the lehrein – waves, lapping up towards the end of the sentence, the sand that fills Shruti’s pockets. The rhythms of Shree’s words move the sentences, the narrative, and us.

Daisy Rockwell navigates the novel with her characteristic ease, mapping the twists of a phrase, the diction of a dialogue, tucking homophones away into unexpected corners. The apostrophe and the structure of “Everyone’s turning somersaults with laughter” so delicately retains the orality of the narration. How easily “Okay enough with all the we we we” tiptoes off the tongue. “Plougher” becomes “flower” to Sharad’s ear (“hal” to “kal” in Hindi) and leads the conversation astray. And especially full and tender are the translations of the songs, poems, and couplets that Daddu recites, lulling in their rhyme: “Let us go and live in a place where there’s no one at all / None to talk to, nor speak our language, no one at all.”

What differences one can locate between the Hindi and the English – some run-on sentences taking shorter breaths, a few passive phrases turning active (and vice versa) need no debate. The novel’s pith and the translation’s pitch are both focused on the political potency of the narrative. Rockwell’s manifest success is in reconstructing as a whole the engulfing anxiety of the novel, the jerkiness of the movements across fragments, the crawling sense of the year. They rage (the real) riot over the pages of Our City, That Year.

“How small that year made our world.” Yes, what kind of small?

These fragments have many effects, depending on how you read. After you turn the last page, you could return to them with no care for chronology: that alternate arrangement will offer other interrelations and intricacies, new questions and new depressions. They hover around like different stringed kites long after the novel is done, or like clouds they collude and condense together. The novel knows this too, and tells you how to read: “This, too, was a fragment that moved along…until suddenly, one day, it collided with another fragment, and then there was an explosion, and everything scattered.”

What if we’ve missed something?

The minute we’re writing a fragment, seventy other perceptions and questions and bewilderments flood us. Will we record them? Will the page run out? Oh, but this is the worry of “I.”

Hanif stops telling anecdotes. Shruti can’t talk to her closest, but they’ve had no real rift. Daddu’s laughter is swapped for pursed “beak”s. There is little room for stories or imagination or connection, cramped by dread and defeat. But there is at least the madhumalti that Shruti tends with care, the birds they watch with an intentness and wonder that they may never have been granted in another time: might here be solace?

Then Sharad hacks the vine apart, feeling that “if a riot breaks out right here, who knows, he’d be capable of anything!” Pushed over, Daddu tumbles – his white-and-pink dentures fall and blur into the white-and-pink blossoms.

There is no solace left in Our City, That Year.

Hamara Shaharein, Is Barasein.

Only pages before the novel ends, Hanif, recipient of death threats and hostile stares from even his students, encourages a family not to leave our city: “Look, things will get better.” The novel makes no such promise. It rather ends with hopelessness – or more exactly, a question mark next to hope. “Where is it? Over there?” If “over there” is the beginning of the novel, the future, things seem to remain bleak. Hanif himself has disappeared from the neighbourhood (and the very pages). Shruti and Sharad try to talk, struggling to ignite a conversation. And there’s a bundle in a familiar posture, “lying on the bed, its back to them.” Remember Ma, from Tomb of Sand? There she finds a crack in the wall to rise anew. And here, too, will this bundle rise? Again? Re-reading the beginning, we realise: the novel is over, and that question remains.

Our City That Year, Geetanjali Shree, translated from the Hindi by Daisy Rockwell, Penguin India.