‘Our Friends In Good Houses’: Rahul Pandita’s debut novel is a haunting quest for home

Journalist and writer Rahul Pandita’s debut novel Our Friends In Good Houses inhabits multiple universes, but the one single thread that runs across these “many worlds” crisscrossing through the 221 pages of the novel is the thread of loss. Besides loss, the book is also scatteringly tied together by a bleak ray of hope which, though often elusive, has kept humanity going despite centuries of violent human history repeating itself in a loop.

By “loop”, I mean that ancient loop of civilisations wallowing in that same old quest for power over the weak, driven by bottomless greed and brutal wars. And though the threads of “loss” and “hope” are both interwoven in the narrative, it is primarily “loss” that the reader encounters on the pages. “Hope” comes around at the very end as an inevitability. As if it is a foggy subtext in the novel, often unclear but quietly cropping up on the margins as a necessary human condition. The kind of hope that comes to us after everything is lost.

Our Friends In Good Houses is a told from the heart by someone who loves and loses. A lover who loses almost all the important battles of his life but keeps loving, nevertheless. From our very own Majnu to Goethe’s Young Werther to Pamuk’s Kemal Basmaci to the Dreamer of Dostoevsky’s White Nights, the history of literature has many great lovers who were all losers and great losers who were all great lovers. Our Friends In Good Houses can be broadly referred to as a work of fiction branching out from the extended ambit of the same literary lineage.

An elegy on loss

But Neel, the protagonist of this novel, has suffered not just romantic losses. This is a story that begins with violence and then goes on to become increasingly steeped in witnessing multiple forms of injustice. The story of Neel’s losses begins with the loss of his home in Kashmir. His family was a victim of religious fundamentalism and was forced into exile in the early 1990s. Still a child, this sudden loss of home scars Neel so deeply that it is all he keeps looking for throughout his adult life.

Over the years, his quest for home turns metaphorical and later evolves into what can loosely be termed a spiritual quest. His consciousness is clouded with a peculiar kind of yearning, a deep longing which is often found in those who have survived tremendous tragedies. The landscape of Neel’s consciousness is also buried under the mountains of losses that marked his life. He lost not only his home but people too.

This novel also took me back to the disappointment that American novelist David Foster Wallace felt when his bestselling and best-known novel Infinite Jest was called funny by a large section of critics and readers. Wallace said that he wanted to write a “very sad book” and that he believed Infinite Jest would be one. He was surprised to find readers thought it funny instead. I am not sure if Pandita, who is himself a longtime Wallace reader and fan, wanted to write a sad book too. But Our Friends In Good Houses is a sad novel.

As I moved forward through the novel, a sense of melancholy enveloped me. This bitter-sweet melancholy, which grabbed me from the first pages, eventually evolved into full-blown gloom by the end.

Sensitive but dispassionate

Among the many worlds that make up this novel, the Bastar world is an important one. Spread across the sprawling central Indian forests of Dandakaranya, a key part of the novel deals with Neel’s journalistic travels to these conflict areas and the many bonds that he forms there – with the armed Maoists, the common adivasis, as well as the security forces. What struck me was the fact that despite being a victim of religious fundamentalism and being forced into exile towards the awfully hot Indian plains, Neel never became a radical right-wing extremist. Similarly, later while working as a conflict reporter, he forms serious, genuine and honest friendships with left-leaning militant Maoists but he never supports their violent ways.

What protects the narrative from falling into plain journalistic outrage or the moralisation cropping up from activism and elevates it to the realms of fiction is Neel’s sensitive but dispassionate and non-violent self. When his Maoist friend Gurupriya is killed in an encounter, he is immensely moved. Neel has a deep sense of empathy for his friends and is able to mourn their bullet-ridden bodies without being filled by any sense of revenge towards the state. Through the arc of Neel’s character, Pandita tries to expand the reader’s understanding of the human heart. Which, as celebrated American critic Susan Sontag said, is one of the primary qualities of good fiction.

Some of the Bastar sections and a long restaurant scene between Neel and his friend Gargi also reminded me of the Govind Nihalani’s 1984 film Party. As a teenager, I liked the film very much but was able to see its limitations as I grew older. Though I still have deep respect for all the brainstorming and deep thinking the film led me to do with my own, now I see it as a cautionary tale of what not to become as a public intellectual in India. Also, the relationship between another rebel character named Gurnaam and protagonist Neel took me back to the relationship between Om Puri’s and Chandrachur Singh’s characters in the Gulzar-directed film Maachis, though Pandita’s Gurnaam comes across as a much kinder and genuine person than Gulzar’s Sanatan (played by Puri). Gurnaam has a certain self-critical and “movement” critical approach in him, which is rare and is mostly absent in armed rebellions.

Landscape and literature

The novel is located in a variety of places like New Haven in America, Srinagar in Kashmir, the suburbs of Delhi , Dandakaranya in Chhattisgarh, Shimla in the Indian Himalayas, Hyderabad and the university campuses of Chandigarh. Pandita is able to invoke a sense of soul in the landscaping sections of the text, each leaving the reader with a different reading memory. Some scenes which have stayed with me include the constant drizzling in the forests of Dandakaranya, the garden of roses in the Srinagar house of Neel’s parents, the roadside red emergency buttons everywhere in the Yale campus and the waterfall near the Tara Devi temple of Shimla.

Besides the landscape, the other tool that Pandita uses to weave a parallel narrative running alongside the protagonist is arts and literature. The novel is full of references to writers, philosophers, actors and cinema. From Carson McCullers and Gillian Rose to Kedarnath Singh and Agyeya, many names show up in the text. To be precise, I counted a little over 70 references across the 219 pages of the novel.

Annie, Adaa, M, Gurupriya and Aarani are the five key female leads of the book. They include lovers, friends and the protagonist’s wife. All of them come with thoughtfully-written backgrounds and characterisation. Pandita is deeply sensitive in his portrayal of a fascinating range of women in his novel, which includes Maoist leaders, PhD scholars, doctors, and designers. These smart, vulnerable, feisty, revolutionary and book-hoarding women hold the narrative up and add immensely in making the whole reading experience immersive and engaging. Their eventual absences (more than their presence) against the backdrop of the events in the novel make Neel’s persistent, eternal longing for the idea of home more haunting and poetic for the reader.

Priyanka Dubey is the author of No Nation for Women: Reportage on Rape from India, the World’s Largest Democracy.

Our Friends in Good Houses, Rahul Pandita, HarperCollins India.