Till Kingdom Come

The structure is very Naipaulesque: encounters with a series of people, thoughtful character sketches, an occasional moment of great perception and a lot of readable but inconsequential detail. Dom is first and foremost a poet, a craftsman with words, a master of the chiselled phrase. He is best when speaking about himself. The autobiographical details about his demented mother and his long-suffering father, and of his sad and traumatised childhood, make compelling reading. He is very good too in describing others and in reporting what they say. Sarayu’s dexterity with the language was a discovery.

This being said, Dom and Sarayu offer very little new as insight to justify their extensive travelling. Dom is an engaging writer but can be effortlessly, even infuriatingly, patronising. He is most at home in his own peer group, such as at the home of the Sarabhais in Ahmedabad. While on the table at the Sarabhai home "an image of India" is made for him "by the wooden wheel in the centre of the table. It was flanged and each of the compartments created by the flanges carried a different dish. An option appeared in front of you, but if you didn’t know how to operate the wheel, each one, with a slight rumbling sound, slid away. For many Indians, successive options had slid out of reach over the years. Random killing was now the most reachable".

The enormity of the inference and the casual manner in which it is announced with such supercilious certainty is a good example of the uncritical and facile manner in which the book proceeds. The killings in Gujarat undoubtedly require the most emphatic condemnation. But surely they deserve a more critical examination, beyond merely a superficial if readable expression of outrage. Dom’s instincts are predictably those of the Western liberal and they are not flawed for this reason. However, he is a prisoner of many unfortunate biases, which are serious roadblocks in fully understanding the reality of India. He admits that he has "an inexplicable block against learning Hindi". The reason, he writes, were the boys who spoke in Hindi outside his school. These boys from India’s new middle class seemed to Dom to be "uniformly crass in their behaviour". "I identified this crassness," he writes, "with their loudly spoken language, Hindi, and with their being Indian."

To be fair to Dom, he admits that he is being less than fair in coming to such a conclusion. But while his honesty is laudable, his attitude is not. India "disgusts" him and he admits to "disliking" Indians. The real problem for the reader is that his hostility is based more on whim and subjectivity and less on research and understanding, thereby making him a relic of a bygone era, when merely speaking English with the right accent empowered one to be superficially judgemental. The Peter Sellers’ take on Indians is good for a few jaded laughs but is jarring in a book which purports to explore the "fault lines" of contemporary India. At one point in the book, Sarayu writes: "Dom was both bewildered and exhausted by the things that Indians believed, did or chose to do. As for me, I never really questioned any of them..." This sums up why the book fails to deliver. Dom remains "bewildered" in a superior sort of way and Sarayu never questions enough.