I don’t know if Bhagat Singh ever really said this, but the revolutionary’s alleged response to his father’s question about marriage is now legendary, thanks to about half-a-dozen Bollywood biopics. What he said was this (or something very close to it): Aazadi hi meri dulhan hai (Freedom is my bride). The reason I am sceptical about this line’s authenticity is that it fits in a little too well with the nationalist movement’s moral aspects — especially in its attitude towards romantic relationships, its glorification of celibacy in service of a higher cause. The publishing house Amar Chitra Katha — surely one of the most influential promoters of the nation-building project in India — made this point very clear in its biographical comics about Chandra Shekhar Azad. He was addressed, again and again, as “Brahmachari-ji”, or the celibate one, establishing his caste credentials and his status as a bachelor who had sacrificed romantic/physical relationships for the sake of the nationalist movement.

Lavanya Shanbhogue-Arvind’s debut novel The Heavens We Chase begins with the admission of one such ill-fated affair in 1920, between young Saraswathi, a teenage singer for All India Radio, and Professor Ibrahim Hameed, an idealistic professor passionate about India’s burgeoning freedom movement. The lovers are separated soon after consummating their affair and Hameed goes incommunicado. Saraswathi’s father Satya is the educational inspector of the Bombay Presidency, a powerful, influential man who bullies both of his children — although his son is no pushover, being a member of Vayu, a nationalist theatre troupe.

Saraswathi is a compelling narrator. Her already fascinating story is enhanced further by some well thought out symbological overtones. She is born with six fingers on her right hand, is an inch shy of five feet and so believes herself to be physically unremarkable. She is known for her unusually mature, robust singing voice, her piece de resistance being a rousing patriotic song called ‘Ae Watan Main Tumhari Hoon’ (I’m Yours, My Homeland). However, her revenues are collected by Satya, her father, who also controls when she can and cannot sing. In the context of the nationalist movement, therefore, she is the classic ‘invisible woman’, hidden in plain sight — heard but never seen, exploited (her songs light up Vayu events/rallies) but never acknowledged. In other words, she is as invisible as Bharat Mata herself — the desexualised mascot of a movement based on feminine anthropomorphisation.

Satya, whose story we piece together through flashback chapters, is every bit as intriguing. As a 10-year-old, he ran away from his devout temple town after stealing the headman’s bicycle. Landing up at a construction site, he meets a strange, predatory man who is about to rape, rob and/or castrate him. In self-defence, Satya kills him by bashing his skull in with a large rock. The passage where he decides to do so is chilling — and funny in a fatalistic way.

“The manic man was trying to turn him into a eunuch. His worries were twofold: the money was tucked away there and he did not fancy a castration. Even if he survived, the memories would haunt him. The boy realised in one flash that a man’s penis, a man’s memories and a man’s money were enough to destroy him.”

Once again, this trifecta — money, manhood and memory — can just as easily be read as the triggers used to enlist hot-blooded young men for the nationalist cause. The British were robbing India of its wealth, trampling on the manhood of its men and thanks to the Macaulay doctrine (which Satya later enforces as Educational Inspector), erasing its collective cultural memories. As we follow the young Satya’s education under Edward Lord (’Grandpa Ed’ in the chapters set in 1920), the full force of the above passage hits you.

Shanbhogue-Arvind’s style is a little uneven for the last 30 pages or so, or maybe it’s uneven editing to blame. But for the most part, The Heavens We Chase is a deeply satisfying read on several levels — as the tragicomic story of a brown sahib-in-the-making, as a stop-and-start love story, and as a commentary on the psychological scars dealt by colonialism. Satya wants to own a horse-racing club one day because he was not allowed to enter one in his youth, on account of being brown-skinned. Later, as a middle-aged man, he frowns upon Kabir being taught over Milton, and Shakespeare being reimagined in an Indian cultural context. Satya’s mental colonisation is what theorists like Ashis Nandy and Franz Fanon have written about in great detail: a kind of schizophrenic splitting of the soul unique to the colonial experience, where the West changes “from a geographical and temporal entity to a psychological category” (Nandy, The Intimate Enemy).

It is to Shanbhogue-Arvind’s credit that she has created a character so perfectly embodying this dilemma. For Satya and the almost painful humanity of all her characters, really, The Heavens We Chase deserves recognition as an outstanding debut novel.