The personal lives of greying, balding, presumably soulless individuals who comprise the steel frame of the Indian government system, can sometimes run into pretty choppy waters. Choppy enough to lend themselves to a novel, like Suchita Malik's 'Scent of the Soil'.
Midlife crisis is a pretty secular phenomenon that hits just about everybody. Even senior bureaucrats, with two 'Prime Minister's Awards', handed out at Vigyan Bhavan, just like Malik's protagonist. The crisis manifests itself in several ways. Leading questions usually are: What am I doing? Is it really worth it? And then, it quickly moves to nostalgia: childhood, growing up years, old friends. Facebook has been generally therapeutic in bringing friends together, even middle aged people, once they are comfortable with the rat race and no longer as competitive as they once were.
In the case of Malik's protagonist, Shubhojit, there was little time for Facebook because the midlife crisis was triggered by a heart attack. In his case, the health crisis gave his volatile personal life and dysfunctional family – which included his former wife, who had walked out on him to marry someone ‘less deserved’ in Shubhojit’s opinion – a second chance at getting things right. The second chance was essentially about coming together and emotional bonding.
Seen through the eyes of his former wife, Shubhojit appears to be a typical bureaucrat – his long tenure had hardened certain traits in his character, and these included “his self-complacency, his sense of righteousness, his conviction of always being in the right” apart from “stereotyped and cliched responses and a stubborn disregard for changing norms and life”. When she married another man on the rebound, it was because he had come into her life like a “breath of fresh air and rescued her from her stagnant marriage”.
Invariably when a midlife crisis hits, it is always about nostalgia: the good old days. In this case, it means a return to the roots, Shubhojit’s village with memories of the village pond and spending time with friends, and, of course, food. It is an idea he has gone over. It was when his wife was still with him. And he had known then that he would go alone. When they were married she would abhor going to a place like that. After his heart attack, it seemed things had changed. When he called her to tell her he had taken a sabbatical and would be away from work and Delhi for a year, she seemed more attracted to the idea of going to the village.
The book title says, “A civil servant returns to his roots.” The ‘roots’ here is not work-related but entirely about his village home. Some of the more interesting passages in the book relate to details of village life, its organisation and daily life, in stories related by Shubhojit’s mother in the manner of a sociological study when she came visiting after he had had his heart attack.
It is perhaps inevitable that any novel on the Indian bureaucracy will be measured against Upamanyu Chatterjee’s 1988 best-seller, ‘English, August’, which gave an insight into the life of an Indian Administrative Service officer at the district level. It told the story of how a person from his background, westernised and over-educated, went from one shock to another as he stumbled through life in the district.
In comparison, Shubhojit is himself from a village. The return to the roots is his own way of finding equilibrium. It is not about getting a shock treatment in an unfamiliar world.
The best parts of ‘Scent of the Soil’ are the ones that are melodramatic. Visualised, these sections are tear jerkers: the time his son, with whom he has a difficult relationship, hugs him and promises to be good; or his former wife, fighting between reaching out to him and keeping her emotions in check because she is no longer with him.
Little is, however, told about Shubhojit himself, his working and living environment. Or how he looks. The same goes for other members of his family. A few more personal details would have a helped the reader to imagine the setting. Under the circumstances, his identity as a bureaucrat is just a background, even incidental. It is basically a personal drama. There is one element that should hold the suspense of the reader throughout the novel. His former wife comes ever closer to him after his heart attack. But, does she come back to him? The reader has to read the whole novel to find out.
ananda.majumdar@mydigitalfc.com
