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Dahanu Road

by | Book Review

Some of the most satisfying works of fiction often defy any attempt at categorization. These stories that tell the truth about us by telling us lies about people that never existed (Stephen King’s definition, not mine!) are as ambitious about the diverse categories of fiction they effortlessly straddle as they are about the complexities of human condition. My friend Anosh Irani’s brilliant novel Dahanu Road (Harper Collins India,2010) is one such work. A love story between a rich man and a poor woman? An anthropological look at the culture that existed in towns like Dahanu and Palghar in the post-independence India? A historical account of the migration of Parsis fleeing religious persecution and finding a new home in India? Somehow, Dahanu Road ends up being greater than the mere sum of its parts.

Nathaniel, the protagonist of Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight once notes that we order our lives with barely held stories.  The characters in Dahanu Road, the rich Irani owners and their dissolute children living life of low-key entitlement as well as the Warli tribals working the chikoo farms owned by the Irani clans, all seek and offer similar order through their stories. These stories at once draw the lay of the land where the story takes place as well as help create the emotional core of this novel.

Zairos, grandson of the rich farm-owning patriarch Shapur Irani, is a good-natured scion to the family business. His life of largely directionless luxury undergoes a drastic change one morning when a farmworker on his grandfather’s chikoo farm hangs himself from one of the trees. On deck to handle the fallout of the suicide, Zairos sees Kusum, the beautiful daughter of the diseased and falls in love with her. The relations between the Warli tribals who till the chikoo farms, and the owners are one of forced cordiality. There is no overt violence but the potential is always simmering beneath surface and the rich, entitled grandson of one of the largest farm owners falling in love with the married daughter of a farm worker might just be the spark that sets the whole thing on fire.

From here on, the book traverses two parallel narratives – one involving Zairos and Kusum in the present and one involving Shapur and his journey to India as an immigrant child who eventually becomes a farm owner and the dark secret, he has hidden all his life. A character in Russel Bank’s Rule of Bone defines committing sin as creating a condition that you have to live in (all your life). The burden carried manfully by Shapur is similarly one of his own creations. And that somehow makes his efforts to maintain a stoic front even more heroic.

The numerous trees on the Irani’s chikoo farms are a character in themselves. The author signals it in the early pages when Zairos pays his respect to the oldest chikoo tree planted by his grandfather, every morning. Of course, he is an Irani from Dahanu Road, so the expression of that respect is him blowing smoke from his first cigarette of the day at the tree! Such personality quirks, the hilarious descriptions of the card games in roadside eateries, Zairos’s cousin who rides his RED BMW motorcycle in his Santa costume, the painstakingly systematic way Aspi; Zairos’s father cuts the apple in the family kitchen every morning- all these descriptions help to create a vivid image of the universe to a place where you feel you can almost touch it merely by turning the page over.

At the same time, the emotional core, driven by an inheritance of violence, loss and grief continues to beat strongly from the first chapter. The lines between oppressors and oppressed are often blurry, and history is relentlessly exerting its force upon all the players. Shapur Irani once tells Zairos “To look at the past is like shining a flashlight on a dead body” and yet as much as the wily patriarch would want to protect his grandson from it, the past proves not a lifeless form but an active and almost malevolent force of nature; driving Zairos and those he cares about to an inevitable conclusion that is tragic and reaffirming at the same time.

In many ways, Dahanu Road is Anosh’s ode to a style of life that is slowly getting lost, if not lost already. That he manages to do this while avoiding the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia as well as the dark shades of cynicism are testament to his immense skills as the storyteller and observer of the human condition.

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