Book: THE PRETENDERS

Author: Avtar Singh

Published by: Simon & Schuster

Price: Rs 599

Avtar Singh’s book belongs to a growing genre that deals with the predicament and the anguish suffered by people all over the world during the Covid-19 outbreak. This expansive novel is set across South, Southeast, and East Asia — with a glimpse of West Europe in the form of Germany — moving seamlessly from Delhi to Bangkok, to Jakarta, to Beijing, and Germany and covers a period of three months, from April 2021 to July 2021 — the period of the deadly Delta Wave.

It explores the intertwined lives of the people who had lived in apartments in South Delhi for generations with their loved ones, friends and relatives, scattered all over the world. The novel also probes the paradoxical nature of the pandemic, which spared neither the wealthy nor the less privileged, even though the privileged
could take safety measures that their less fortunate brethren were not able to afford.

Surrounded by death and the constant burning of the pyres, Singh’s book invokes the ghosts of the past, both literally and metaphorically. Shamsher Singh, one of the major characters of the novel, is visited by and lives companionably with the apparition of his dead wife while renewing a love affair with his former girlfriend, Ursila. The past also haunts the characters in the form of their own unquiet conscience due to the misdeeds they had committed earlier in their lives. It also chronicles the acts of courage and courtesy extended by the likes of Sewa Singh, Shamsher Singh’s driver, as a volunteer at a local langar. The Pretenders vividly recreates the ambience of fear, mistrust, solitude, and compassion that the deadly pandemic engendered.

The title refers to the hidden identities of several of the characters, who, for multiple reasons, have assumed names and positions that are not really theirs. An element of suspense is also deftly interwoven into the narrative in the form of the gradual revelation of the real identities of the pretenders, with all the loose ties resolved satisfactorily at the end.

The novel also refers to the political turbulence in India during the period resulting from the farmers’ protests. Like the border of the national capital where they were forced to encamp, they are also situated at the margins of the narrative, never taking centre stage. In a prose that is lucid and smooth, and peppered with a mix of colloquialisms, the novel lays bare the pretensions of not only the imposters but also the people from different classes, especially from the upper echelons of society.

The Pretenders is an eminently readable novel by an author who, surprisingly, is still little known or read by the Anglophone readers of this country.