Fairy Tales at Fifty
By Upamanyu Chatterjee,
Fourth Estate, Rs 599

Upamanyu Chatterjee has been cogitating on nothingness for quite some time now, so much so that one suspects that it's his favourite topic. Which is just as well, since the way Chatterjee handles it makes dogged emptiness the occasion of the blackest mirth and proves that nothing is something, after all. Chatterjee specializes in characters (always men) who are incapacitated by their hyper-active, over-refined minds. Nirip, the protagonist of Fairy Tales at Fifty belongs to the hallowed line. To compound the woes of our Prufrockian hero, Nirip realizes with a start that he is about to complete 49 years of living in his skin and hit 50 - which means that he can now see his head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter. But there is hope - Nirip has a living image in the mirror, a twin, who, unlike Dorian Gray, ages in tandem with his brother to keep him company. In contrast to Nirip, his twin, Anguli, is a man of action - he is a serial killer - a fact which makes it easier for him to find his way out of problems like that of ageing simply by moving on, even if towards death.

Chatterjee gives body to his meditation on existential emptiness by bringing in frame-narratives of fairy tales and myths, which, by serving as precedents for the stories of Nirip and Anguli, lift them out of time. Anguli, for instance, names himself after Angulimala, the feared highwayman from Buddhist times who used to wear the fingers of his murdered victims around his neck as a garland till he met the Buddha and was transformed. So adolescent Anguli, at that time known as Jhabua, writes out his fate early on when he voices his ambition: "'Badi-mummy-ji, I want to be Angulimala and run after the Buddha. Failing which, I want to join the Army."' The second option would suggest that Jhabua wanted to make sure that he would get to kill in any case, in the high probability of the Buddha failing to turn up at the right time. However, the author, like the kindly fairy godmother, lets him have his fill of both blood and beatitude in the course of the novel.

The fairy godmother, is, in fact, a prominent presence here. If in fairy tales she acts as a surrogate of the author, changing pumpkins into carriages and riches to rags with a swish of her wand, she, and, by implication, the author, is in dire straits in this story. She is beaten to pulp by her godchild, Anguli, when his frustration with the injustices of an unequal world gets the better of him. The fairy godmother turns out to be neither god-like nor fairy-like in her powers, but is more like just a mother, who must learn to love her progeny without indulging in the concomitant desire to control their lives. The same is true of the author, playing Mother Goose to his gaggle of characters, who waddle off in every possible direction as soon as they are hatched. Most annoyingly, they must also cross the road and get crushed, which would mean the end of the story. The author's intention to bring about a 'happily ever after' ending is thus thwarted at every turn, mostly because characters like Nirip want to stay unhappy while those who have achieved some happiness spoil it by wanting to be happier still. The author still tries to make some 'motherly' interventions while keeping the characters' freedom intact. He suspends Nirip's half sister, Magnum, in midair when she jumps off the fourteenth-floor parapet of her father's apartment. "In the present staccato [as opposed to the "future imperfect"], each time you look in on her, she is right there, arms and legs flailing, still full of life in midair."

This is the crucial moment towards the end of the novel when the author, who has been invisibly controlling the narrative so far, reveals his face as the benevolent magician, thus breaking the illusion of the story-telling, to doff his hat to Time. Nirip, teetering on the edge of 50, has been battling against Time all along, and now the author joins him in the unequal combat to declare peace. In the penultimate chapter, "An end to mythmaking", Chatterjee, throwing away his magic wand, invokes Time: "Time in Hindu and Buddhist speculation is the power that limits the existence of eternal elements in matter. It is the boss, it calls the shots, it decides when the fun and games of gods and demons should end and when the partying of people on this planet must wind up." The author can offer temporary reprieve to his characters, but when the story cracks open to reveal the life it has been borrowed from, Magnum, who "wants to be free of everything, for everything causes sorrow", must hit the roof of some parked car to become gloop.

Chatterjee has been playing the clown in novel after novel, laughing out loud in the dark to keep thoughts of sorrows, sufferings and, most of all, mortality, at bay. Sex, or eros, perhaps the only force that can put up a worthy fight against death, has been one of the mainstays of his brand of laughter, and Fairy Tales at Fifty too is full of fellating women and sodomizing men. The way they go about their business makes for true entertainment, Chatterjee-style, but the author is apparently aiming at more than light entertainment here.

The novel is full of violence, against the poor, against children, and Chatterjee has talked of the Nithari killings as an instance of the nadir of humanity. Nirip's father, Pashupati, is the emperor of filth, the font of corruption, who has thrived by selling skeletons and organs of the poor. He may well stand as a caricature of the Nithari killer. Pashupati is odious but he is also hilarious: Chatterjee's jocular style makes it difficult for the reader to take Pashupati's villainy seriously. The profusion of fantastic flourishes in Nirip's part of the novel creates an effect of madness, leaving the reader too dazed to care. Chatterjee's baroque touches here are just self indulgent and they defeat his purpose.

Even the sex-related humour gets rather too yucky at times. For instance, Shaamo, one of the several ghoulish women in Pashupati's harem, "dunk[s] boiled potatoes in her own menstrual discharge" to make a "nourishing stew" for a mother-to-be. Some sketches are so absurd as to be nonsensical - I could not picturize someone like Chintamani, one among Pashupati's many lackeys, whose "dyed hair" bounces "like yoyo". Moreover, the imposition of the fairy tales and myths - borrowed from a wide range of sources, starting from the Greeks to Bollywood movies of the Eighties - meant to give the story a meaning beyond itself, strains the narrative at times, especially when are put in arbitrarily. After sleeping for little over a day and a half, Nirip contrasts his power of holding back piss to that of Rip Van Winkle, who hadn't urinated in the 20 years of his hibernation. The Rip Van reference seems to have been fitted in more as a reminder of the "fairy tale" of the title rather than help the narrative progress or gather meaning. Indeed, the word, "fairy tale", has been repeated so many times in the novel that one begins to wonder whether Chatterjee is over-anxious about getting his point across.

Fairy Tales at Fifty fares the best in the first part, in Angulimala's tale, chiefly because here there is no attempt at an apology for Anguli's murderous behaviour, while later there will be stilted apologies aplenty for Nirip's impotence in the face of his father's evil nature. As Anguli kills his truck-driver molester and takes to the highway in the stolen truck, the narrative too seems to expand endlessly like the horizon, and race past breezily like the landscape seen from a driver's seat. The description of the ride on the highway at night sounds authentic, pulsating with the energy of adventure, unlike sizeable portions of the novel that sound fake, even if delightfully so. "His headlights did pick up the kilometre stones, but some were defaced and some others had handbills pasted on them... The highways have always been dangerous, at all times; at night they are especially lethal, for the trucks are let loose after dark. The one that Anguli had debouched on to had no central divider and the lights of oncoming traffic completely blinded every driver. Those already high and getting steadily more drunk in their need to forestall sleep didn't quite care, though, about being blinded. Some of them hadn't slept for sixty hours at a stretch; trusting their manliness, they continued to careen and roar through the dazzling lights and beyond... We shall overcome, we shall overtake, we shall overturn. Some of the accidents on those highways looked like the result of one of the storms that have helped to form our planet."