Age of Anguish

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Sudeep Chakravarti’s The Avenue of Kings is emotionally honest. The book portrays the mind of the youth in India’s capital and Kolkata going berserk between the 80s and early 90s. The decade was perhaps the one with the greatest unrest and churning, also the one most splintered and debilitating to be carried through in one long story. It does not easily lend itself to one narrative graph, so Sudeep chooses three personal narratives, in three novellas, which are released as one book.

The first novella starts with Brandy Ray (from Tin Fish), a young man, witnessing a Sikh man being burnt alive in the aftermath of Mrs Gandhi’s assassination and how it destroys his mind and breaks his sense of hope. Brandy becomes a journalist, goes on junkets and press briefings, and sees more similar disasters: Rajiv’s death, Babri Masjid’s destruction, apathy around the Union Carbide disaster, Bofors and the IPKF in Sri Lanka. India becomes a wasteland and Brandy, along with the news agency head Marty, Shreya with whom he has an affair, Asli Ravi, who is a don of drugs, moves through it like a zombie, trying to make sense when there isn’t any.
His voice screams its pathos on the Avenue of Kings, the Rajpath in New Delhi, where heads of state undertake their last journeys. How does one deal with witnessing “a so dead in black and white face of a child, a father’s hand gently brushing dirt from his clouded eyes as they looked innocently into nothing?”
These are stories of a generation, which if they chose to witness, did not know how to make sense of anything, except by going into one’s own heart and venting its helplessness, or escaping to the plush lives aboard. Brandy marries and loses Suya. Suya chooses to work with poverty: “I feel anonymous in the undertow of village India: surveying, emotionless, and quite mute. I am lonely, but am learning to live with myself. ...I can hardly connect with Delhi, your job there, with the project here. I believe in you. Do you believe in me?”
The book is about ‘belief’, and what is ‘me’ and ‘you’. Yet, the third novella ends in bleak hope when children shout: Ung-kaal, Khuda hafid. What I liked is that the stories are just what they are; the author does not try to explain or give background. The book is neither a complete showing nor a complete telling, it is somewhere in between, a way to capture events on how they work on Brandy’s shattered heart. Its tone is irreverent and politically wrong. It takes guts to be so past caring, to convey that you are screwed, irrespective how readers think about you.
I wish the author had paid attention to a few historical facts: like Shah Jehan had 14 children, not 15. But those are minor glitches. What stands out is the lifestyle of urban youth in Delhi in the 80s: such variety of sex and drugs. It allures you, but when you read the book, you realise you did not want to be part of such catastrophes. Yet you did, we all did, as a nation we did live through all that and more.
Amandeep Sandhu is the author of Sepia Leaves