KR Meera’s latest novel Assassin begins, as the promo line goes, “at the height of India’s demonetization drive and culminates on the anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination”. The narrative follows a 40-something woman named Satyapriya, living in an unspecified big Indian city. At the beginning of the book, Satyapriya survives an assassination attempt and receives a threatening phone call, one that leads her to believe that the recent tragic deaths in her family may in fact be murders—that someone is out to get her and everybody close to her.
Meera is one of the most versatile and accomplished writers in India today, and Assassin is her take on the ‘hardboiled’ detective story, a la Dashiel Hammett, Raymond Chandler et al. One of the most fascinating aspects of the book is how it uses Mahatma Gandhi—his life, his legacy and his assassination—as a plot point in several different (and equally satisfying) ways. For example, here’s a conversation as early as page 6, where Satyapriya watches three men arguing about politics and discussing her murder in the same breath—notice how cleverly the term ‘Gandhi’ is used for the (newly demonetized) Rs 500 note.
“The three continued to ask questions which they themselves answered. Gandhis are gone, said Shetty, now the contract killings are going to go up. But only the ordinary folk are bereft of Gandhis, Reddy countered. They were talking about the five-hundred-rupee notes, of course.”
This pun linking the Mahatma to the Rs 500 note is whipped out a few more times in the novel, especially when money and / or dire necessity are being discussed.
Meera links Gandhi’s assassination with Satyapriya’s attempted assassination in other, more subtle ways as well. At one point, she goes through her recently deceased father’s belongings and finds that he had preserved a dead foetus in formaldehyde for over a decade—it was the aborted foetus birthed by his mistress. Satyapriya’s nausea manifests itself in the form of a hallucination—she sees the foetus walking towards her “like Gandhi” and even imagines it wearing little “Gandhi spectacles” (a bloodied pair in Gandhi’s signature circular style is featured on the novel’s back cover as well). At a different point, she also imagines her sister (also recently deceased) walking towards her in Gandhi’s typical gait, walking stick tap-tapping alongside her.
Deep into the second half of the novel, a crucial chapter ends with a scene where Satyapriya remembers a detail about a bag she gave to her mother. She rushes towards the bag and removes a torn half-note for a thousand rupees—only to be greeted by a curious sight.
“I took out the half-note I had been given in Bhubaneswar and fitted it along this one. They made for a whole thousand-rupee note. One half was grimy, the other fresh. Gandhiji’s image was on the latter. No truth is truth until such time as one is convinced by it. That is the curse of crime detection. Especially when the individual truth lacks political conviction. I looked closely. What I saw on the note was not Gandhiji’s image. It was Godse’s – but Godse with a bald head and round spectacles.”
Meera’s novel is the latest, but since the 1940s or so, there have been works of fiction that have used Gandhi as a prominent plot point. RK Narayan’s Waiting for the Mahatma is a prime example. In the novel, protagonist Sriram falls for Bharati (the name is no coincidence, of course), a young activist involved with Gandhi’s Quit India Movement. A smitten Sriram joins the movement to be with Bharati but soon realizes that Bharati expects the two of them to follow Gandhi’s vow of chastity. Obviously, for a young couple this causes complications.
The Hungarian-born British writer Arthur Koestler’s 1960 book The Lotus and the Robot was banned from India because of its unflattering depiction of Gandhi. Science fiction novelist Barbara Hambly’s short story ‘Soldier of the Queen’ imagined a world where Martians had invaded the earth, thereby weakening the British Empire and allowing Gandhi to declare India independent as early as 1897, 50 years before it actually happened. Harry Turtledove, an American writer known for his works of alternate history, wrote a novella called The Last History in 1988. The narrator was Gandhi and the book imagines how the world would look had Germany and the Axis powers won World War II.
Today of all days, it is worth your while to read more about Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and understand why he continues to inspire not just politicians but also writers and artists around the world.
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