Comings and Goings: On the beauty of Amitabha Bagchi’s HALF THE NIGHT IS GONE
Sakshi Nadkarni on Amitabha Bagchi’s Half the Night is Gone (2018), a tale of stories withing stories, both dense and sparse, a glimpse across many Delhis, a meditation on sorrow, fatherhood, self-reflection, and literature itself.
Not much of Amitabha Bagchi’s 2018 novel Half the Night is Gone (Juggernaut) is explicitly related to darkness, or incompleteness, nor does Bagchi ever make use of the titular phrase in the novel itself. The protagonist—startled at the realization of the brevity of human life after the sudden death of his son in an accident—begins to right the many wrongs he has committed in his self-absorbed life of a reclusive novelist, one who had always been at odds with the world. Thus begin a string of letters to his publisher, to his younger expatriate brother, to his son’s white girlfriend, and ultimately, to the one he has wronged most: his wife. He attaches with his letters the pages of a manuscript he has immersed himself into writing in the year and half after his son’s death, when all his relationships seem to have gone awry.
What Bagchi’s work deals with, then, is a certain gone-ness. Unlike his previous books—expressions of biting, snarly satire, which spat out with anger at the injustices of the world—the most recent one is encased within Bagchi’s overarching novel as metafiction, and is more tender and accommodating of the world. One encounters visages here of the masculine sensibility of the Indian householder: the expectations to perform, the dissatisfaction that comes with the frustrated performance, the craving for affection from elders, the inability to respond to (even while understanding and empathizing with) feminine love, the complex dynamics among fathers, sons, brothers, sisters-in-law, husbands, wives, masters, servants, selves.
So, why the title? Does it have to do with the political history of India, which the novel ventures into, but doesn’t quite unpack fully? Does it refer to the recession of the first half century of India’s independent nationhood, steeped in disillusionment with the world after the pomp and rigour of the freedom struggle had been replaced with corruption, money laundering, and social debilitation that exposed India’s unreadiness for the future? Does it mean (in the style of the individualistic ‘Western’ novel) the night of a life that Vishwanath—our protagonist—has endured, only deepening with the losses he has incurred? Or does it refer to the characters in the novel Vishwanath writes, where history repeats itself aimlessly, a lineage of servants, as if by automation, serving a lineage of masters; until, until one Ramadassa winds up in a classroom and dreams a dream—beckoning the dawn?
The novel shuttles comfortably between the Delhi of rich merchants, of their whores and wives, of pehelwans, of the politics of the upper-class household, of strict rules and regulations, the Delhi of competitive entrance exams, of dreams of moving abroad, of glossy literary circles.
Maybe the night refers not to an event or person or even historical period, but to the bewilderingly pessimistic tone of this book. Lamentation, breakage, regret, guilt, and loss are central to the novel; but more so, is the stark sadness that underlies the humour, the magnificent narration, the religious munificence and the very tone and mood of the novel. The glass here is not half-full. The night that remains holds no interest over the night that has passed. The irreversibility of time, its cruel permanence which renders every moment final is the thread that knits the frame story to the story within it, which knits all these myriad-minded characters, which knits the era of pre-independence old Delhi with the era of technologically-advanced (yet otherwise regressed) new Delhi together, such that the polyvocality of the narrative never takes away from its heart and soul.
Indeed, what astounded me about Half the Night is Gone was how much it did with its three hundred odd pages. In its relative slimness, it not only packed dense themes of age, death, grief, mourning and redemption, but also traversed through time—if not through space, too. The novel shuttles comfortably between the Delhi of rich merchants, of their whores and wives, of pehelwans, of the politics of the upper-class household, of strict rules and regulations (and equally wily ways to get around them), the Delhi of competitive entrance exams, of dreams of moving abroad, of glossy literary circles. Yet, there is that raw emotion, that weird, family dynamic hinged on respect unique to India, that distance between the individual and his society which must be tread alone that remains common. By the end of the novel, one discovers that despite being worlds apart in plot, theme, tone, and characterization, the two stories are mirrors, indefinitely reflecting the complex images of self, nationhood, and family on to each other.
For instance, is the relationship between Diwanchand and Dinanath not the same as the need for approval that Vishwanath claims Jagannath felt for him? Aligning, too, is the penchant for renunciation and religiosity between Diwanchand and Jagannath, or the shrewd man-of-the-world qualities of both Dinanath and Jagannath. The two sets of brothers are foils to each other; Diwanchand and Jagannath’s tenderness—often mistaken for emasculation—heightens the almost cruel intellectual and professional superiority of their brothers. Yet, Vishwanath writes Diwanchand as more lovable, kinder, softer than Dinanath, forever rupturing any empathy the reader might have for Dinanath, and turning the audience gently towards Diwanchand’s likeability—a subtle gesture that scaffolds the self-flagellating nature which Vishwanath has displayed throughout, though he claims it to be a compensation of sorts for his egotistic and self-absorbed past.
The triumph of this novel is that it does not make the choice between characterization and narrativization that has so plagued novelists, abstaining from that steely compromise between being Virginia Woolf and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. So far, the thesis has been that if one hopes for the incisive character sketch of their protagonist to shine through, they must make room for it with a stream of consciousness form, that dispels all plotting and narrativity; conversely, if one wants to make room for a strong narrative—replete with subplots and full of wonderful digressions—the characters inhabiting them must show a linear arc (if any).
Somehow Bagchi does both. Through the letters, he masterfully unravels the complex, layered, extremely persuasive trajectory of Vishwanath’s life: his embarrassment of a socially-depressed father which carries forward as embarrassment of a brother who follows suit, and his alienation from domestic life as the more ‘masculine’ concerns of a dream career as a serious novelist take off, until he transforms into a shadowy, absent father for his son and an inattentive husband to his wife. We are privy to his arrogance and pride at being a public intellectual, which turn out to be ineffective bandages to hide the insecurities of a motherless child. We experience his seething anger at the unrighteousness of a nation grappling with post-independence stagnancy. We see his eventual guilt, which prevents him from expressing his truest feelings and his constant struggle with own self. These features are all made evident in the letters that span barely a third of the novel.
For every emotion that a contemporary man feels—whether it’s devotion for a guru or love for a brother—there is a rendering of the feeling in what a character professes to be almost divine, almost perfect, almost godlike poetry.
Yet, through the metafiction, the story within the story, Bagchi reveals his prowess as a conjurer of alternative worlds. Not only does he evoke the charms of a postcard-esque Delhi with its evocations of sprawling havelis filled with pot-bellied masters exacting work from their poor servants—who in turn plot to overturn their fortunes by competing for a position of proximity with their masters—but also intersperses these with a handful of geographical anchors: the majestic, airy Red Fort, the gullies of Agra, the halwai shops. Their sparsity is the cause of their intensity.
Inhabiting these large homes are scores of people, and with them, an equal number of natures. We meet the withdrawn and religiously-inclined Diwanchand, and in contrast, his authoritative and illustrious older brother Dinanath, both progenies of the patriarch Lalaji. Their wives are victims of a menacing patriarchy which allows fathers-in-law to sexualize their daughters-in-law, for the daughter-in-law will never tell her husband out of shame. This is also the skewed world where a servant woman passes around from master’s hand to that of another servant, or a widow suppresses her longing for male companionship and envy for a friend who is more blessed, maritally and economically. Yet, these very same women are also voices of agency who create a situation they can lead and dominate even within the confines of this system.
For instance, the daughter-in-law commences her education at the hands of her seven-year-old son, the servant woman establishes her authority such that everyone listens to her. The widow questions religious texts and gives a befitting response to her friend’s cruel ploy to rid her of her unrequited love. These are women who stand up for themselves, yet whose voices remain underrepresented in the overall masculine tone of the novel. The daughters of the family are barely mentioned, and the daughters-in-law who are mentioned occupy less space and do much less for the narrative, serving merely to prop up the stories of their men.
Regardless, the women play their part in the grand story that unravels over almost two-thirds of the novel, spanning generations, from Mange Ram, the promising pehelwan turned docile servant, his son Parsadi and wife Omvati who follow in his footsteps but never reach his stature, and their son Ramdassa who decides to emancipate his class by venturing to dream.
A sharp contrast to this cast of characters are the people they work for: the wealthy overlords of large estate, including Lalaji, whose cunning has facilitated this turn in the family’s fortunes. Diwanchand’s son Kesho makes a guest appearance, but is never allowed to develop beyond the spoiled child of a rich father who foils the simplicity and innocence of Ramdassa. By imbuing, thus, the poor character with richness of imagination and his wealthy foil with a poverty of the mind, Bagchi tries to break the same class hierarchy he has expended the whole novel.
As we track the fortunes of the family through some seventy to hundred years in Bagchi’s beguiling storytelling, we discern the facades of money and power fall away to reveal a primality that lies at the core of the human race. A certain pattern emerges. The prologue begins with a grandfather, charting themes of power, lust, and maturation into that treacherous, deceptive world of adulthood; the epilogue ends with his grandson, with an anecdote so simple and innocent that it is jarring, seemingly out of place in this novel about the bigger, deeper, darker things in life. This is a regression echoed also in the character arc of the tale’s protagonist, who moves from the fallacies of adulthood to the sagacity of childhood, from his egotism and pride to the innocence of love, from the repressed traumas to the settlement of emotional debts. As such, the novel ends wth a clean slate for the protagonist to begin writing the story of his life again.
It is impossible to speak of this novel without at least making note of the dense intertextuality it consciously employs, deriving its hermeneutic force from the steady rivers of Hindu spirituality in North India. There is perhaps no North Indian unacquainted with the Ramcharitmanas (Spiritual Lake of the Acts of Ram) of Tulsidas Goswami, that pioneer of Hindi poetry and chronicler of Hindu belief. Not five pages of Half the Night is Gone go by without a mention of The Manas, including quotations (supplied with seamless translations in English) and an exegesis on The Manas and its author. What I perceive to be the climactic scene of the novel is, in effect, a long exposition on the meaning and merit of The Manas, delivered by a central character dealing with an immense potentiality. It is also one of the most well-written, well-thought, and well-placed passages in the entire book.
The exposition fills the story with resonances of ‘u’ and ‘h’ that make the Awadhi language so beautiful, lending a musical quality to the novel. It reiterates the spirituality that so penetrates the domesticity of every Indian and provides a necessary, easing contrast to the cruelty, deception, and materialism that underlies the narrative. It pins the story to an India that seeks to replicate its history in the present. For every emotion that a contemporary man feels—whether it’s devotion for a guru or love for a brother—there is a rendering of the feeling in what a character professes to be almost divine, almost perfect, almost godlike poetry.
India feels like a wheel stuck in its path, rotating, but never moving forward.
But move forward it does. In the letters set in India of the early 2000s, there is close to no mention of The Manas, except at the very end (yet, the fact that the story of pre-independence India, so rooted in the spirituality of The Manas has come from the pen of this modern man, in a twisted way, is testament to the pervasion of this text in Indian consciousness). These letters draw on other, more secular sources, shayari and ghazals and forms of modern poetry that are a sharp turn from the dohas and chaupais of the story-within-the-story: Dushyant Kumar, Dilawar Figar, Bismil Azimabadi, Daag Dehlvi, Allama Iqbal, Muneer Niazi, Jaishankar Prasad, Mahadevi Verma, Parvin Shakir, Adam Gondvi, Wafa Rampuri, Chand Narayan Raina, Subhadra Kumari Chauhan all make an appearance, in that order, and sometimes a couplet is even repeated. For the novel, this choice tempers the heavily religious impact of The Manas, conferring it with a rhythmic, musical quality.
The question inevitably arises: Did the depths of Vishwanath’s grief lead him to remark that writers find a way to narrativize their life, and thus, stunt its possibilities?
The Manas, most definitely, is a source of quiet strength in times of pain and companionship in times of loneliness; yes, it is a perfect expression of every imperfect feeling. But here is not just the story of God which tells humans how to behave; it is also sheer poetry, which the literature aficionado Bagchi expounds on in an exegesis: the juxtaposition of the vernacular language of the people (Awadhi) with the “alankarik”, beautiful language of the Gods (Sanskrit). Bagchi slyly places the “so” beside the “tamas”, creating a new sound “tamas so” which evokes the Upanishadic prayer of “astomasadgamaya” or “from darkness to light”. The author being a lover of poetry, coupled with his protagonist being an award-winning writer, is enough reason to justify the recurrence of verse throughout the novel, with a long scene dedicated to a mushaira performance that doesn’t do much for the story but is instrumental in creating the mood of a 20th-century Delhi with both Hindu and Islamic influences.
Half the Night is Gone earned nominations for the Hindu and JCB book prizes for 2018, and has continued to have an impact upon readers like me, prompting us to return for another immersion into the novel. Bagchi’s success lies in stretching the limits of language, as if to test the tenacity of the colonizer’s tongue in the land of multiple tongues. At times, he metaphorizes “the supple tones” of a woman’s voice as “unfold[ing], like a cloth covering a holy text” (176), or when he describes a father’s death as an event which eases the passage of a man from the banks of “invincible childhood” to “inevitable death”? The novel is filled with profound spiritual truths that lay enmeshed within the convoluted, winding sentences, the wisdom of the indigenous Manas embedded even within the rule of the colonizers, such as the passages on renunciation and duty, action and inaction, thought and feeling.
Or perhaps the victory of the work lies in that most fundamental of novelistic elements: the hypotheses about life presented by sensitively crafted characters. The question inevitably arises: Did the depths of Vishwanath’s grief lead him to remark that writers find a way to narrativize their life, and thus, stunt its possibilities?
Maybe, the novel’s strengths lie in its palpable, raw emotions, such as the passage where the protagonist’s son’s death reminds him of other regrets in life: like leaving before touching his mentor’s feet per usual in their last encounter, or when a halwai’s resemblance to his father in the simple honesty of work makes Vishwanath reconsider the standard of success he has so cherished.
Certainly, part of Half of Night’s readability is the easy, non-pretentious way in which the novel is written, despite its demanding and exacting use of language—contrary to that oft-repeated maxim for writers, to ‘show, rather than tell.’ For despite having thought for days about the gravitas of this novel, about what it means and what it wants to convey, about the heavy, hard-hitting themes it deals with, I am convinced that it is in the starkness, the bareness, the nakedness of the work that eventually explains its triumph. Yes, maybe it is in the gaps between what is said and what is understood that the real reading takes place, maybe the interpretation of language is what completes its circuit of meaning, maybe the reader is more essential to the novel than the writer. Yes, a reader’s insights are valuable, they placate the ego which craves intellectual validation, maybe also provide a semblance of personal fulfilment,. Yes, maybe all these long lists I’ve made so far about the excellence of Bagchi’s Half the Night is Gone are evidence of how it lends itself to reflection, to memory, to affect.
But ultimately, I have realized that this novel has enriched my life by simply being what it is, minus the mental baggage I brought upon it. I know this for sure: it was not what was in my mind that made this book so special, it was simply the words on the page that were special in and of themselves, because by virtue of their meaning something, they could not mean anything else; they were so inexplicably beautiful precisely because they could not be broken down to expand on them, that specific arrangement of words was fated to happen once, and never repeat.
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Sakshi Nadkarni is a reader, primarily; a writer, peripherally; a seeker, eternally. Her creative and critical work has previously been published in The Monograph Magazine, Bilori Journal, The Contemporary Literary Review India, Indigenous Web and the Ithaka journal. You can find her on Instagram: @sakshinadkarni or @yourstrulysakshii, Twitter: @sakstweets, or on LinkedIn.
