True Lies in the Heartlands: Chandan Pandey’s LEGAL FICTION
Photo: Karan Madhok
Much of the novel Legal Fiction is about the facts only understood as fiction, and the fictions that should never interfere with facts. Chandan Pandey’s story shines in the uncomfortable confluence of the real and imagined in a dangerous New India.
Chandan Pandey’s short, urgent novel Legal Fiction (Harper Perennial India)—first published as Vaidhanik Galp in Hindi in 2020 and translated to English by Bharatbhooshan Tiwari last year—hardly wastes time on subtleties. Within the first sentence, the reader is introduced to North India’s sometimes-tense, sometimes-celebrated ‘Ganga Jamuna Tehzeeb’—the confluence of Hindu and Muslim cultures—when the narrator Arjun Kumar hears the ringtone of his phone. The tone is the popular Hindu devotional song “Mujhe Apni Sharan Mein Le Lo Ram” (Take me under your projection, Lord Ram), sung by Mohammad Rafi, one of India’s greatest and most influential playback singers—and a Muslim.
The call is from Anasuya, Arjun’s ex-girlfriend, whom he hasn’t heard from in years, with whom he parted ways under less-than-pleasant circumstances. Anasuya tells Arjun that she is calling from Noma, a fictional small town near Gorakhpur in eastern Uttar Pradesh, close both to the Nepal and Bihar borders. Her husband—whose name Arjun later learns is Rafique—has gone missing, and the local police have refused to register an FIR. Arjun is a writer in Gurgaon, and has powerful contacts that include a brother-in-law in the Ministry of External Affairs. When Anasuya turns to Arjun in her moment of utmost stress, he is pulled into a web of drama and deceit, of politics and police, into a world where religious tensions of that very ‘Ganga Jamuna Tehzeeb’ of North India are polluted under the smog of impending violence.
Legal Fiction moves at a fast pace, as Arjun quickly finds himself on a flight out of Delhi, and then in a taxi to Noma, and then in a police station where he gets his first whiff of violence by the men in uniform—and his most gutting understanding of his own weakness in the face of authority. The writing—in Tiwari’s translation, too—is often straightforward, with heady emotions of pain and trauma told as matter of fact. In his first time in Anasuya’s presence in the novel (she is also pregnant), Arjun notices that, “When she closed her eyes, copious tears streamed out. When she opened them, the teardrops hung from her eyelashes the way raindrops hang from a clothesline. She continued to blink hard, as if she couldn’t decide whether to keep her eyes open or closed. There was no third option, after all.” (25) Later on in the novel, Arjun summarises the plot of this riveting tale as succinctly as one possibly could, “A man disappears in this small town and nobody knows anything!” (133)
The disappeared man is Rafique, a teacher and a playwright—and a Muslim—and his absence is also coupled with the disappearance of one of his students, an upper-caste Hindu Janaki. Unlike Rafique, Janaki’s absence is noted in the local newspaper, her personhood acknowledged. Soon, the rumours of so-called ‘love jihad’ follow in this small community—the Islamophobic allegation that Muslim men target and seduce Hindu women for conversion to Islam. The allegation puts the burden of the absences solely on Rafique, and furthermore, presumes that he has been involved in an extramarital affair.
The writer Amitava Kumar, in his review blurb of Legal Fiction, compared Pandey’s work to “Camus in the Cow Belt”, or “Kafka in Deoria”. Legal Fiction is definitely Kafka-inspired: A trouble quandary begins the tale, but any solution is further complicated by larger authorities—inept or wicked bureaucrats. Often, characters speak not directly to each other, but across each other, as if they are involved in two different conversations. And in the centre of it all is a confused youngish male figure, trying to detangle the cobwebs, while more entanglements continuously present themselves.
Arjun gets pulled into a web of drama and deceit, of politics and police, into a world where religious tensions of that very ‘Ganga Jamuna Tehzeeb’ of North India are polluted under the smog of impending violence.
Occasionally, this narrative also takes deeper philosophical turns, as Rafique’s absence and subsequent imbroglios make Arjun reflect on the larger human condition. After his awkward meeting with Anayusa, Arjun wonders:
When people meet, their coming together builds on the course of all their previous meetings. But how nice it would be if meetings could be devoid of memories! The degree of familiarity between one human being and another also presents a further complication. If the woman sitting next to me were my wife, sister or mother, would I be so helpless in consoling her? The past should not hurt this bad. Do only human beings have this feeling of unfamiliarity, or do other species feel it too? (28)
In this reunion with Anasuya—complicated with what he refers to as his ‘degree of familiarity’ with her—Arjun finds himself in a unique position, both as sleuth summoned to help solve the mystery, as well as an extended character in the cause behind the mystery itself. He feels some remorse over his own role in Anasuya’s current predicament: his breakup with her that eventually led to her relationship with Rafique, which brought her to Noma, and which now leaves her separated with the man she loves.
Thus, similar to his reflections above, Arjun also finds himself contemplating the inter-religious love marriage between Anasuya and Rafique, the type of love that, as a concept, Arjun feels he left behind with his youth. “As I grew older, I had begun to believe that ‘love marriage’ was not made for Indian society. One couldn’t cut oneself off from society for the sake of a woman. One could not leave everything for love.” (122)
Apart from only seeing the male perspective here (‘for the sake of a woman’) Arjun’s thoughts are also antithetical to the love stories that he is himself known for, as well as the aspirational pop culture messaging of India’s mainstream romantic musicals; aspirations that tell the young to chase their heart, to be passionate, to fall in love. But, of course, much of Legal Fiction is about the facts only understood as fiction, and the fictions that should never interfere with facts. The novel is based firmly in realism, and this realism has little place for love.
In the very next line after admitting that ‘One could not leave everything for love’, however, Arjun immediately admits, “But whenever I heard of a love marriage, a certain kind of respect took root in my heart for such couples.” (122) Suddenly, being in love is seen as a sort of bravery, an independence to make one’s own decisions - away from the rules of society.
Legal Fiction is written as a form of diary by Arjun, the day-by-day account of his Noma misadventures and his personal ruminations. The writing is often plain, without any hidden messages or deeper allegories—what is real is on the page. Facts are stated just as they are.
With time, Arjun’s own emotional response to the absurdity spills palpably off the page, adding an internal psychological tension to the already critical tension of missing persons, until Arjun yearns to embody and bear the Anasuya trauma upon himself. He wishes “it were possible for us to switch skins. Then her sorrows would become mine, and the advantage I had of being able to observe her trouble from a distance would become hers”. (110-111)
Apart from meeting his former girlfriend, Arjun also comes in the acquaintance of a colourful cast of characters, including politicians and students, taxi-drivers and bereaved families. Most ‘present’ of these characters, however, is the one who is also the most noticeably absent: Rafique. Once Arjun gets his hands on the wet pages of Rafique’s diary, he begins to dive deeper into the personality of the missing man, his professional commitments, the films he watches, the desire he has for respect on campus. Arjun begins to feel a kinship with Rafique, a true eagerness to be friends with the man who married his former girlfriend.
Arjun’s place in Noma, which he says “this tiny town which… couldn’t even compete with a Delhi neighbourhood” (82) is as absurd as the trials and tribulations of any Kafkaesque character, too. He is after all, just a writer, an old friend, but someone who is pulled deeper into this mystery as if he’s a hired detective. The translated language of the novel also sometimes mirrors a detective pulp fiction, such as when Arjun claims that “What Amandeep told me chilled me to the bone." (135). Chasing the missing white rabbit, Arjun even ends up in Janaki's village to meet her family. He is a bane for the local politicians and police because he is asking too many questions. In rapid succession, he is trapped deeper into the cobwebs himself.
What exactly, the reader will wonder, is Arjun’s role here? Why is he so desperate to help—since he’s certainly not getting paid? The trip is costing him in own time, money, and safety. Is he in Noma only for his ex-girlfriend, even if he doesn’t seem to have much emotional attachment with her anymore? Is he there to absolve himself of the guilt of leaving her? Is he there to do “the right thing”?
As he spends more time with Rafique’s words, the answer to the questions above become clearer. Arjun finds himself becoming more interested in the absent space of Rafique’s personality. He is enamoured by Rafique’s artistic inspirations, his poetry and his theatre. Arjun even imagines how matters would’ve unfolded if he had gone missing, instead of Rafique. He rides Rafique’s bicycle, but has a hard time settling his fingers on the handlebars where Rafique’s fingers were once set. He reads Rafique’s play with the eye of a close editor; and then, wishes to dream about the play itself; hopes to dream about Rafique’s play; and then, hopes to embody Rafique in the play, acting as the real-life character that Rafique played.
Legal Fiction is indeed brave; but the reason for its bravery is largely attributed to the absurdity of the society that now exists in India, where telling the simple, direct truth is the bravest thing that one can possibly do.
By late in the novel, Arjun declares Rafique a “genius” (124). He falls deep in the quicksand of obsession with this man he has never met. “Rafique's absence had filled up all the space around us to such an extent that there was no room for words.” (109)
And it is in Rafique’s prose—found in his diary entries—that Pandey truly explores the flourish of literary language. The author makes a clear distinction of writing style between the two men: Rafique, who can barely write a sentence without twirling and spinning it into a mesmerising little dance; and Arjun, who beelines from subject to verb go object to punctuation, as succinctly as he can.
This is another similarity—this directness of action and emotion—that evokes the best of Kafka in Pandey’s work. There’s a bold, unflinching nature to the narrative: topics of ‘love jihad’, caste, communal tensions, police corruption, and bureaucratic nightmares—topics often taboo to discuss in much of Indian society—are tackled with head-on. Little is lost to subtext.
Even Arjun, after initially flinching at the face of injustice, borrows some bravado—inspired undoubtedly from that ‘absent-presence’ of Rafique—to finally clear his throat, and speak his truth. The switch is similar to his personal ruminations about marriage: his mild disdain for leaving everything for love, quickly followed by his awe and respect for the bravery for those that did the exact same thing.
‘Bravery’ is a running theme of Legal Fiction, both in the story itself—as students of Rafique bravely attempt to find the truth about their missing teacher, or Rafique tries to stage a brave play—as well as in Pandey’s inspiration of the novel itself, a story that challenges the suffocating rise in injustice and violence enacted against India’s minorities.
In her review of the novel for Scroll, Saloni Sharma writes that “The word ‘brave’ jumps up and insists on attaching itself to the book. We shall resist the temptation. That Pandey pulls no punches... does not make the novel brave. It makes it mimetic.” Legal Fiction, however, is indeed brave; but the reason for its bravery is largely attributed to the absurdity of the society that now exists in India, where telling the simple, direct truth is the bravest thing that one can possibly do.
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Karan Madhok is a writer, journalist, and editor of The Chakkar, whose fiction, translation, and poetry have appeared in Gargoyle, The Literary Review, The Bombay Review, F(r)iction, and more. He is the founder of the Indian basketball blog Hoopistani and has contributed to NBA India, SLAM Magazine, FirstPost, and more. Karan’s debut novel A Beautiful Decay will be published by the Aleph Book Company in 2022. Twitter: @karanmadhok1
