Unusual for the first day of the week, a literary evening beckoned literature lovers in Chandigarh as US-based author Karan Mahajan visited the city to promote his new book, The Complex, at Centre for Research in Rural and Industrial Development.
The event was organised by the Chandigarh Citizens Foundation. Mahajan is the author of The Association of Small Bombs (2016), which was shortlisted for the 2016 National Book Award.
In 2017, he was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists, and in 2019, he received the Jeannette Haien Ballard Writer’s Prize, awarded annually to a young writer of proven excellence in poetry or prose. The complex is a multi-layered and multi-generational novel that plays out in a fictitious place called Modern Colony in Delhi in the 1970s and 80s.
It weaves multiple stories emerging out of a family caught between the past and present. At its centre is the Chopra clan, burdened by the scars of the Partition and struggling to remain united amid the political turbulence of what the author described as the “last gasp of Socialist India”. The narrative later moves into the 1990s, touching upon the unrest surrounding the Mandal Commission and religious polarisation.
In conversation with senior journalist Manraj Grewal Sharma, Mahajan spoke about how his Delhi roots and subsequent migration to the United States shaped the novel’s backdrop. He introduced the audience to his characters — SP Chopra, the deceased patriarch whose shadow looms over the family; Laxman, the anti-hero; Gita, uncertain of whether she belongs to India or the US; narrator Mohit; and even the city of Delhi itself.
To better understand women of that era, he spoke with therapists and women who had lived through those decades.
