Karan Mahajan can’t escape Delhi. He left over 20 years ago, but the city looms large in his books. ‘The Complex’, an instant hit, is his third foray into the city’s literary landscape, and in many ways, his most ambitious, complex novel.
The book is a sprawling saga of a Punjabi family, a milieu that he is intimately acquainted with. Unlike the Delhi of Aatish Taseer, Arundhati Roy or Kiran Desai, this does not chart the broad road leafy avenues of Lutyens’ Delhi. It is set in North Delhi: in A-19, Modern Colony, ‘the Complex’ built by SP Chopra, the famous family patriarch, after Partition. SP had been a freedom fighter, a “deity of the family”, Governor of the Reserve Bank of India — a man who everyone wants to measure up to but never can.
The Chopra khandaan is large, dysfunctional and deeply enmeshed, especially as they all live together in this complex. Their entanglement — physical and internal — serves as the backdrop of the novel. Their dreams, desires, hopes, jealousy and frustrations play out in the space of the two squat bungalows of the Complex — and Karan’s writing evokes the suffocation that each character feels. “[T]he rest of the family was close — unlike the country, it [the Complex] had suffered no partition,” he writes.
His characters are carefully etched. There is Sachin, who goes off to America to find a better life and finally patents the squishy plastic bottle. His wife Gita, 29 years old when the story begins, an editor in a publishing firm in India, is unable to find a job in America. She discovers that her work experience in the “boonie” — India, her home — counts for nothing. Laxman, SP’s ambitious son, is ruthless, a sexual predator and the heart of the novel. His wife Archana, who he cheats on, is entrepreneurial but with limited choices. Brij, Laxman’s nephew, had gone into the Air Force, but wasn’t cut out for it; he found himself stuck in a dead-end job and constantly angry. His wife Karishma — compliant, attractive — is an equal match for Laxman’s ambition. Her own entanglement with Laxman becomes the trigger of a violence that is inescapable.
The book begins with a bang. Brij, in jail for killing his uncle Laxman, is being set free after 25 years. His son, Mohit, the narrator, is gently advised by family members — who he had not spoken to in years though they all “resided in the same ramshackle complex” — that his father stay somewhere else.
It is at the cusp of what will be a “tamasha” for the family that the reader enters the book and the Complex, poised very much for an-edge-of-seat thriller. Karan has everything that can go into a hit show — murder, secrets, a not-so-secret scandalous affair, rape, betrayal and blackmail — everything that you would want in a family saga.
But what Karan does is transform this into a reflective deep-dive — the shift in the dynamics of the family mirroring the changes in India. It is intense, deep, complicated, layered, vividly told.
In his dense 400-odd page book, Karan has captured post-Partition Delhi tumbling through the politics of the 1980s — whether it was the Mandir, Mandal or the mass massacre of Sikhs in 1984 to the arrival of Hindu nationalism. Karan recreates the turbulent decade. It is a fictional journey that feels real, but lies in the shadowy world conjured up by Karan, amid thinly disguised leaders of the BJP — TTP in the book — and real people.
To confuse the reader further, Karan’s note at the beginning of the book suggests that this is a posthumous collaboration between Mohit, the narrator, and him, who made him his literary executor by leaving him an unfinished novel of the Chopra clan in his ‘draft’ folder.
The book is also a portrait of marriage. Karan has explored the gambit — from the love marriage of Sachin and Gita, born through letters, the old-fashioned romance, to the other end of the spectrum with Brij and Karishma. “Sachin and she loved each other but could apparently talk about nothing.” Or a line that is both cautionary and tender: “Having another person’s voice in your head: That was marriage.”
It is not an easy book to read. Or write. In laying out the inner worlds of Laxman — easily the most amoral character in the book — Karan forces the reader to enter his head to confront the demons that live there, no different than anyone else’s.
The victimhood of Partition, which Laxman has passed down, becomes lethal in the Masjid-Mandir politics era. The rath yatra, and Laxman’s role in it, solidifies what was casual bigotry into the ideology of Hindus left behind. He may be the least likeable character, but is the most powerful — and he refuses to go away after the book finishes.
In a literary landscape littered with trying to unravel the ‘new’ India, Karan offers no easy answers, choosing to reflect the fractures that existed, hate secreted away and the divisions that were slowly sharpened. His world is believable, and his characters familiar — because it is impossible to have lived in Delhi and not encountered a version of Laxman, Brij or, Sachin — and it is in this discomfort that really lies the novel’s power.
— The reviewer is a literary critic
