A gritty Ramayana with Mumbai as backdrop and baddie

In Lindsay Pereira’s The Memoirs of Valmiki Rao, there are multiple enemies, and no winners.

The Memoirs of Valmiki Rao is an unflinching look at Mumbai and its residents through a familiar narrative. | Photo Credit: Getty images/ iStock

Not long after the publication of Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel (1989), a satire that draws parallels between the Mahabharata and Indian politics from the Independence era until the 1970s, India witnessed the BJP-led rath yatra in 1990 and the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. In the aftermath of the destruction, Mumbai—a city that had always prided itself on its cosmopolitanism and tolerance—was brought to its knees by communal riots and would never be the same again.

The Memoirs of Valmiki Rao

By Lindsay Pereira

Vintage Books

Pages: 320

Price: Rs.599

Having critiqued Mumbai’s Roman Catholic community in Gods and Ends, Lindsay Pereira now confronts the city’s demons, and the gods that continue to reign, by drawing parallels between Mumbai politics from that dark era and the Ramayana, in his latest novel, The Memoirs of Valmiki Rao. Like Gods and Ends, The Memoirs is also set in a chawl—this time, a chawl called Ganga Niwas in Parel, Mumbai’s erstwhile mill district. The novel is the doomed love story of Ramu Shinde and Janaki Lalji as narrated by the retired Valmiki Rao.

It is not hard to guess how the events of the narrative are likely to play out; the Ramayana is India’s most popular epic, after all, especially in the current political climate. But Pereira gives the familiar plot relevant twists and recognisable characters new shades. In a Bombay that is fast turning into the Shiv Sena’s Mumbai, two boys have their bright future cut short with the death of their mother, who embodies the ideal of motherhood.

She is replaced by a stepmother who denies them—and herein lies the irony—their “kingdom” of a kholi in the chawl and a higher education for the sake of her biological son, Bantya, who goes on to relinquish these privileges for the love of his stepbrothers. Ramu falls in love with Janaki, the beautiful daughter of the local kirana store owner, but so does the local dada, Ravi Anna. The rest, as they say, is mythology. Except that Ramu joins the local Shiv Sena shakha in an attempt to feel a semblance of control over his life, and his Hanuman is a boy called Sundar who works at the local tea stall.

Teetering edge

If the ancient epic painted its characters in black and white, was unforgiving in its depiction of evil while making allowances for characters seen as good, then Pereira treats his cast with equitable empathy. If Ramu and his brother Lakhya are shaped by circumstances, then so are his stepmother, Kavita, and the villain, Ravi Anna, and the latter’s sister, Surbha.

Ravi Anna, alienated by his peers for his dark skin, is a product of the days of the Sena’s anti-South India campaign of Uthao lungi, bajao pungi (which roughly translates into, “Flush out the South Indians”). The thread that binds them all is the sense of powerlessness that the city imbues in its less fortunate residents: their varied reactions are merely attempts to gain control over their own destinies.

Cover of The Memoirs of Valmiki Rao | Photo Credit: By special arrangement

The Ramayana is itself an allegorical tale exhorting Ram or “everyman” to do the right thing and set the right example for his subjects by defining masculine duties; women are pressured with the feminine self-sacrificing ideal of Sita, and those who do not toe the line or the Laxman rekha, must do so at their own peril and face the consequences. In Valmiki Rao’s gritty Ramayana, however, the tragic love story goes further: it becomes a means to reveal the teetering edge of the city, and holds a mirror to its broken soul. Mumbai is both the novel’s backdrop and its most villainous character, and in the battle between multiple enemies, there are no winners.

“It was always about us versus them,” writes Rao of the political ideology of the Sena and about politics in the country at large. Elsewhere, he observes: “Twenty-five years from now, when we are gone, they will still be discussing Hindus and Muslims. No one wants to discuss why we still don’t have running water.”

Nothing in the city, and the country, is spared by this contemporary sutradhar: the courts, the political and education systems, the misogyny that is inherent in our society; the novel is peppered with his caustic observations. He calls out political parties for finding new recruits in “young men with serious anger management problems and no jobs to distract them” and wonders: “Was India a country for children? For women? For anyone but the young and angry?”

The Memoirs of Valmiki Rao is an unrelenting, unflinching look at Mumbai and its residents through a familiar narrative as it essays the cycle of hopelessness in a chawl. The chawl itself becomes a metaphor for life in the city, and indeed in this country, where violence is normalised, love comes at a price, the poor are dispensable, and where “the only beings that mattered and would continue to matter were the Gods and Goddess [sic] who held sway over everything”.

Janhavi Acharekar is an author, a curator, and creative consultant.