OPINION:
WE THAT ARE YOUNG
By Preti Taneja
Alfred A. Knopf, $27.95, 480 pages
In “We That Are Young,” Preti Taneja’s re-imagines the “King Lear” story in modern India. The country is economically booming — “fast forward every day” with malls and hotels, spas and mansions for the wealthy, and slums and rubbish-heaps and punishing jobs as servants and factory workers for the poor.
Devraj Bapuji is one of the super-rich. He founded the Company, which gobbles vast profits from stores, hotels, mines, arms, concrete, clothing, automobiles, and, indeed, from the impoverished multitudes in the slums. Yet, “He has never — not once in his life — given something for nothing, or anything back.”
When he retires he divides his shares in the Company among his daughters Gargi, Radha, and Sita. Gargi is going to run it — a task she relishes. But Babuji does not go quietly. He has a hundred cronies who party regularly and rambunctiously. Gargi has always taken care of family matters including the catering arrangements, but after a particularly outrageous night of drunken mayhem she decides the parties must stop.
Outraged, Babuji stomps off on tours round the country, pointing to the Company’s abuses — child labor for example — and laying them at Gargi’s door, though in fact he has always foiled her attempts to provide education and other worker benefits,
Bapuji’s tours are only the start. Marches, pilgrimages, and hunger strikes follow, as do more verbal attacks on Gargi and Radha, who handles Company communications. Meanwhile, Sita his favorite daughter has walked out, rejecting an arranged marriage to devote herself to environmental activism. She returns when his antics have undermined everything, including himself. She finds her sisters isolated and in crisis, partly brought on by themselves though catalyzed by Javin and Jeet, the sons of Babuji’s partner.
Javin, Jeet, and the three sisters get their own sections of the novel. Their perspectives on each other and on Bapuji and his mother — both of them scary people — are often misted by memory and shot with personal pain and rivalry. Despite being awash in wealth, each is constricted — by personality, position, and by the economics of luxury.
As Gargi explains to Jivan, newly returned from studying in America, “We talk about the government being corrupt here, and we ourselves are forced to bribe each other for everything. To get contracts, we pay. To get paid, we pay. Fake invoices at the bottom, empty partner companies, listed traded shares in the middle, untouchable at the top There isn’t a VP of finance across the board without dirty hands. You know we have an entertainment farm right? where the CEOs relax. Models, drugs, blue movies on the big screen; whatever they want.”
Jeet highlights the contrast between the wealthy denizens of the new India and the country’s slum-dwellers when he goes to live among them, sleeping in a hovel, scavenging for food, accepting dirt and filth. Preti Taneja writes trenchantly of all of this — the slums, the middens, the decay as well as the luxurious hotels, the lovely gardens, the gorgeous shawls and saris, the delicious foods and cocktails, the cigars, the drugs — and the corruption that keeps everything ticking over. She takes us into luxury, where sensual Radha lolls over endless snacks and sweets from five-star kitchens and bundles of saris and dresses from top designers.
The slum sections are told from Jeet’s perspective. He is probably the most sympathetic of the characters because he gets himself out of his lavish comfort zone to explore who he is. Gargi has no such need. She is more self-aware, perfectly drawn as the devoted but not unlikable businesswoman.
Gargi is the Goneril character of the novel; Sita, who shows up only at the end, is the Cordelia, and remarkably less sympathetic because like Cordelia — or even more so Dickens’ Little Dorrit — she is sentimentalized.
The shade of Dickens wisps in and out of this novel. Like Preti Taneja, he wrote about a country surging and buckling in an historic economic upheaval. The prose of both authors is vibrant, energetic; both love pinpointing vivid details of dress, food, furnishings, houses, and streets; both create biting portrayals of people profiting from laissez-faire capitalism red in tooth and claw.
Preti Taneja does not write at quite Dickens’ length, but her book has 480 dense pages — a lot by contemporary standards. Readers may find longueurs, especially in the long-drawn out second half. Certainly, more rigorous editing here could have sharpened its focus. Nonetheless, this is a brilliant first novel, and while the author, born in Britain to Indian parents, keeps attention firmly on India, the economic situation she investigates has resonances everywhere. Her book is a must-read.
• Claire Hopley is a writer and editor in Amherst, Mass.
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