Nobody Does the Right Thing: A Novel - Softcover

Kumar, Amitava

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822346826 ISBN 13: 9780822346821

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2010

Synopsis

A young poet is killed by her lover, a politician, in the eastern Indian state of Bihar. Soon afterward, across India in Bombay, an idealistic journalist is hired by a movie director to write a Bollywood screenplay about the murdered poet. Research for the script takes the writer, Binod, back to Bihar, where he and his cousin Rabinder were raised. While the high-minded Binod struggles to turn the poet’s murder into a steamy tale about small towns, desire, and intrigue, Rabinder sits in a Bihari jail cell, having been arrested for distributing pornography through a cybercafé. Rabinder dreams of a career in Bollywood filmmaking, and, unlike his cousin, he is not burdened by ethical scruples. Nobody Does the Right Thing is the story of these two cousins and the ways that their lives unexpectedly intertwine. Set in the rural villages of Bihar and the metropolises of Bombay and Delhi, the novel is packed with telling details and anecdotes about life in contemporary India. At the same time, it is a fictional investigation into how narratives circulate and vie for supremacy through gossip, cinema, popular fiction, sensational journalism, and the global media.

About this title

About the Author

Amitava Kumar is a novelist, poet, journalist, and Professor of English at Vassar College. He is the author of Husband of a Fanatic, a New York Times “Editors’ Choice”; Bombay-London-New York, a New Statesman (UK) “Book of the Year”; and Passport Photos. He is the editor of several books, including Away: The Indian Writer as an Expatriate, The Humour and the Pity: Essays on V. S. Naipaul, and World Bank Literature. He is also an editor of the online journal Politics and Culture and the screenwriter and narrator of the prize-winning documentary film Pure Chutney. Kumar’s writing has appeared in the Nation, Harper’s, Vanity Fair, American Prospect, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Hindu, and other publications in North America and India.

From the Back Cover

""Nobody Does the Right Thing" imaginatively portrays the forces shaping contemporary India, and it is a remarkable reader of mass culture and popular narrative forms, of the worlds of Hindi cinema, pulp fiction, sensational journalism, and globalized media."--Siddhartha Deb, author of "An Outline of the Republic" and "The Point of Return"

Reviews

Kumar’s latest, distinctive novel looks at the multifaceted, interconnected lives of two cousins within the blurry terrain of personal ambition, class, and contemporary life. Following the murder of a young poet by her politician lover, a journalist, Binod, is hired by a Bollywood director to write a screenplay based on the events surrounding the controversial affair. Binod’s research brings him to Bihar, India, near the village where he was raised. This is also where his cousin, the larger-than-life Rabinder, is imprisoned after distributing pornography through his Internet café. While Binod struggles to begin writing the script, the past and present lives of other relatives become intertwined with his own, particularly those of his perceptive, dying father and Bua, Binod’s aunt and Rabinder’s mother, who breaks societal and political norms after her husband becomes mentally unstable. In the meantime, Rabinder concocts various get-rich-quick schemes and finally decides on filmmaking to pursue the commercial success he so desires. The shifts between rural communities and the urban sprawl of Delhi and Bombay heighten the contrasting perspectives in Kumar’s intelligent tale. --Leah Strauss

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Nobody Does the Right Thing

a novelBy AMITAVA KUMAR

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2010 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4682-1

Contents

Acknowledgments......................................ixPeople and Places....................................xiI * The Car with the Red Light.......................1II * Ulan Bator at Night.............................33III * The Lady with the Dog..........................61IV * Kiss of the Spider Woman........................99V * News of a Kidnapping.............................123VI * Nobody Does the Right Thing.....................153VII * The Glass Menagerie............................175

Chapter One

Mala Srivastava's mother lived in a two-room flat above a tiny kindergarten institution that called itself Harward Public School. Binod didn't know this; he stopped at the school first and was pointed to the narrow stairway that led up to the second floor. Rows of dark, feral faces with slightly scared but inquisitive eyes followed him from the window where the teacher had paused in the lesson he was giving. The door of the flat was open and lying on the dirty floor beside it was a steel plate with half a dozen freshly washed potatoes and a knife.

A middle-aged woman came out of the room at the back. Binod stopped knocking and, in the semi-darkness inside, the woman stopped too. She began to cover her head with her cotton sari when Binod introduced himself. He had brought a copy of the editorial he had written about Mala. The woman took it from his hand but said that she couldn't read without her glasses. Binod was still standing at the door. He said, "I didn't have your phone number. I couldn't call you before I showed up like this. Could you talk to me for a few minutes?"

The woman said, "My daughter ... my second daughter ... will be back from college. She will be able to answer your questions."

That must be Mala's younger sister. It was she who had first spoken to the media after the murder about Mala's affair with Surajdeo Tripathi. Just a day later, inexplicably, she had withdrawn the charge. She said that she had been misquoted in the press. But the police had done the tests on the fetus. Surajdeo and his wife were arrested within days, after Mala's servant had identified the hired killer.

Binod said, "I don't really have any questions. I came from Bombay just yesterday. A local journalist gave me this address last night ..."

The woman didn't move or say anything. She looked past Binod into the street outside. She said, "I don't even have tea in the house. The servant went to his village last Monday and hasn't returned. I'm here by myself."

"Mataji," Binod said, folding his hands dramatically, "you need not concern yourself about me. I don't need tea. I have just come from my parents' home here in Patna. Please give me a few minutes of your time. That's all I ask."

He was seated on a wooden chair that the woman had dragged close to the door for him. She sat on a stool halfway across the room. The woman's hair was gray, but her face was largely free of wrinkles; it was a round and heavy face, tired looking because of the dark circles under the eyes. The face remained expressionless as Binod read aloud. He would read each sentence, putting great emphasis on those words where he seemed to be praising Mala's ambition, and stop to look at her. He faltered once he got to the closing lines about the children of film stars-what did it have to do with Mala anyway?-but he didn't pause in his reading. He had planned to ask her if she saw her daughter's journey as a terrifying trip to the heart of power, but the blankness of the woman's gaze made him hesitate. He began to justify what he had done. He said, "I didn't want to deal with details of the scandal. That wasn't of interest to me. I just wanted to comment on what it meant for a young, fatherless girl to make her way in the political world."

But it didn't matter.

The mother said, "The press printed reports that she was pregnant. How could that have been possible? People have insects in their brain ... I had just seen her. She was wearing churidar kurta that day. Would it not have been obvious to everyone?"

Binod remained silent. After a while, he asked, "What did your daughter want to become when she grew up? I mean, when she was a child, what did she dream of becoming?"

The woman said, "When she was a child, she played, she went to school. What does a child care about how she is going to survive when she grows up?"

There must be wisdom in this response. That is what the shaking of Binod's head was supposed to mean. It might have suggested to someone else that he was actually shaking his head in despair.

The woman spoke again. "Her father passed away when she was only fourteen. I didn't have a son. Mala grew old almost overnight. She was the breadwinner now. She was my son. Who will-"

The old woman's hand went up to her throat and her plump lips fluttered for a second. She seemed to sigh but actually she was crying; she would catch her breath and then let out a small moan.

Binod wanted to ask her how Mala had discovered literature. He didn't interrupt the woman's crying, however. And then it was too late. Mala's mother looked up with alarm and began to wipe her eyes. Binod turned and saw that a young woman was standing on the landing and behind her was a tall, dark man in a black shirt. The young woman pressed her lips and without saying anything to Binod made a circle around his chair and entered the flat. She put her hand on the old woman's shoulder and then, still not looking at Binod, asked her loudly, "Is it right to cry like this-in front of strangers?"

This was the sister. She had no interest in the editorial that Binod was holding out for her to see. But the tall man took it from Binod's hand. While the fellow was reading it, Binod said, "I wrote that editorial. I'm a journalist working in Bombay. But I'm from Patna."

The man said, "But what do you want here now?"

It didn't occur to Binod then, or even later that day when he kept returning to this question, to tell them that he was going to write a story for a film about the murdered girl. The dark man had a thin gold chain on his chest. Binod looked at him and then at the old woman, whose face, now emptied of grief, had once again surrendered itself to blankness. He felt he should say something about how difficult life was-and how he had felt that Mala had been unconventional. But it was clear that the girl wanted to speak. The younger sister. Her name had been in the papers too, but for some reason Binod couldn't recall it right then. He looked at the tense, thin fingers that she had placed on her mother's shoulder.

The girl, all fury suddenly, spoke up in English. "I think you are a lawyer."

"Lawyer," Binod asked loudly, doing his best to look hurt. But he was genuinely surprised. A lawyer? Did they think he was a lawyer, perhaps here to entrap them, and is that why there was such suspicion and anger?

The girl took a step toward him. "You are a lawyer. Get out." Her thin finger described a ridiculous arc through the air. Binod turned away. It wasn't until he had reached the bottom of the steps that he realized that she had actually been calling him a liar.

* * *

Binod did not know the woman but after her murder she had been everywhere in the papers. The stories repeated themselves and were often smudgy with their details, but the headlines told their own unambiguous story: "Bad Art, Worse Life," "Death of a Small Time Poetess," "Couplet of Ruin," and, given the eternal allure of alliteration, "Mala, Mahatvakanksha, aur Maut" (Mala, Ambition, and Death).

Her name was Mala Srivastava and she was from a small town near Patna. She had been in the local papers even earlier because she used to recite poems at public meetings. Her poems mocked the manhood of Indian leaders; she called upon Indian youth to cross the border and slaughter the people in Pakistan; she wanted the national anthem inscribed on the body of Benazir Bhutto. Mala was only twenty-one when she died. People said that she was pretty. Those who had seen her performing said she was arrogant and wanted everything from life. A couple of the press reports after her death mentioned that during a visit to Bombay she had been arrested briefly for having stolen gold jewelry from her host's apartment.

When Mala had still been in high school her father was killed in a road accident and the family had fallen on bad times. But at the time of her death she had been living for a year and a half in a large house in Buddha Colony. The story went that Mala did not need to pay rent on that house in Patna. Her neighbors said that white cars with red lights would deliver sweets and gifts at her door whenever the festivals rolled around. Politicians and officials were regular visitors to her house at different times of the day and night.

The autopsy report revealed that Mala was pregnant when she was shot, and it was accepted that the father of the unborn child was Surajdeo Tripathi, a former minister in the state legislature who had done a brief stint in prison. Several corruption cases in which he had been charged were awaiting the attention of the honorable High Court. Tripathi was a married man; his wife, one of the six accused in the murder, had surrendered to the police. Tripathi had been arrested and then released and then arrested again.

The world had been busy at the time of Mala Srivastava's death. The American president had climbed into a green flight suit and flown in an aircraft onto the deck of a naval carrier to declare that war had ended in Iraq. In the Congo, the rear door of a Russian-built cargo plane had burst open in flight and 129 passengers had been sucked out into the open air. There were fears during those weeks of a new infectious disease having come from China. In Pune, a bride who was infected with SARS had insisted on getting married in church and was taken to the hospital in the middle of the ceremony. Both the groom and the priest were quarantined together in a hospital that was then forced to shut down.

The Supreme Court in Delhi ruled that the people in Jharia town in Bihar were to be relocated by the government. Seven of Binod's more distant relatives lived there, including his cousin Munni and her husband, whose teeth were falling out because he was addicted to the wrong tooth powder. Three decades ago in Jharia, Baba's old roommate from college had disappeared into the ground along with the postmaster's chair and desk at which he had been sitting. An underground fire had been raging there in the coal mines for nearly ninety years. It had started because of a spark from a Davy safety lamp in one of the mines. The fire had now spread to more than seventeen square kilometers. Every once in a while roads collapsed-and houses and the people in them disappeared down caves that suddenly opened up in the earth. A public-interest suit had been filed in the courts a few years ago and now the judiciary had directed the government to relocate all the affected families to a safer area. The news about the world's largest and oldest fire competed with the details of the private life of Mala Srivastava.

In the world of Bombay cinema, matters that were also in a way about life and death had forced Binod to go on an assignment to Surat. He had only recently arrived in Bombay, transferred from Delhi, and was expected to cover the city's film scene. Arrest warrants had recently been issued against the parents of an actress. The police said that they had used members of the Bombay underworld to extort money from a sari manufacturing company in Surat. Binod spent a day watching on video all of her hot dance numbers; then he caught a train that would take him north to Gujarat. By the time he got back to Bombay, Mala Srivastava had been buried under new names and new print, and it wasn't till the first anniversary of her murder that Binod wrote an editorial about her.

Eight hundred words on what he called the tragedy of small-town ambition. He quoted the actor Om Puri, who had told a journalist that in India there was poverty even of ambition: "Hamaare yahan iraadon mein bhi kangaali hai." Puri had been born in Ambala, which is a place only on the way to somewhere else, smelling of the diesel from the army trucks leaving for Kashmir. The real argument was not about character but about place. In Motihari, where Binod had been born, the evening's amusement came in the form of a walk to the railway station with your friends for a cup of tea. If you were a young woman and lived in a house with a courtyard or access to a roof, you always had a piece of the sky even though you were denied the rest of the world. It is doubtful that Mala Srivastava was a poet of any importance but her journey to the heart of power must have been as terrifying as a trip to the North Pole. When Binod wrote this, he was conscious that he was probably exaggerating and, therefore, in an effort to sound more restrained he had concluded with a more local sentiment. In Bombay it is usual to see the children of film stars easily stepping into the shoes of their parents and being handed one film contract after another. But if you happen to be from nowhere, it is not simply that you don't know anyone else-the truth is that you don't even know yourself.

The editorial came out on a Monday. On Tuesday evening, he was in the newspaper office downloading a wire story on Iraq when there was a phone call for him. The loud voice on the phone sounded familiar.

The man said, "Binod Singh?"

Binod said yes slowly, taking his time to place that voice, and the man said, "You're not sure?"

The caller laughed at his own joke. It was Vikas Dhar. Binod felt a rush. Dhar's Rome was the biggest hit of the year. His heroine's open-mouthed laugh next to a fountain spurting water in a piazza in Italy was plastered everywhere on the giant Bombay billboards. Binod heard him saying, "What you have written is not an editorial, it is actually a very powerful testimony. You should write a story about this. Write the story that is behind this editorial. I think a good film can be made on this story."

And he said, "Come and see me in my office tomorrow at five o'clock."

Binod said that he would do that. He had fought to keep the uncertainty out of his voice, but he was in a calmer state of mind when he went to Juhu to meet Dhar the next evening.

There was a sofa in the office that curled around the wall and the filmmaker, wearing a black kurta, lay sprawled on it, his right arm stretched out on the desk alongside. He was relaxed and friendly. Tea was brought. The lamp above the sofa was shining on his bald head. His face, still handsome and boyish, was framed between white sideburns. A small puppet of George W. Bush squatted on the desk close to him. Bush's pants were pulled down and a pencil rested snugly in the presidential asshole. From time to time, while he spoke, Dhar would meditatively wiggle the pencil and make the puppet twitch. The man who had brought tea returned and asked whether he wanted a vegetable patty; Binod shook his head although he felt a slight sensation of hunger spiral up his gut.

Dhar was frowning in thought. He said, "Do you write exclusively in English? You're from the cow belt, you must ..."

The question was both unexpected and generous, and in the comfortable air-conditioned space of the office, Binod found himself telling Dhar about his past.

When he had come out of university, he wrote in both Hindi and English. He used to file all news reports in English, but his more reflective essays on Sunday were for the sister paper in Hindi. These essays were filled with nostalgia and protest, and reflected perhaps the loneliness he had felt while living away from home in Delhi.

He had once attended a week-long seminar on journalism at the Ashoka Hotel and in the afternoons he would go and lie down on the grass in Nehru Park. He rarely saw poor people from places like Bihar walking on the green grass-had they turned into machines of flesh and bone in the new factories of Noida and Ghaziabad? In prose made lyrical by homesickness and longing, Binod wondered if those who had left behind their small homes had turned to stone in this strange land and were laid down as slabs on the pavements of the city's wide streets.

The essays appeared under the heading Aayeena, which means "mirror" in Hindi. After a few months of this, Binod's editor told him that he needed to look in the mirror and decide what he wanted to be, a journalist in English or Hindi. The choice was easy. There were more readers for the Hindi papers but the money was in the English.

Nevertheless, while writing entirely in English, Binod found that he could not talk very easily about villages and small towns. He lacked the idiom to express his feelings directly about harvests or heavy rains that led to flooding, the excitement and then the numbing that followed the news of another caste massacre, the familiar bare roads that cut through fields and shone at night under the moon's light, the sound of a woman's bangles coming across a pond in the dark. He wanted to talk about the routine of travel during Holi and Diwali in the unreserved compartment of third-rate trains like the Shram Jeevi Express-but who among the readers of English newspapers in Delhi would find any appeal in such things? There were only so many times that he could remind his reader that you could not understand the pain of the man who brought your milk or drove your car unless you too needed to go back to your village every six months to find out whether the child who had four milk teeth last time had now learned to call your name when shown your photograph.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Nobody Does the Right Thingby AMITAVA KUMAR Copyright © 2010 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822346826
• ISBN 13: 9780822346821
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 216