Between the Suffering and the Will

Here's a first look at my upcoming novel "Between the Suffering and the Will."

When Vikram Arora, an eighteen-year old from the north Indian city of Chandigarh manages to gain admission into Neverland College in the American Midwest, he has no idea how his life will change in the next four years. His is not your usual coming-of-age story, but one in which self-discovery, the quest for knowledge, and adventure blend together into an explosive cocktail. Vikram's self-doubt, his intellectual journey and his love affairs may appear familiar to most of us, but his nagging ambition, patriotic fervor, and the love of his life lead this mild-mannered middle-class boy to metamorphose into a cunning Maoist strategist and commander of a liberated zone on the Bengal-Jharkhand border.

Vikram's story is heroic because it represents a Promethean struggle between the human will to combat the slings and arrows of fortune and the suffering that is the necessary consequence of our worldly decisions, perhaps even of our very existence. Hence the title from Byron's Prometheus. Readers are aware from the opening pages that Vikram is dead though his diaries offer vivid glimpses into the last five years of his tortured existence. Juxtaposed with fragments from the diaries are the narratorial interventions of Joe, a Neverland student writing his senior thesis in anthropology and literature. Joe, who shares a charismatic adviser with the ill-fated Vikram, is interested in filling in the gaps left by Vikram's diaries. As he proceeds to interview the people who appear in these diaries, he is drawn into Vikram's story, its darker and unstated aspects, and ultimately, its tragedy. Soon, the lives of the narrator and the protagonist get entangled in ways beyond Joe's wildest fancies. Struggling to find his own feet and to avoid being sucked into the vortex left behind by Vikram, Joe must use the clues hidden in the diaries to regain his own freedom and sanity.

The non-linear narrative structure in the novel enables Joe to parallel Vikram's journey, yet allows him to escape the latter's fate. Non-linearity also demands that readers construct their own meaning from the diary fragments, interviews, and narratorial experiences that feature in the novel. Readers are thus placed in a position somewhat analogous to that in a traditional play or music performance, especially in South Asia, where the audience is expected to participate in the construction of the narrative or performance. The critical reader is, in this sense, a literary critic making sense of the narrative structure, a historian seeking coherence from fragmented textual and oral sources, and an anthropologist flitting back and forth between diverse cultural contexts.