Delhi was once Chinglen’s ‘cradle of love’. With his student years over and the love that once comforted his stay has come to a tragic end, he is seized by a strong urge to flee the city. Run as far as he can from the memories of love. As a costly escape is beyond means, he returns to Manipur, a place long marred by protracted violence, a failed revolution, an engineered incessant political chaos, and already neck-deep in corruption. Perhaps to lick his wounds and hide with the beguiled sense. That the distance and the rich bizarre should shield him from the very memories sloshing thick inside him.
His attempt to keep himself engaged as well as to make a meagre living lands him a shoddy journalist job and the opportunity to pursue a PhD at the state's only university. In the absence of his laidback editor and opportunistic professor, he teaches himself some degree of creative writing and dabbles in academia. As he moves further into the labyrinth, he learns the hard way that trying to do the right things where almost everything is wrong, or even attempting to find inspiration, can be daunting. Sensibility has long become a strange notion, making moral courage a stranger notion. Such a condition demands a person’s soul be surrendered to secure a spot, and to defy is to become an outlier.
At the university, everyone, from the vice-chancellor to the armed guards at the gate, is eager to misuse their power whenever possible and desperate to exhibit servility to get admittance to the door of ill fortune. If the guards exercise firm discretion while dealing with ordinary people, with the powerful, they could outdo their own servility. The same can be said of the vice-chancellor who plunders the very establishment he claims to love and flashes his servility for meagre personal gains. Similarly, the Chief Minister of the state could even beat a footman in the race while interacting with a ceremonial figure from Delhi.
Who are these people? A people bred in prolonged political repression and disorder, successive terror, incessant humiliation, and yet constantly trying to cheat death, and who, by now, only know parodies; and their parodies happen to be too bad.
In such a farcical setting, Chinglen can remain a mere spectator and live with suppressed contempt. How long, though? It could accost him anytime. When that happens, he won’t back down, for he has nothing to lose. But it will further isolate the outlier. When the university is asked to select a political science teacher to be sent to a Thai university, the vice-chancellor surreptitiously picks a sociology scholar, resulting in an acrimonious battle, forcing the administration to choose Chinglen. But it comes at the cost of burning the bridge forever.
What he finds in Thailand is akin to avoiding the tiger only to run into a bear. If Manipur is characterised by violence, nepotism, failures, and traumas, Thailand is a feudal society below the garb of democracy. There is more: its obsession with the white west. In such a landscape, a German like Mike, teaching English at the university, is idolised. A white man’s position and knowledge should not be doubted, let alone exercising the audacity to question. This is true for someone like Mark, a former factory worker, who is considered a living encyclopaedia since he happens to be English.
Soon, he discovers that the intent of the university is not to engage him as a political science lecturer but to utilise him as an English language teacher. When he protests the capricious arrangement, troubles erupt. The underlying statement is: that it is for a white man or someone from an economically advanced place to show disdain for the wrongs in the country, not for someone from a less developed place. The assumption is, that the latter is a beneficiary in the country.
After he is forced to quit, attempts to get a job in such an unjust environment prove quite challenging. He sustains his illegal stay in the country with a part-time job and writing editorial columns for a newspaper. It also happens to be the time political polarisation in the country intensifies, and soon culminates in a palace-backed coup d’etat. This is followed by widespread colour-coded violent protests that paralyze the country.
Exploiting the crisis, he continues to write for the paper, and when the collection of his columns is turned into a book, he finds his recognition suddenly heightened. But this, done out of the simple desire to secure a stable life, takes him to the centre of the country’s politics when he accepts the task of managing the image makeover of a general-turned-politician. The success finally hurls him into the epicentre of power. The palace. He is to work for the notorious prince, and he is choiceless. To work for him is to taste the nectar of power and wealth, and, at the same time, to be a witness and enabler of the man’s callous cruelty. Eventually, he has to make a choice, which isn't without ramifications, putting his moral courage to the test.
The fiction work captures a young person’s ceaseless encounter with pervasive human absurdities and brutality at play, and how he himself gets involved. It illustrates how such a condition is created or made conducive enough to breed and mould absurd characters who impulsively dance to the farcical rhythm.
*Synopsis of a fiction work for which the writer is currently seeking a decent publisher.
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