EXTENDED SYNOPSIS
“There is an unwritten rule, or, if it is writ, it lies sculpted on God’s arm. Once your journey begins, you cannot end it. You can propel yourself off track, skid in different mud, but it will only make your journey that much longer. There is another rule, that of widows and mad dogs. It lies under their beds. God has never read it for he does not visit their homes. I will find out which rule holds true.”
—from The Cripple and His Talismans
An unnamed narrator wakes in a Bombay hospital to discover that he is missing his left arm. How it was lost he cannot recall, but he is now wrecked, a pariah to the upper-crust society to which he once belonged. He moves away from his white marble apartment to a dark and squalid cockroach-infested flat and soon encounters Gura the floating beggar, who lives under the egg-seller’s cart and with whom he feels a stronger kinship than he ever did with his wealthy, miserable parents. Gura advises the narrator that to find out the story of his arm, he must first locate the In-charge, a beedi vendor who referees lepers in grotesque fighting matches. The In-charge is one of many bizarre guides along the narrator’s quest, all directing him to the notorious avenger Baba Rakhu, whose dungeon is stocked with hanging limbs, a “dealer of arms” in the most shocking sense.
Carrying a leper’s dismembered finger, donated as a weird compass for his journey, the narrator encounters a dead woman selling rainbows. Lighting a thousand oil lamps to burn for the duration of his travels, she warns him that a sworn enemy will try to end his journey before it is over. Given the narrator’s antisocial past, there are any number of candidates. Perhaps it is Viren, a school mate whom the narrator abused despicably. Or will it be Horasi, the eunuch he smokes hookah with, and whom he has betrayed in a hallucinatory vision/memory? And then there is Malaika, the prostitute with whom he is engaged in a perpetual tussle of love and hate …
Joining literature’s pantheon of anti-heroes, our protagonist may be Bombay’s answer to Roskolnikov or Humbert, Gollum, Gregor Samsa or Grendel, the mad narrator of Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart, or Burrough’s Bill Lee. And yet he remains wholly distinct. For while he can be a frustrating mess of opposites, capable of cruelty and compassion, recklessness and regret, madness and acuity, he is also earnestly, heart-rendingly, in search of redemption.
With The Cripple and His Talismans, Anosh Irani makes his powerful debut as an up-and-coming star in the absurdist literary tradition. At the centre of his novel’s darkly comic narrative lurks a powerfully charged and deeply perceptive moral outrage, illuminated by hope.