No God in Sight

Nestled amidst the clean lines of Tyrewala’s debut novel, lie a million voices. Voices that belong to many protagonists. Faceless people you see all the time, but rarely look at - a housewife, a butcher, a beggar, an Urdu teacher.
They could come from anywhere and yet they also belong exactly where Tyrewala situates them – among the congested streets of Mumbai’s oldest neighborhoods. They tell their stories simply – a chapter for each character. But their voices when you hear them are like the unborn-baby voices in the head of the illegal abortionist protagonist, “discordant and raw and numbing “.
It’s an unusual novel - spare and simple but strangely dispersed. Yet Mumbai based Tyrewala navigates the six degrees of separation between his pavement protagonists with cinematic ease. Beginning with ‘Mrs. Khwaja’ who tells us,”I used to be a poetess and would dwell on minute metaphors for days. Now all day long I cook for Ubaid and Minaz, spend the thousands their fathers earns every month, and contemplate television absentmindedly.” And ‘Mr. Khwaja’ on the next page,” Twenty six years ago I married a mediocre poetess. She gave me two kids”. One of these kids will now visit Akhbar, the abortionist. Kaka , the father of the abortionist, is a shoe salesman. Everyday, for the last thirty years, he climbs to his place of work , where he stays crouched “between the shop’s false ceiling and real ceiling, the mezzanine, where boxes and boxes of footwear are stocked.” Only , Amin-bhai, the shoe shop owner and a disillusioned man, will soon sell the shop and emigrate on an aircraft whose “projection screen will show a blue India, with our plane’s route-so- far outlined in white like an anemic tapeworm in the belly of a diseased nation”.
Strong metaphors these, but expressive of the sense of isolated hopelessness most of Tyrewala’s Muslim protagonists feel . Like Rohington Mistry’s impoverished Parsis who are remorselessly squeezed into smaller spaces , the characters in this book no longer seem to belong . Sohail Tambawala’s wife must borrow her maid’s mangalsutra before she registers a missing person complaint in the local police station, Suleiman obsesses about his Muslim identity , his great-grandpa’s conversion that “turned us into outsiders to be driven out of villages..”, Tambawala recoils from the disgust of the Honda City passengers face ,”staring out at what must seem just another filthy Muslim ghetto”.
Simple yet soulful , this is less that is definitely more.

This review appeared in the Deccan Herald December 25th 2005