Manu Joseph, perhaps does with this novel, what an Indian journalist is expected to do; to document the time we live in. It is perhaps an irony of our times that a journalist does it through the medium of fiction.
Why evil succeeds all the time and why the good guys keep losing are two fundamental questions which the novel tries to dig into. It contextualises these questions by analysing the phenomenon of ‘DaMo’ and a brutal take on Indian liberals, through Miss Iyer which includes direct attacks to its defining icons like Arundhati Roy, Irom Sharmila, P Sainath and several others. The novel begins and revolves around a sudden collapse of an old building in suburban Mumbai which coincides (rather symbolically) with the day Damodar Bhai emerges as PM of India. Miss Iyer is our atypical heroine who takes on almost every liberal intellectual strand we have as opposed to the real-life Damodar Bhais. As the rescue progresses, Miss Iyer engages herself in saving perhaps the lone survivor of the accident.
The courage to be unpopular, the unwillingness to be consumed by available narratives about truth, commitment to originality and the art of putting his truth bluntly are traits we can appreciate in the writer. But however original the insights might be, there is a certain scope for accusing his analysis as a sweeping generalisation, made by a cynic or megalomaniac, because of its irony and at times, an oversimplification. Even then, you can’t shrug off the analysis entirely as irrelevant or complain that it doesn’t offer any doors for introspection. The novel certainly deserves a read as it is an honest attempt to explain the crisis we are confronted with.