SURFACE - Siddhartha Deb

When reporter Amrit Singh’s editor at the Sentinel, a Calcutta-based newspaper, talked of sending him to ‘the region’ (a fictionalized place that corresponds entirely with India’s North-East), he takes it as an opportunity. Resolving that the Sentinel was not what it used to be, Amrit puts aside all loyalty for the paper and on advice of his one ‘foreign contact’ Herman the German, he decides to go to the region, but to find there a story for a foreign publication instead - “…Just one article, and enough to live on for two to three months.” In the weeks before his departure, while flipping through old files in ‘the morgue’, a musty room in the Sentinel office out drops his wild card: an enigmatic photograph of a young woman taken captive by two masked men. He was going to find her and tell her story, regardless of the ‘adventure tourism’ and ‘local festival’ type features his paper was looking for.

Set in the early 90’s the novel follows Amrit through a region as shrouded in mystery as his self-assigned assignment. Traveling on rebel-infested roads through forests and floods, taking short stopovers in odd little towns paralyzed by army curfews, he meets a strange assortment of people and finds out a few things. The woman in the photograph is Leela, who worked for Malik - the almost mythical director of the ‘Prosperity Project’; the masked men were members of MORLS - an insurgent group that claimed Leela was involved in porn films and that they were punishing her as an example for all to resist the corrupt influence of Indian Imperialism. A little later he finds that the Prosperity Project may not exist at all, that Leela may be in Burma with the pro-democracy activists of Aung San Suu Kyi, and that Malik may not be the hero people think he is. But scratching the surface proves increasingly difficult and the more Amrit chases Leela, the more she evades him. In the process however, he has a marvelous, if menacing, adventure, filled with smugglers and counterfeiters, dreams and nightmares, wise men and oafs, all the while traveling to edge of the republic and to the centre of himself.

‘The region’ really does come alive in crackling detail but suddenly this is all sounding really familiar. Then you flip back and notice the novel begins with one of the most famous quotes from Joseph Conrad’s most famous work Heart of Darkness, and you realize that the plot and main characters parallel much of that classic. And it strikes you that Surface is obviously some sort of tribute, a rejoinder if you will, rather than a rip-off. Maybe Amrit is Marlowe and Malik is Kurtz; instead of the Congo we have Manipur and Nagaland; in exchange for the Company’s brutality we have the corrupt Indian government and army; and for Belgian Imperialism in Africa, we have Indian Imperialism in the North East. Surface is without doubt beautifully imagined and elegantly written – there are starling images at unexpected corners, authentic characters with palpable idiosyncrasies, phantasmal recreations of Japanese soldiers on Burmese borders, amateur palmist “looking rather Saturnine in dark clothing” with the “rings on his fingers like satellites in orbit around him,” and you can’t help wonder why the blueprint needed that much borrowing when the architect was so clearly extraordinary.