True Story of a Writer, a Philosopher and a Shape-Shifter: A Novel begins at a piquant inflection point. Lord Spider, fiction writer par excellence, has just propositioned his wife Rosi. Could he make love to her that night? As a philosopher given to parsing everything, she wants to know why. He discloses that he has to write an essay on compassion for the Party, but has difficulty transitioning from fiction to non-fiction, and was hoping lovemaking might help. Rosi disabuses him of the idea, pointing out that lovemaking is fiction. That comes as a revelation to the conflicted writer—one of the many beguilingly commonplace revelations besetting his life, we delightfully discover as we read on.
Welcome to another upended world of Paul Zacharia. The author, it would appear, is himself experimenting a ‘shape-shift’ here, from the short story, which is his proven metier, to a longer form writing. And he goes about it with his characteristic tongue-firmly-in-cheek elan. It is one thing to keep the zany crackling in a short story, quite another to have it invigorate the entire stretch of a novel, as Zacharia magically accomplishes in this work.
It would be a rambunctious roller-coaster, were it not so tightly reined in to achieve the obverse effect of faux gravitas, cultivated mannerism and quotidian banter, keeping the lid on the hilarity rippling beneath the surface. Much of this is wordplay, with the essay as excuse, interspersed by runaway imaginaries of the protagonists—Spider, Rosi and Pillai, the last of the trio being politeness personified when in human form; the form matters because he has a bat-bitten power to turn avian at will and in fact begins his association with the family by stepping into Lord Spider’s study from his windowsill as a bird one fine day. You have the urge, every once in a while, to plonk the book down and laugh out loud where it gets helplessly funny, but you won’t, can’t, because it would somehow be a readerly violation of the writerly solemnity meticulously evoked and holding you to it as in a compact.
It is just as well to keep laughter at bay, because the humour can slip unexpectedly into the dark and gallows variety, as in the graphic, grisly account of a man burnt at stake as part of routine medieval church practice, delivered in such wry, straight-faced tenor that you don’t know what to make of it. But then, redeeming our spirit and sending it soaring afresh is Jesus Christ himself, flying up there in the sky alongside our three protagonists (by now Pillai has passed on the bat bite to Spider and Rosi and they, too, are aloft) on their way to the valley yonder where “forgotten songs gather and share memories”. It is Christ divinely, defiantly humanised with the Zacharia touch. And, lest you become sanctimonious, there’s swarthy Satan flying in from the opposite direction, brushing his teeth with a tree to keep them in fine shine.
It is a heterodox, nonlinear account sans a plot line, with the essay itself serving as a slim running thread. The episodic chapters could as well be as many short stories by one who excels in that genre. And yet they gel as a whole, fantasy segueing into fantasy. Animals, birds and reptiles are anthropomorphised and are coeval with humans, among them, Brother Dog, who vies with Spider for Rosi’s love, the snake slithering up the thigh of the bathing beauty in the pond, and of course the bat which enjoys the most-favoured fauna status. And so it goes, with us scrambling to keep pace with the fun of it all.
TRUE STORY OF A WRITER, A PHILOSOPHER AND A SHAPE-SHIFTER: A NOVEL
By Paul Zacharia
Published by Penguin India
Price Rs399; pages 256