If God바카라™s Little Soldier isn바카라™t about terrorism, what is it about? A lot of things: growing up in middle-class Bombay, a dysfunctional liberal Muslim family, the magic of numbers, the certitudes of faith, the unreliability of love, the incertitudes of the stockmarket, psychotic depression, life in a Trappist monastery, extremism, the anti-abortion movement in America, arms-dealing, the Bhakti poet Kabir. And if there바카라™s one thing that ties all these disparate strands together, it바카라™s one man바카라™s quest for the meaning of life.
That man is Zia Khan, introduced to us as a child in the arms of his fundamentalist Muslim aunt Zubeida (who, in one of the paradoxes Nagarkar delights in, has left her husband to nurse an impossible devotion to the actor Dilip Kumar). Zia is the spoilt son of rich parents, precociously self-aware, resentful of his asthmatic brother Amanat, who gets all his mother바카라™s attention, and madly in love with the Bollywood child-star Sagari. His childhood occupies a wonderful first section of the novel, a beginning so compelling that it alone is worth the price of admission. If the rest of the novel doesn바카라™t live up to the promise of the first ninety pages, it바카라™s only because Nagarkar바카라”as that list of his key plot elements suggests바카라”tries to do too much.
Zia goes to a fancy boarding school, turns out to be a mathematical genius, discovers the joys of Islamic self-flagellation, impregnates his best friend바카라™s girl, gets sent to Cambridge, loses interest in mathematics and takes up garbage collection, gets serious about economics, has an affair with a British girl he converts to Islam, decides to assassinate Salman Rushdie, disowns his adulterous mother, nearly murders his own brother, converts to Catholicism and becomes a monk...we바카라™re out of breath already, and we aren바카라™t at the book바카라™s halfway mark yet. Nagarkar is a born story-teller, with a gift for the narrative yarn and an endless supply of plot-lines. But they don바카라™t all seem to belong together; as each episode succeeds the next, it becomes less and less convincing that it바카라™s happening to the same character, and people seem to do things for no comprehensible reason other than that the author decided they would. Nagarkar is the omniscient puppeteer, making his cardboard figures dance and fall to his every twitch, but he sacrifices believability at the altar of his inventiveness. After the moving realism of Zia바카라™s childhood, nothing in the novel seems even remotely plausible. Not even the central character, for the depiction of Zia바카라™s profound Islamic faith and his later Christian zealotry completely undermine each other, and the theory that his "real faith is extremism" is itself too pat to be convincing.
But amidst the frustration of the novel바카라™s half-realised potential there are some genuine gems. None is more remarkable than Amanat바카라™s novel about Kabir, several excerpts from which leap out from the page as the work of a brilliant and humane writer (it so transcends the material surrounding it that one wishes Nagarkar had written the rest of that book instead of this one). The letters of the reflective and self-doubting Amanat are also crafted with rare sensibility. And there is no doubting the intelligence and earnestness with which the author examines the issues of faith and doubt. His Kabir puts it simply: "I may have found the true path, if such a thing exists, but the truth, like all of us, has a short life span. Somebody must then find another path, and another truth. And the one will not cancel the other."
But too many of Nagarkar바카라™s literary paths seem inauthentic, flights of fancy rather than leaps of the imagination, and so they do cancel each other out. Yet his achievement is that he has written a big, weighty book about serious themes and made it, for all its flaws, insistently readable. Don바카라™t look into God바카라™s Little Soldier for insights into terrorism; what little there is on the subject is both perfunctory and contrived. Its real wisdom comes from Amanat바카라™s paraphrase of Kabir that Zia will recall at the novel바카라™s climax: "There is only one God and her name is Life. She is the only one worthy of worship."
