Book review: Udayan Vajpeyi's novel has empty spaces that can't be filled by a reader

The lyrical, if somewhat awkward, title aside, it is evident from its opening pages that this is a poet’s novel. Written in spare, tightly controlled prose, the story unfolds through vignettes, mostly in the form of internal monologues by characters who step in and out of the narrative. There is a semblance of a plot centred around a murder, but it isn’t the crux of Vajpeyi’s focus. Instead, his gaze is turned inward, on the secret lives of men and women, the desires they harbour and the unseen forces that propel them towards their destiny.

At the centre of Love is Participation in Eternity is Sudipt, a literary scholar educated in Paris, who throws away the prospect of a glamorous career and returns to India to work as a humble librarian in a small town. Exactly why he does so isn’t fully clear, except for the fact that Sudipt is the archetype of the romantic idealist, who likes to walk around town with his nose buried in a book, the very act of reading being a sacred ritual for him.

Sudipt is married to Mridula, who is devoted to him, and father to a young daughter called Noa, but his past, as well as present, is trailed by women deeply enamoured with him. In Paris, he meets Veena around the time she is nursing a broken heart after being jilted by her boyfriend. Their relationship, though intense, doesn’t last long as Sudipt, like Veena’s ex Jacque, decides to move away from Paris to pursue his career.

When the reader meets him in India, Sudipt is already married, and a father, but emotionally entangled with Vandana, a young woman hemmed in by her controlling, patriarchal family. Encouraged by Sudipt, Vandana decides to do something with her college degree in literature instead of giving into a life of domestic drudgery. She launches the Show, a literary one-woman act that pleases neither her uncle, who makes a living by selling saffron sourced from Kashmir (one wonders about the political symbolism of the colour associated with his trade), nor her hot-headed brother, quick to take offence on women who taint their family’s “honour." But ignoring their threats and insinuations, Vandana refuses to cave in.

Instead, once a month, she rents the local auditorium for an hour on a Saturday evening to read passages she has selected from books by writers from around the world that speak to a common theme. For the remaining days of the month, she spends her time with Sudipt ensconced in his library, researching and curating the narrative she wants to present to her audience, her frame of reference transcending geographies, languages and histories. At no point does Vajpeyi imply anything other than a platonic connection between the two, but the rest of the town, and their respective families, are suspicious of Sudipt and Vandana’s friendship.

Eventually, Sudipt is killed one night while Mridula is away at the hospital. All signs point to an “honour killing", but the evidence refuses to add up. Instead of dwelling on the cause of death, Vajpeyi dissects the emotional turmoil that brews around it.

Mridula, newly widowed, is not only stricken by grief but also a deep sense of shame. Vandana, bereft of the pillar of support that kept her intellectually alive, is put under house arrest. Emotionally, she withdraws from the rest of her family, until a cathartic move by her mother, along with the care of close friends, enables her to move on. The ending almost feels unimaginatively “happy", insofar as the word may be invoked at the end of a tragedy.

Every literary tradition, including Hindi, has poets who have tried their hands at prose with varying degrees of success. While Vajpeyi isn’t as ambidextrous as, say, Suryakant Tripathi Nirala or Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh, he attempts to wrestle with the novel form in his own style. There are beautiful passages strewn throughout the story, which, in the end, is a celebration of reading, not only as an act in the service of great writing but also as a tool to hone the imaginative capacities of those who indulge in it.

As Sudipt tells Vandana in the early days of their friendship, “I often think that every beautiful story carries empty spaces within it, which we fill with colours of our experiences. A reader can only be someone who has the strength to pour himself into a story and take the risk of completing it."

The reader, too, is perhaps expected to take this statement as a guiding light to get to the heart of his story—and a serious one would gladly comply with such a demand. Except, in the end, the writer doesn’t give enough depth to his characters for the reader to venture ahead and fill in the empty spaces. For one, Sudipt’s magnetic appeal to women remains somewhat unconvincing. While the women, especially Mridula and Vandana, are more complex, they, too, remain conduits of the author’s, or Sudipt’s, ideas. As an experiment, Vajpeyi’s novel remains bold and original, but comes short of achieving its full potential.