Karan Mahajan’s third novel The Complex is aptly titled, as it is set in a warren of apartments that belong to the Chopra family in Model Colony, north Delhi. The word “complex” itself denotes psychology (inferiority complex, god complex and the like), architecture (a building with added features), and of course everyday language (complicated). Mahajan’s novel similarly works on all these different planes, reminding us of the intricacy of emotions in confined urban settings.
This is the story of an unwieldy Delhi khaandan living in a complex, where S.P. Chopra (one of the framers of India’s Constitution and a former RBI governor) looms over his nine children squabbling for existence. The six sons and their heirs live in the constant shadow of the patriarch as they never achieve his political clout nor his financial success. Many chapters in the last section of the book end with a cliffhanger. And like a good saas-bahu serial, one can hear the cymbals crash, and the drums boom as the reader rushes through the pages.
Behind the fast-paced drama and the tight plot, The Complex masterfully creates a psychological portrait of the Great Indian Family. The proximate living quarters shackle characters together in a way that nuclear living would preclude. The novel’s structure ensures that you are not sure whose point of view you are privy to as everyone is always in everyone’s business.
The Great Indian Family, in Mahajan’s telling, is like a panopticon—it is an institution built for control, where everyone believes they are being watched all the time, and this forces them to self-regulate for reasons of censure rather than integrity. Just as the word “panopticon” derives from the Greek word for “all seeing”, similarly the Chopra family runs like a surveillance operation. As Mahajan writes: “Movement was the hallmark of the family, a hundred eyes dancing in the background, watching you.” It is a novel where you realise, “Everyone knows everything about everyone… Acting only comforts the actor.”
The story opens with a son’s revelation that his father is returning to the Complex after spending 25 years in Tihar Jail for the murder of his grand-uncle Laxman Chacha. In the early pages Mohit, the son, reveals that while S.P. Chopra, the freedom fighter, had originally been the deity of the family, he had been replaced by Laxman, a politician and a member of Trishul People’s Party. Spanning the 1970s and the next two decades, the novel builds an arc about a country awakening from Nehru’s socialist policies and moves to the assassination of Indira Gandhi and the anti-Sikh riots, to the rise of the Hindu nationalist “Trishul People’s Party” (TPP, which rose in opposition to the “secular” Congress party), to the Mandal Commission Report and the anti-reservation unrest, to the Rath Yatra to the Babri Masjid demolition.
While plotting the decline of the Chopra family, Mahajan simultaneously traces the rupture of the country. He does so with the acuity of a sociologist and the empathy of a novelist. His skill lies in how he never belabours the politics, instead he shows how individuals stumble into political situations. Politics is not the rhetoric of Parliament; instead, it is the sum of individual choices played out in the public sphere. In politics, Laxman, who’d always been a blundering opportunist, a selfish go-getter, suddenly finds his life’s meaning.
Unlike Bollywood movies, which show the Great Indian Family in the thrall of song and dance, The Complex remains much bleaker. It is a novel that tells us of the affairs, abuse, adultery, thievery, insecurity, hatred, jealousy, secrecy, paranoia, distrust, and a smattering of loyalty, within a family. It is an account where love is a surprise and distrust the norm in a marriage. Where superstition determines decisions. How businesses start and businesses end. How one is seldom happy in the moment, but only in hindsight.
Speaking about his previous novel, The Association of Small Bombs, Mahajan had said in an interview to me in 2016, “A lot of the novel is about male entitlement and privilege—men reacting badly because they feel they’re entitled to a voice but aren’t being heard.” The same logic can apply to main male characters Laxman and his nephew Brij in The Complex. Their bad behaviour takes the form of both sexual assault and physical abuse, often targeted at women in the family, who they see as frontiers to be conquered. Their attitude towards women is moulded by their initial encounters with servant girls in the village, who could not say no. Brij treats his wife Karishma with contempt and bruises. Laxman tolerates his wife Archana as he embarks on an affair with another woman in the family, which lasts seven years.
Within the family, violence is not an aberration, rather, it is an undercurrent. Bullying starts early, with older cousins chasing down the youngest (smallest) cousin and stripping off their shorts and underwear, much to the amusement of cackling aunts and uncles.
With age and time, the brutality sharpens, and by the end it culminates in murder. But this anger and proclivity for violence is not unidimensional and it is to Mahajan’s credit that he shows how violence can also be subdued. When anti-Sikh riots rage through Delhi, Laxman’s instinct is to join the murdering mobs, but then his loyalty to his neighbourhood, which had been founded by his father, holds him back.
It is trendy to write about male anger in fiction and non-fiction today, but Mahajan doesn’t merely map anger, he interrogates it. Does this anger emerge from a sense of inferiority? Does it emerge from the exhilaration of getting away with a transgression? Laxman’s path into politics is unpredictable at best. His first job is at a flailing bobby-pin factory; he then embarks upon a doomed Ayurvedic balm business. Through it all, he can never silence his father’s words, “All my sons—each and every one—is a duffer. But you? You’re the stupidest of all of them. You’re stupider than these rocks.”
A hundred pages later, Laxman will look around the rooms of the Complex and remember Papaji and think, “All around him now were men who were like smashed pieces of the great man. Together, Laxman realised, we add up to less than our father.” Brij similarly is a man of meagre accomplishments. He joins the air force but is in it only for himself. He works in a paper mill that dispatches him to rural outposts, where he is once again frustrated and disappointed. Mahajan never excuses the loutish and uncouth behaviour of his male characters, but by providing context he humanises them.
It is hardly surprising that Mahajan has taken a decade to build The Complex as there is nothing glib about it. The murder victim and the murderer are named in the early pages of the book. However, the novel still holds the reader in its grip not because of big reveals but for how it takes you into the trenches of both family and country and leaves you breathless by the end.
Nandini Nair is the associate director of New India Foundation, and a literary critic.