‘The Tiger’s Share': Taking the mask off the elite, entitled Indian male
Summary
Keshava Guha’s second novel is an acutely observed portrait of India’s upper crust and their deep malaise
Keshava Guha’s new novel, The Tiger’s Share, is a refreshing departure from his debut, Accidental Magic (2019), which was centred around the intense but somewhat rarefied world of Harry Potter fandom. In contrast, the intensity of his second book comes from its gritty, social realist setting, among the upper crust of south Delhi, nurtured by illgotten generational wealth, patriarchal biases, and caste superiority.
Narrated by Tara, a self-made lawyer with a thriving practice in Delhi, The Tiger’s Share tells the story of her family’s gradual disintegration, or rather, “disequilibrium", as she puts it. Tara’s father Brahm Saxena, a retired chartered accountant who has made his wealth from scratch, is the instigator of the disharmony. A year into his retirement, he calls for a “family summit" to discuss his future. Somewhat like eccentric King Lear, he throws a googly at his children, telling them not to expect anything from him in the way of an inheritance.
Tara is mostly nonplussed by this announcement, but Rohit, her younger brother, who has already been a beneficiary of their father’s largesse when he went to study film in the UK and the US, is far from happy. He joins hands with his childhood buddy, Kunal, who, as an adopted son of a rich business family, is battling similar fears of being disinherited. As it happens, Kunal’s sister Lila knows Tara as a friend from her school days, though not particularly well. But soon, circumstances bring the two women together to tame their errant brothers, who are guided by an atavistic sense of entitlement as male heirs of their families.
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Tara aptly captures the fearful symmetry between the Saxena and the Chawla families: “The older daughter, finding success through brains and application, dutiful to her parents while expecting nothing from them, self-reliant and free from entitlement; the younger brother, ill with entitlement, thirty and with nothing worth to show for it."
The inequality of this shockingly common situation is so ingrained into the DNA of Indian families that even in the 21st century, with progressive laws in place to protect the rights of all descendants’, fairness and justice tend to crumble before the almighty force of social judgement—especially if the sibling in question is single, child-free, gay, or a prosperous professional with no strings attached.
In The Tiger’s Share, Guha peels the layers of presumption, moral outrage, hurt ego and emotional blackmail that feed and sustain this status quo. His acute, often aphoristic, observations of the ways of polite society are delightfully tongue-incheek (“The rich man in Delhi is more likely to know no etiquette than too much. In that sense, you can really tell the Mughals are long gone"), at times, wickedly camp (“You saw Vicky and your first thought wasn’t a word but a whistle, a catcall").
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He gets under the skin of a type of privileged Delhiite, whose world remains circumscribed by parental influence, even after they have moved out of the ancestral home and made a life for themselves. So, for all her confidence of being a woman of the world, Tara is not free of an infantile pull to stay close to her roots. “I moved between my parents’ flat and my own barsaati as if they were rooms of the same house," she admits without any qualm. As the male scion of the family, her brother simply turns a very similar urge into reality by proudly living under the same roof with his parents, as though he deserved nothing better. While there was every risk of Tara being turned into a martyr, who must do her sisterly duty by her feckless brother, Guha gives her character its own set of insecurities—be it in love or professional success.
Tara’s closest friend, Deepti, acts as a foil to her seemingly flawless persona, showing her up as being emotionally cruel towards Rohit when he was a vulnerable boy of 16. Tara, herself, remains conflicted about her relationship with Wojciech, her former Polish boyfriend, till the very end. Although, The Tiger’s Share is filtered through Tara’s consciousness, it remains alert to the Big Questions that are rewriting the script of society and politics in India. Instead of solving the dire crisis of air pollution and environmental damage that is being wrought on Delhi, and the world at large, Kunal, Rohit and their cronies are focused on building a curriculum on “desh-bhakti" (patriotism) that they want to disseminate among government-aided schools in Delhi.
Like arrogant male lions, who like to be waited upon by the female of the pride, men like them expect to be given the lion’s share of everything—including their inheritance—without having to fight for anything. It is to this generation of men that Tara’s father throws a challenge, where, like tigers in the wild, they must learn to fight for what they want. In an inspired ending, Guha brings a touch of crazy to the phrase “the tiger’s share". But it doesn’t feel dissonant in a world, where rational arguments don’t bring positive changes. And so, it is left to mad, Lear-like men like Brahm Saxena to take wild leaps of faith.
