Of all the Indian epics, the Ramayana is the best- known: Rama, the prince of Ayodhya, is banished from his kingdom by a jealous stepmother. His wife Sita and his brother Lakshmana choose to accompany him. During the exile, Sita is abducted by Ravana, the king of Lanka. With the help of Hanuman and a “monkey” army, he defeats Ravana and gets Sita back. It is not a happily-ever-after for Rama though. Questions arise about her chastity given the time she was held in captivity by Ravana. As an ideal king who cares for public opinion, Rama chooses to let her go.
But Rama has also informed actual history. Babur, the founder of the Mughal Empire, built a mosque (known as Babri Masjid or Mosque) in Ayodhya. That it was built on a site that was the birthplace of Rama or at least the site where a Rama temple was believed to have stood, was seen as a desecration of the Hindu religion and has also led to a lot of communal tensions on the subcontinent.
Lindsay Pereira’s The Memoirs of Valmiki Rao blends the two narratives of the myth and the historical reality of the riots as experienced in Mumbai to craft a rather unique kind of adaptation. His rewriting blends the story and characters of Ramayana with the life in a Mumbai chawl, a neighborhood populated by the poor. The meta narrative introduces Valmiki Rao, a postman, whose memoir, tempered with a bit of fiction to reconstruct certain incidents he did not witness personally, the reader is about to read. Valmiki was also the sage to whom the authorship of the Ramayana is attributed. The Prologue opens:
Valmiki Ratnakar Rao, seventy-two, unshaven, crabby and smelling a little like a wet dog, was not in the best of moods that Wednesday morning. His third cup of weak tea lay before him, cooling quickly in its chipped porcelain teacup, but there were still no signs of a bowel movement.
Soon, the readers get to know what makes him assume the credentials of writing this story, or why his memoir needs to be seen as a modern rendering of the epic while admitting that it reads like fiction too:
There was some embellishment, naturally, because his memories of those days had begun to fray. The bulk of that history had survived intact though, a blessing Valmiki placed on his years as a postman. You couldn’t deliver the post if your memory was weak… He revelled in the private pleasure of knowing that no one else, not in Ganga Niwas, Sri Niwas, or anywhere else in this godforsaken city of sin, could tell it the way he did. He could tell it because he knew them all—the heroes and sidekicks, villains and vamps, dons and damsels. He knew what drove them to do the things they did and why they had no choice… He explained the past, chronicled the events before and after the riots, and left conclusions to the imaginary readers.
Ram, in this story, is Ramu, a local drunkard who was once a small-time volunteer in a political party. Sita is Janaki, the daughter of the owner of a provisional store in the area. Ravana is Ravi Anna, the goon who aspired to be a politician. Ramu and Janaki are in love. But Ravi Anna, the demonized Tamil-speaking outsider in a city that gets claimed for the local Marathi-speaking insiders, wants her, a move that gives the local twist to the Aryan-Dravidian conflict-oriented interpretation of the mythology. He has her fooled into walking into his chawl, Sri Niwas, where he locks her up. With a mob turning violent in the neighborhood, Ramu gets hurt and Ravi Anna gets killed in the confrontation with Ramu. This personal history does not register beyond being noted as casualties in the macro narrative of incidents perpetrated by mob violence. But the real tragedy is Janaki’s: as she tries to run away in despair given the dishonorable gossip about her, she meets her end tragically at the hands of miscreants loose on the streets of the city.
Thus, at every step, Pereira manages to make the story belong to Mumbai. The backdrop of riots becomes a way of pointing towards the insider-outsider hostility as a constant dimension of any given time and place. The riots leave everyone in the chawl devastated. Pereira explores the greater antagonism stemming from religion in the Rama story that belongs in 1992 with those who could have been heroes in a mythical time being now found in the contemporary times as pawns working for political parties:
Every political party in India needs foot soldiers. They are the ones who walk door to door, hand out bribes for votes and make sure rallies are attended by transporting people to and from their kholis. The men here did this not because it was lucrative, but because wearing the same T-shirts gave them a sense of community. When they shouted with one voice, they felt more powerful than when they were on their own. For those moments, they felt heard by a city that otherwise insisted on behaving as if they didn’t exist.
It is such commentary on Mumbai that makes The Memoirs of Valmiki Rao a provocative work of city writing. The story is peppered with seething remarks about the brutality of the life of the unprivileged in Mumbai:
The funny thing is, even after all these years, I know how difficult it is for our boys to walk into any of Mumbai’s big offices and be taken seriously. We don’t have the degrees or experience, so all we are given are new enemies to blame every ten years. We are taught to hate people from one state this year and another state the next, then blame them for taking jobs we were never qualified for in the first place.
And then there is also the philosophizing about Mumbai as a space:
Silence was an unknown entity in Mumbai. One could stand outside at 4 a.m., smoking a beedi, and witness a drunken brawl erupt like a firework. Silence was for those who had nowhere to go and nothing to work towards. In Mumbai, you began moving towards something bigger and better from the second you were shoved out of your mother’s womb. You stopped moving only when you died because, if you didn’t, someone behind you would rudely push you out of the way.
Pereira’s Mumbai is soaked in the drama of Bollywood at every point for the city cannot be spoken of without invoking its cinema, posters, film songs, and television always present in background as ambient sounds or embedded in the way the citizens make sense of what is happening around them. When Ravi Anna comes face to face with Janaki held captive, she likens her to the famous film actress Madhuri Dixit! Elsewhere, the locked-up Janaki tries to process what is happening around her:
Janaki awoke at the sound of gunfire. If she wasn’t sure hours ago, she knew it now. She hoped it was Ramu and her father, wielding a gun like heroes in an action movie to rescue her, but knew that couldn’t be.
Film scenes pop up as metaphors in the novel:
Public displays of affection are against our culture. I don’t know why, but we follow these rules because being like sheep comes naturally to us. If you look at black and white videos of old film songs, where the hero is singing to a heroine, there is usually a crowd of men standing around them nodding. That is what we have always been. We all stand and point, mouths and eyes open, ready to follow anyone who does something first.
Part history, part ethnography, and part fiction, The Memoirs of Valmiki Rao comes very close to a shocking re-interpretation of the genre of epic as tragedy and horror. It is written with great sensitivity towards local flavors of belonging to the city, a move that will make best sense to Mumbaikars, but it ought to be read with a heightened sense of interrogation of how one’s own city, in India and elsewhere, has or has not succumbed to hatred and violence.