“Nireeswaran” by VJ James

Nireeswaran VJ James, Ministhy S (trans) (Vintage Books India, April 2022)

Indians take their gods and goddesses seriously, holding them extraordinarily close by means of innumerable festivals round the year, and striving to find every possible opportunity to pray to the divine, wish-granting beings in as many ways as humanly possible. As a result, everything from personal problems to social evils becomes a matter of divine intervention. In his 2014 novel Nireeswaran (recently translated from Malayalam into English by Ministhy S), author VJ James has dared to make a case for human intervention by floating the idea of an un-god. The single-word title is the antonym of Eswaran (God). 

Nireeswaran is a headless, limbless god (aptly visualised on the cover of the book) invented by village boys Antony, Bhaskaran and Sahir (nominally Christian,  Hindu, and Muslim respectively), a trio of atheists that calls themselves Abhasa (after the first letters of their names) Sangha, that means “the fellowship of the debauched” in Malayalam. They have an agenda: they want to go beyond atheism in the process of shaking up people to the reality of superstition and non-existence of god:

 

The atheist view is as old as faith itself. Wasn’t Charvaka its exponent? Neither the Buddha nor Mahavira worshipped God. If we jabber like the rest of the rationalists that there is no God, there will be nothing unique about it. We must add a new dimension to it! Displacing one thorn with another, we should install a Nireeswaran in the place of Eswaran!

 

They have the god consecrated by a former priest who has stopped believing in god in the presence of a simpleton, a prostitute, a butcher, and a barber, among others. The mock ritual is followed by mock-prayer to Nireeswaran for things they want, things that seem impossible: a government job for someone who has crossed the age limit prescribed for the job, a lost gold chain, a Gulf visa for someone else. A kid prays to pass his exams. And an anonymous voice prays that the village prostitute turn into a saint.

 

Things start turning around from mock to serious when the prayers begin to come true. Readers recognize the message very early on in the story:

 

Spirituality was like a boomerang which returned to its origin despite having been thrown in another direction.

 

Someone finds a source of livelihood and someone wakes from a coma after two decades. The Abhasa are frustrated: their joke acquires divinity and ends up reinforcing the idea of faith that they had set out to challenge. They know that the coming true of a lot of prayer can be easily explained: hard work, science, coincidence, patience, and kindness. But the villagers refuse to see it through any lens other than that of faith.

The Abhasa wait for an opportunity to overthrow their creation but it turns out to be difficult. In the meantime, the plot forks into different paths taken by different prayers, each exploring desire and the meaning of life in different ways with one idea lingering over all of them:

 

The world’s greatest laboratory is a human’s inner universe. The “God Particle”, and the stillness transcending the emptiness, can only be found if you search there.

 

The novel is a delight: it makes for a gripping narrative that balances the turn of events that border on the miraculous with philosophical reflections on being human. Readers will find the working of the varied miracles in the novel very believable, learning something interesting from each as they see prayers come true in exquisite and surprising ways. In Nireeswaran, James takes the social evil of superstition and turns it into something nobler than satire: the story does not want to mock or correct a societal wrong; it wants the readers to pause and reflect, to look at life with wonder. It is an unusual victory of the sublime over the didactic.


Soni Wadhwa lives in Mumbai.