“The Light at the End of the World” by Siddhartha Deb

Siddhartha Deb (photo: Nina Subin)

Siddhartha Deb’s The Light at the End of the World is a massive novel filled with conspiracies, uncertainty, madness and marvels, the inability to process the wide array of what is noticed and reported, and, indeed, what counts as reality. Here is the world, specifically India, except it isn’t. As one character responds in a quasi-interrogation to her alleged “betrayal” of India: “India is not a nation but a prisonhouse [sic] of possible nations.” As with India, so goes the world.

The novel appears to be three novellas framed by a fourth, except it isn’t. They share too much and are too closely linked in images, references, dead ends, ideologies, malaise, and a general premise—each main character is manipulated by a shadow entity into recovering or hiding information that will help the shadow restore its world order. The biggest threat to each character is a complete loss of identity.

The frame stars Bibi, a former journalist for the Daily Telegram who had done investigative work into so-called atrocities. Brought back by her former paper, presumably at the bequest of a shadow organization, she is asked to find a colleague who worked with her at that time. Of deep interest to the organization is Sanjit. Her interrogator grills her.

 

Surely you couldn’t have failed to keep up with his meticulous reconstruction of conspiracies? Mass murder, torture, financial fraud, India nothing but a Brahminical, Kautilyan, capitalist state swirling with inequity and violence.

 

Bibi is forced to revisit her own investigations from her earlier days as a reporter. In what is vaguely an abduction with its implied threats to friends and family, she agrees to search for Sanjit who was, in the intervening years, subjected to torture and abuse, and allegedly murdered. By whom? Bibi begins to drift through a series of her own inquiries.

 

The Light at the End of the World, Siddhartha Deb (Soho, May 2023; Context, APril 2023)
The Light at the End of the World, Siddhartha Deb (Soho, May 2023; Context, April 2023)

From the future, we are sent back to 1984 and the Bhopal disaster and its immediate horrors, where we follow an assassin out to kill the worker who knows the truth about the accident before he goes public. For the assassin however, the truth is problematic. At one point he slides into a deep meditation on truth, falsehoods, hallucinations, and fictions.

 

As I drank, I thought of the thing I had seen in the factory.
      Was it because of the chemicals I had breathed? What could it be other than a hallucination? I drank whiskey and thought of stories whispered in the backchannels [sic] of deep state work, tales murmured by intelligence men on long, lonely nights of vigilance, incidents buried in termite-infested case files.
      Rumours of laboratories and classified projects and occult knowledge. Vimanas and robots and superweapons [sic] originating in mysterious frontier zones, on mountains and islands. My mind went back to the creature, the alien or the Ganesh, alive, trapped in a glass cylinder. I vaguely recalled stories of thought-form experiments carried out somewhere, even though I wasn’t sure what thought forms were. Stuff from Tibetan Buddhism, tulpas, tulkus, something like that.”

 

What laboratories? What classified projects? They are all presented in detail throughout the novel. There is always a dark force responsible for them. Or so one suspects.

The third section invokes the Committee that has a veterinarian looking for an ancient Vedic aircraft. Set in Calcutta, 1947, it foregrounds the transition from the state of British India to the creation of the states of India and Pakistan. Interspersed with his work for the Committee are his weekly appointments with a doctor at the Savage Freud clinic where he is being assessed for his “emotional fitness as a pilot for the Vimana.” Das speaks to the doctor about himself in third person in what is a shamanistic variation on Freudian psychoanalysis.

 

The person whose exploits he is describing, and who goes by the name of Das, is no longer him, just someone he once knew, someone trapped in the 1940s, while he is capable of ranging back and forth in time, a flying yogi, a soul in transit seeing the numbers rise and fall – 1947, 185.., 198-, 2???

 

Throughout the novel, Deb exploits his sentence structure to further develop issues of uncertainty and instability, what is and is not. As is his character, Deb is his own variant of a flying yogi floating through time. In 1947, such floating offers a wide range of uncertainties and possibilities, with or without hope, for the country. The newly re-constituted states of India and Pakistan and the nightmare of Partition are the quintessential situations identified in the colonial/postcolonial work of the past seventy years.

 

The last section sends us back to the origins of Bibi’s prisonhouse of possible nations. Here is one moment in the many births of ‘colonial’ India, when the British took administrative control of India/Pakistan under its own British Raj. The specific occasion arises out of the Sepoy Revolution of 1857. A small band of British soldiers has been charged to bring the revolutionaries to justice. The soldiers head into the Himalayas in pursuit, suffering months of mountains and weather, before coming to the vast estate of the revolutionaries’ leader, an estate having room after room of mysteries ripped from their contexts, isolated, dissected, and set out for display. Sykes, one of the British soldiers, struggles to maintain his sanity even as his colleagues and superior officer descend into their own special madnesses and obsessions. For Sykes, the question is not so much whether or not things make sense, but the real reason for the British being in this so-called world and how they might escape it. Justice? That mission evaporates.

The novel ends with Bibi and her continued search for Sanjit. The future has her arrival on an island, a former prison, now hotel. It is a travel destination but no longer has guests. Here we find a deep change in the physical world itself, the ocean, the sky, the landscape, everything. What possible world is in this process of becoming? Whose reality or truth will form it? Will the story be controlled by a dark organization? Will individuals have identities or will they be little more than the human ants the assassin sees as he speculates on hallucination and fiction, assuming humans continue to exist?

As deep as these philosophical/political issues go, for Das or God or the devil or Freud or the British or Union Carbide it is the richness of the details given to this world that elevates this novel.


Rick Henry was a Professor of English at SUNY—Potsdam where he directed the BFA in Creative Writing.