Brahm Saxena summons his family—his wife, daughter and son—to announce that they, especially the children, should not expect anything from him as inheritance. Rohit, the son, is rattled but Tara, the daughter, is financially independent and doesn’t bother about what she doesn’t feel entitled to.
Through the story of the Saxenas and of the Chawlas—another family facing conflicts over property after the death of the father—Keshava Guha’s The Tiger’s Share narrates the stories of four kinds of apocalypses in one: the class/caste apocalypse that Delhi is, where the divide between the rich and the poor keeps widening; the Delhi of climate crisis which is engulfed in a “man-made solar eclipse” and “human-fucked seasons”; the Delhi where men think everything belongs to them and daughters can go to hell or their husbands’ homes; and the Delhi where liberals and the orthodox fight the loudest in moral outrage.
What begins as tensions around property gets entangled in a sadistic hatred for people of another religion and a sadomasochistic ecological wrongdoing. The strand about the ecology ends in an act of ecoterrorism/ecowarriorhood while the two property disputes end differently: one in an ugly series of blackmail with the two sides trying to outsmart each other, and another in an act of sacrifice. As Tara realises towards the end of the novel, one must live for the people and not for principles; that most misunderstandings in the world are rooted in the misplaced pride that comes with righteousness.
Guha eschews a conventional plot.
Guha eschews a conventional plot. There are no events and episodes by which to keep track of who’s up to what. Rohit does little other than make YouTube videos. Kunal, the brother from the second dispute, believes he wants to make the country a better place by designing a patriotic syllabus to be taught in schools. Lila, Kunal’s sister, is obsessed with finding justice: she wants her share of what belonged to their father. Tara observes and wants to do better. Rather than action, there are encounters and conversations: the characters agree or disagree, hardly moving the needle in the cold war they have trapped themselves in. Bitterness and resentment unfold about who will end up with what, but life goes on: a banal life that has not yet reached the courtroom but one spent pondering over the ways in which things that seem personal/familial (such as messy estate planning) are a reflection of socio-political chaos.
Narrated by Tara, the four strands intertwine in ways that arouse anger at how the world is doomed from the level of the individual to that of the family, society, politics and environment. Guha paints a detailed picture of the city: the rich go around only in cars and do not have to live with the consequences of pollution the way the poor do. The Delhi of the wealth divide is an inversion of a typical city:
In the modern city, density decreases as you move away from the centre. Central Delhi … was on the scale of a gilded suburb. Ministers, MPs, senior bureaucrats and generals, and a few businessmen – old money and new in equal proportion – lived in bungalows on plots of an acre or several … Then you had the gated colonies of south Delhi … As you moved away from the centre, you came eventually to a treeless world of streets the width of Lutyens’ Delhi pavements, choked up with dust and flies, the buildings unfinished except for the facade … This world, where most people now lived, had no place in the public or private facing image of Delhi, and was likely to have no role in its recorded history. It gave Delhi away as just another north Indian town.
Here is the Delhi of the climate crisis:
‘Delhi,’ my father continued, ‘well, there is no better place to see this than Delhi. What was Delhi? A perfect oasis. In the middle of near-desert, a slice of green heaven, fed by a strong river. What have we made of Delhi? A place unfit for life. The river is a dry garbage dump. The water in our pipes is liquid refuse. The air – I won’t tell you about the air. Every park is a monument to what we have done. What is a park? A temple of life. Our parks are temples of sickness. Every tree, every bird suffering, as if it has been told it must live but is stuck in a place no longer fit for living. Come to the mandi and you won’t be able to show me one tomato that isn’t sick and decaying.
It is a city in which animal conservation is seen as “a denial of our purpose as human beings” because to be human is to exert control over nature because a tiger does not care about building a “human sanctuary”: “For a tiger, a human sanctuary is called a buffet. All-you-can-eat.”
And here is the city of male privilege:
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 of worth to show for it.
The title’s animal is this tiger: always insecure, desperate, and ready to stop at nothing.
There’s a nature analogy here too. The younger generation of men are like tigers: unlike lions who have their lionesses to feed them and care for them, tigers see women as a threat because to them, everything seems to be scarce: land, prey, water. The title’s animal is this tiger: always insecure, desperate, and ready to stop at nothing.
The novel is at its most rousing in the fourth strand as a mirror to the liberals. Many problems might be solved if only those who know better—the liberals—stop thinking of themselves as right and behaving arrogantly. As Tara’s friend rebukes her once, echoing what is wrong with liberals in general:
You never say, “If I don’t know much, it’s because I’ve never tried to find out, never actually been curious, because when it comes to him [Rohit, the brother] I’m smug and condescending and my mind is shut, because there is nothing I can learn from him or about him, ever.”
The liberals are not likely to be happy at being called narrow-minded and smug but that provocation is what The Tiger’s Share seems intended at. Listening to the “other” and letting go of something as petty as property can bring peace to those who feel secure? The idea is as radical as it is foolish, especially in times when access to wealth or power of any kind means more injustice and greater inequality. The Tiger’s Share should be seen as a novel not in the way it captures its times but how its times react to it.