Every now and then, art responds to social crises and challenges to make sense of the world we live in. A world where riots and clashes or hate and ban set the agenda for society, or worse, become the agenda itself. It is such an unenviable territory that The Dance of Faith, the debut novel by R Seshasayee, seeks to explore. On a raw canvas cohabited by sketches of ordinary people, the author adds brush strokes resembling a multitude of question marks, all relating to tensions and conflicts unsettling dreams and ambitions. Among these questions, one, however, stands out: Have the differences given an escape velocity to the human race to plunge out of control, just like human greed sending the planet beyond repair?
Set in a sleepy village surrounded by Tamil Nadu’s Yercaud hills and in an era of MGR movies and tent cinemas, the novel is about coexistence of faith. Zaheer is a teenage boy who wants to become a dancer, but his family and faith wouldn’t allow him to pursue his passion. Caught between gods and men, the boy wanders into a world of movies and stars he discovers in a makeshift movie hall. Anandhi is a young woman chaperoned into a new religion through a marriage of convenience and conversion. Christened Ayesha, she finds herself trapped inside a cloud of tentative and uncertain realities. The two tread a path paved with suspicion and distrust to make way for self-belief.
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The novel warns of the deep suspicion of the other bordering intolerance in its beginning when Zaheer spots a colourful shirt in the window of the only garment shop in a nearby town. “Boys don’t wear such colours,” his father says, scolding him for his choice. “But gods do,” replies Zaheer, evoking an end-of-discussion retort from his father: “They are not our gods.” The boy’s appeal to learn dance is similarly struck down. When he wins the approval of a dance teacher during a performance in his classroom, Zaheer is accused by his family of singing ‘their’ songs and dancing ‘their’ dances. Anandhi, who marries Zaheer’s uncle Ahmed after walking out of a previous arranged marriage, wants to name her snack shop after MGR, the evergreen hero of Tamil cinema, but the police wouldn’t allow it. Living as Ahmed’s second wife, she encounters a different world that she is willing to work with.
Seshasayee, a former chairman of software giant Infosys, creates a fictional world set somewhere in the second half of the last century as a mirror to contemporary society. The innocence of a young boy who seeks answers to the confounding questions around different gods and the inclination of a young woman to host two beliefs sum up the novel, an important work that addresses the concerns of a world that is caught between giant strides in science and technology and a rapid slide into the dark ages. The deadpan jokes and the cheeky characters that the author gathers fit perfectly with the social milieu of a pre-liberalisation period. The hate and divide some of them indulge in, however, resonate with contemporary times.
Faizal Khan is a freelancer
The Dance of Faith
R Seshasayee
HarperCollins
Pp 307, Rs 499
