Nobody Does the Right Thing: A Novel - Softcover

Kumar, Amitava

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822346826 ISBN 13: 9780822346821

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

A young poet is killed by her lover, a politician, in the eastern Indian state of Bihar. Soon afterward, across India in Bombay, an idealistic journalist is hired by a movie director to write a Bollywood screenplay about the murdered poet. Research for the script takes the writer, Binod, back to Bihar, where he and his cousin Rabinder were raised. While the high-minded Binod struggles to turn the poet’s murder into a steamy tale about small towns, desire, and intrigue, Rabinder sits in a Bihari jail cell, having been arrested for distributing pornography through a cybercafé. Rabinder dreams of a career in Bollywood filmmaking, and, unlike his cousin, he is not burdened by ethical scruples. Nobody Does the Right Thing is the story of these two cousins and the ways that their lives unexpectedly intertwine. Set in the rural villages of Bihar and the metropolises of Bombay and Delhi, the novel is packed with telling details and anecdotes about life in contemporary India. At the same time, it is a fictional investigation into how narratives circulate and vie for supremacy through gossip, cinema, popular fiction, sensational journalism, and the global media.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Amitava Kumar is a novelist, poet, journalist, and Professor of English at Vassar College. He is the author of Husband of a Fanatic, a New York Times “Editors’ Choice”; Bombay-London-New York, a New Statesman (UK) “Book of the Year”; and Passport Photos. He is the editor of several books, including Away: The Indian Writer as an Expatriate, The Humour and the Pity: Essays on V. S. Naipaul, and World Bank Literature. He is also an editor of the online journal Politics and Culture and the screenwriter and narrator of the prize-winning documentary film Pure Chutney. Kumar’s writing has appeared in the Nation, Harper’s, Vanity Fair, American Prospect, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Hindu, and other publications in North America and India.

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""Nobody Does the Right Thing" imaginatively portrays the forces shaping contemporary India, and it is a remarkable reader of mass culture and popular narrative forms, of the worlds of Hindi cinema, pulp fiction, sensational journalism, and globalized media."--Siddhartha Deb, author of "An Outline of the Republic" and "The Point of Return"

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Nobody Does the Right Thing

a novelBy AMITAVA KUMAR

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2010 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4682-1

Contents

Acknowledgments......................................ixPeople and Places....................................xiI * The Car with the Red Light.......................1II * Ulan Bator at Night.............................33III * The Lady with the Dog..........................61IV * Kiss of the Spider Woman........................99V * News of a Kidnapping.............................123VI * Nobody Does the Right Thing.....................153VII * The Glass Menagerie............................175

Chapter One

Mala Srivastava's mother lived in a two-room flat above a tiny kindergarten institution that called itself Harward Public School. Binod didn't know this; he stopped at the school first and was pointed to the narrow stairway that led up to the second floor. Rows of dark, feral faces with slightly scared but inquisitive eyes followed him from the window where the teacher had paused in the lesson he was giving. The door of the flat was open and lying on the dirty floor beside it was a steel plate with half a dozen freshly washed potatoes and a knife.

A middle-aged woman came out of the room at the back. Binod stopped knocking and, in the semi-darkness inside, the woman stopped too. She began to cover her head with her cotton sari when Binod introduced himself. He had brought a copy of the editorial he had written about Mala. The woman took it from his hand but said that she couldn't read without her glasses. Binod was still standing at the door. He said, "I didn't have your phone number. I couldn't call you before I showed up like this. Could you talk to me for a few minutes?"

The woman said, "My daughter ... my second daughter ... will be back from college. She will be able to answer your questions."

That must be Mala's younger sister. It was she who had first spoken to the media after the murder about Mala's affair with Surajdeo Tripathi. Just a day later, inexplicably, she had withdrawn the charge. She said that she had been misquoted in the press. But the police had done the tests on the fetus. Surajdeo and his wife were arrested within days, after Mala's servant had identified the hired killer.

Binod said, "I don't really have any questions. I came from Bombay just yesterday. A local journalist gave me this address last night ..."

The woman didn't move or say anything. She looked past Binod into the street outside. She said, "I don't even have tea in the house. The servant went to his village last Monday and hasn't returned. I'm here by myself."

"Mataji," Binod said, folding his hands dramatically, "you need not concern yourself about me. I don't need tea. I have just come from my parents' home here in Patna. Please give me a few minutes of your time. That's all I ask."

He was seated on a wooden chair that the woman had dragged close to the door for him. She sat on a stool halfway across the room. The woman's hair was gray, but her face was largely free of wrinkles; it was a round and heavy face, tired looking because of the dark circles under the eyes. The face remained expressionless as Binod read aloud. He would read each sentence, putting great emphasis on those words where he seemed to be praising Mala's ambition, and stop to look at her. He faltered once he got to the closing lines about the children of film stars-what did it have to do with Mala anyway?-but he didn't pause in his reading. He had planned to ask her if she saw her daughter's journey as a terrifying trip to the heart of power, but the blankness of the woman's gaze made him hesitate. He began to justify what he had done. He said, "I didn't want to deal with details of the scandal. That wasn't of interest to me. I just wanted to comment on what it meant for a young, fatherless girl to make her way in the political world."

But it didn't matter.

The mother said, "The press printed reports that she was pregnant. How could that have been possible? People have insects in their brain ... I had just seen her. She was wearing churidar kurta that day. Would it not have been obvious to everyone?"

Binod remained silent. After a while, he asked, "What did your daughter want to become when she grew up? I mean, when she was a child, what did she dream of becoming?"

The woman said, "When she was a child, she played, she went to school. What does a child care about how she is going to survive when she grows up?"

There must be wisdom in this response. That is what the shaking of Binod's head was supposed to mean. It might have suggested to someone else that he was actually shaking his head in despair.

The woman spoke again. "Her father passed away when she was only fourteen. I didn't have a son. Mala grew old almost overnight. She was the breadwinner now. She was my son. Who will-"

The old woman's hand went up to her throat and her plump lips fluttered for a second. She seemed to sigh but actually she was crying; she would catch her breath and then let out a small moan.

Binod wanted to ask her how Mala had discovered literature. He didn't interrupt the woman's crying, however. And then it was too late. Mala's mother looked up with alarm and began to wipe her eyes. Binod turned and saw that a young woman was standing on the landing and behind her was a tall, dark man in a black shirt. The young woman pressed her lips and without saying anything to Binod made a circle around his chair and entered the flat. She put her hand on the old woman's shoulder and then, still not looking at Binod, asked her loudly, "Is it right to cry like this-in front of strangers?"

This was the sister. She had no interest in the editorial that Binod was holding out for her to see. But the tall man took it from Binod's hand. While the fellow was reading it, Binod said, "I wrote that editorial. I'm a journalist working in Bombay. But I'm from Patna."

The man said, "But what do you want here now?"

It didn't occur to Binod then, or even later that day when he kept returning to this question, to tell them that he was going to write a story for a film about the murdered girl. The dark man had a thin gold chain on his chest. Binod looked at him and then at the old woman, whose face, now emptied of grief, had once again surrendered itself to blankness. He felt he should say something about how difficult life was-and how he had felt that Mala had been unconventional. But it was clear that the girl wanted to speak. The younger sister. Her name had been in the papers too, but for some reason Binod couldn't recall it right then. He looked at the tense, thin fingers that she had placed on her mother's shoulder.

The girl, all fury suddenly, spoke up in English. "I think you are a lawyer."

"Lawyer," Binod asked loudly, doing his best to look hurt. But he was genuinely surprised. A lawyer? Did they think he was a lawyer, perhaps here to entrap them, and is that why there was such suspicion and anger?

The girl took a step toward him. "You are a lawyer. Get out." Her thin finger described a ridiculous arc through the air. Binod turned away. It wasn't until he had reached the bottom of the steps that he realized that she had actually been calling him a liar.

* * *

Binod did not know the woman but after her murder she had been everywhere in the papers. The stories repeated themselves and were often smudgy with their details, but the headlines told their own...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822346826
• ISBN 13: 9780822346821
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 202
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland