The sun burns,
no matter what you think
One Love, And The Many Lives of Osip B is about 18-year-old Osip Bala Krishnan, so named after the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam — who was exiled by Stalin twice to Siberia and who died of starvation during his second exile in 1938—and his transgressive love affair with his English teach teacher, Elizabeth Hill, a British citizen. The novel begins with Elizabeth dramatically missing: ‘Weeks after she went missing, Elizabeth Hill called and said I had no future with her. I was out among the climbing woods at the back of the school, leaning on a rock and watching a pig-shaped cloud spill its guts.’
Osip B’s search for Elizabeth takes him to Oxford. The journey covers the growth of Osip B as a character. In the process of mapping the difficult relationship between two individuals conflicted by age difference, race, language and culture, the novelist brings to life the fraught contemporary themes that keep our society on boil. These themes, group identity versus individual rights, gender rights, Indian patriotism, and a kind of blind and buff liberalism work their way in and out of the situations that the characters both find themselves through their actions and accidents.
Can an understanding of the deeply interconnected nature of the existence of modern society, a complex recognition of the pervasive play of our repressions and dysfunctionalities help set us free? This is an important question in the sense that modern communication technologies and new social media platforms have irrevocably enmeshed the individual with the group. Osip B, like his mentor friend Arjun Bedi (an iconoclast writer breaking down under sexual harassment charges), are, on the face of it, aberrant individuals. Their equations with society and its norms are in a state of flux. The result is that they would have to pay heavily.
The novel also focuses on fatalistic existential themes. We know only too well that the universe is indifferent to the search of meaning so peculiar to the human enterprise. The sun burns no matter what you think. Nevertheless, we must exercise our choices. But does that compulsion render us in the end unhappy? Because, no course of action in modern society is independent of repercussions. Are we therefore fated to be unhappy, never getting fully what we desired? Or because we finally got what we desired but it did not turn out to be what we expected? As happens in Osip B’s quest for Elizabeth. One Love, And The Many Lives Of Osip B, raises these questions with a sense of urgent engagement, carrying the reader in the flow and movement of the narrative.
The language here is loaded with imagery and references. Consider a short, random sentence that occurs in the very first pages: ‘Often one’s name is one’s fate.’ That Osip B is named after Mandelstam is partly responsible for the unravelling of the plot. Osip B’s grandfather, Mr Niranjan Menon, has a Stalinist past of political violence and the blood of many murders on his hands. That he finds a kind of expiation in christening the adopted child Osip sets the stage of the one of the central conflicts of the novel: that the victim and the victor, right there at home itself; the rest of the world is after all an extension of that domestic stage.
Osip’s struggles to cope up with the world is offset by his friend and roommate at the school-hostel in Kasauli, Anand, who beautifully aligns his insecurities to the collective insecurities of society. But that is only one way of looking at his success. Deep in his heart Anand—a quick study who trains himself to be a yoga guru, much in the mould of some of the leading icons of our times, but perhaps even more dangerous because he is so young— knows everything is a game, and he is conscious he is persuading himself that material success is the only kind of trophy worth fighting for. He achieves this by feeding his insecurities ( he is an orphan) into the insecurities of a larger group. Anand knows a group coheres thanks to its insecurities and the collective faith in protective bubbles. Osip B, on the other hand is looking for a deeper integration of his fragmented self.
In the background, there is the larger than life-shadow of narcissism, the insecure authoritarian leader and the society, ready to destroy all that it needs to destroy to feel safe, even if that feeling of safety might be momentary. By drawing parallels from the mid 20th-century Russia, Surendran is able to dramatically show up the fault lines of contemporary Indian politics and how a stray incident, seemingly one of the minor fault lines, involving a Right wing Uber driver and Elizabeth, slowly spread and crack the whole edifice of the fictional reality of the protagonists, Osip and Elizabeth. The political in this sense turns personal.
Seemingly scattered characters from different walks of life and age group are interconnected strongly. There is a program at work in the novel. The interconnections of characters and themes mesh and grind toward a conclusion that seems as much as natural as it is inevitable.
But through it all Osip’s alienation develops into a full fledged flip: “‘I suffer from an inability to see things for what they are,’ Osip had once said to Elizabeth. He had come over to her quarters. They had ended up in bed, and afterwards, lay without touching each other, a little estranged, as if all of it had happened to another couple who lived inside a mirror in the far side of a room.’
Eric Fromm, a German-born American psychoanalyst and social philosopher popularized that term for us. According to Fromm, alienation is very widespread, even endemic. Man is said to be alienated from others, from nature, from society and culture, and, perhaps most significantly, from himself. It is possible that social media on which we find ourselves round the clock, instead of helping us integrate and feel belong, is actually isolationist, as the disappointment at the lack of ‘likes’ and the prolific nature of vituperative comments show. The bubble that Mr Menon and his ward, Osip B, develop around themselves, we are shown, is a kind of mental disorder between them. But outside, in the wide world, various versions of that disorder governs our lives, Surendran shows.
One of the characters, Alok Jain, a media baron for whom Osip B ends up working, reminds us of the stories we might have casually heard about the power and authority that money could have in contemporary India. Osip B’s insight that Stalinism is at work even in the fictional reality of his newsroom, that Mr Jain is capable of extreme and arbitrary cruelty (the baron stares a journalist with a heart complaint to death) and can ‘create’ truth or history is a devastating comment on the helplessness of the individual to give shape to his own life.
The novel unveils itself through conversations between characters, and these conversations have the concentrated depth of philosophy and seductive touch of poetry. The creative and dynamic use of the dialogue keeps the plot moving and at the same time makes the characters colorful: ‘Maybe you are not fit for the world, which you may think in your vanity as yours, Mr (Arjun) Bedi. The new world does not want to read you. We will make sure of that,’ Dev said. Dev and his partner, Diya, are at the forefront of people who are fighting this war against the sexiest writings and the being of Arjun Bedi. Both Dev and Diya are cameo characters. But in a few bits of conversations, they assume mythical proportions and offer a commentary both for and against the idea of media trial, where the law has little impact.
Elizabeth, a free and complex person representing the new individualistic woman, indulges in her attraction and love for her younger lover, Osip and her much older lover, Kris. That her lovers are at two ends of the spectrum materially, age wise, and geographically ( Kris is in Oxford) and the fact that her relationships are conditional on her freedom, in the end, do not contribute to her condemnation as one might expect initially. Elizabeth comes off as a brave and honest person. Her words, ‘…it takes everything to have a bit of freedom,’ define her cold attractiveness and a rare honesty of purpose.
The plot is gripping, revelatory, and alternatively funny and sad. This is not a novel that gives us answers, but one that raises painful questions that we have allowed to be subsumed under the first level of our awareness, so that we could comfortably continue our sleepwalk like existence. In the final count, One Love is a compassionate yet confrontationist drama. It helps us to hold ourselves accountable.
One Love, and the Many Lives of Osip B : A Novel by C. P. Surendran, Niyogi Books, New Delhi, 2021 pp.372 Paper Rs. 695
Available on Amazon India : https://www.amazon.in/One-Love-Many-Lives-OSIP/dp/9391125123/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1626411935&sr=1-1
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