I am trying to remember reading something like this, and I can’t. As an open letter to an unknown person, this fictional memoir renders a pre ‘New’ India. One in which Arun, the narrator, comes from a poor, low-caste family but manages to improve his lot by going to ITT: the India Institute of Technology. Where he meets two boys aspiring to grow up and become the new thinkers embedded in a new wave that will constitute this India. Broken up in four parts, each roughly corresponding to adolescence, adulthood, mid-life, and present circumstances—we see how the method in constructing the modern man has left Arun a kind of non-protagonist protagonist. Trauma and obligations, the lack of a galvanizing, positive force in his life has left him listless and disaffected. His life is a sail boat riding privilege, and he knows this, as he pens an incredibly apt changes in India, even while feeling removed from them himself.

But who is he writing to? Why is it rooted in these two boyhood friends? How does their trajectory compare, as a microcosm of the new India, to himself? These mysteries, along with just superb prose work—as well as an MFA approach where the feeling Arun lacks is embedded in the structure and granularity of what is occurring—propel the novel consistently. Even when it is gruelling, it took me a while to figure out that this feeling is what Arun is unable to articulate. He does so through the book only. His character; his memory of himself is an indictment of the modern man in a way I have not seen before. There is no rags to riches or intelligence overcoming things, or emotional pathos. The breakthrough IS the novel. Everything he loathed about himself is there.

It is nothing more than a gesture at attempting to show what most life paths are like for the average man, even with privilege. And why and how it has led to a great many of them unable to find a voice and a purpose that isn’t a lie that fits society. Which is then counterpointed to the other two boys, and the mysterious figure, to whom he writes all of this out for. It is not romantic. It’s not sexy. It is truly an indictment and therefor perhaps one of the only non aggrandizing self reflections of a person. One that, as I say, wouldn’t be a protagonist in any other book, really. But is also a perfect reflection of malaise and willful distortion expected of people to make a good living. Or any living.

It is methodically paced, meta in a literature MFA kind of way for the voice, concerned with capturing the character paralleling the growth of a nation, as well as place. Not so much time, though. Which is quite fluid. Positioning everything as memory. Moving from sweeping to extremely granular as buttressing for this fictional, mystery writer, who watched his classmates cash-in on the Wests desire to fetishize India intellectuals, quite aptly, as the modern white man possesses the same disaffected malaise captured here with Arun.

It’s a challenging read, but more than a worthy one.