City of Incident. A Novel in Twelve Parts by Annie Zaidi. Aleph Book Company 5th January 2022. 144 pages.
Ashoak Upadhyay
I
n Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin at the very outset, in the second paragraph of Chapter 1 ‘A Berlin Diary (Autumn 1930)’ the narrator asserts: “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording and thinking.” The narrator, perhaps Isherwood himself as author, captures fleeting images of the city, of characters like a photographer, in pre-Hitler Berlin heading towards war and cataclysm.
That phrase “I am a camera” comes to mind barely a few pages into Annie Zaidi’s “City of Incident” an episodic novel of six women and six men whose paths, at some moments, intersect; the eye-as-camera captures these moments but unlike in Isherwood’s Berlin stories, here the observable eye is not the narrator-author alone; more often than not, the author leaves the visual recording to various protagonists who observe and record the encountered other. The author ‘directs’ this visualization quite even-handedly bowing to Flaubert’s advice that the author like God must be everywhere but not visible. Another difference: Isherwood’s narrator wishes to convey the idea of neutrality as a visual recorder though the assertion of being “passive…” But immediately adds “recording aand thinking.” Perhaps the thought is not articulated but we could hazard the guess of an interpretive, maybe an emotive reflection on the recorded. In Zaidi that ambivalence, itself a delicious ingredient of Isherwood’s classic story of a city on the brink of a holocaust, becomes central to Zaidi’s work: the eye-as-camera is not just a metaphor for sight but also of insight. And in this duality is embedded an ambiguity that will become a driving force of her protagonists. The camera seems as much turned on the recorder as on the subject thpugh ever so often the reader is not quite clear of the demarcations between the two. And in that liees the intrinsic worth of this novel, its embedded thrill at the discovery of life’s enmeshed, interwoven subjectivities. Realism, in Zaidi’s hands is refracted, truth is non-absolute, not relative so much as obscured and riven with ambiguities.
Zaidi sets the pace for the novel as visual recording at the outset in a city that is never named; the only hint you get that it is Mumbai is through the use, only once, of a significant location that will also form the site for various encounters between protagonists, Churchgate. Uniquely, she lets her visual recording of the cityscapes speak of its identity: uniquely also because these are barely three locations within which she frames her episodes. And yet they nameless sites bear eloquent testimony to the city’s identity. In in her dexterous telling, topography not a name provides the city with a remarkably distinct identity. And in the same vein, the characters are identified not by names but through the4ir professional identities or at best their gender. Their existential peculiarities mark their singularity.
The first chapter, ‘A Policeman Reflects on Accidents. Careless Women and Infanticide’ visualizes a policeman doing duty on the suburban railway line’s Ladies-only compartment. “Between nine o’clock and midnight , this man rides in the first class twenty-four hour ladies’ coach on the Western line” The man is introduced; so is his rifle that “sits on the cushioned teal blue of th first class sat , as if it has nothing do with him.”The compartment fills up; the recording device is ‘handed over’ to the policeman who watches the compartment fill up; he sees and also thinks and interprets, offering the reader a view of his inner world riding that compartment every night: ladies wearing high heels, shiny slippers that he wants to counsel them are dangerous, balancing on the footboard of the fast moving train, perilous. Accidents happen, he thinks, but “that word—accident- it belongs to the vocabulary of the innocent. For him ,there are only incidents.” But he says nothing. Only thinks. And remembers an old woman sitting on the other side of the metal barrier separating the firsts class where he is from the second.
“She held something in her lap. An odd shape wrapped in black plastic, her fingers laced around it and a corner of her sari drawn over it. Did he imagine the plastic bag moving?”
As their eyes meet, he sees the flicker of an incident; a flicker mind you, that’s all the mind records. She sees him too. And the author’s gaze records for us a physical description that our own gaze will do well to hold onto.
Sight and insight; every episode, and there are twelve interlinked ones, appears at first glance a stand-alone narrative even though the blurb advises us they are interlinked. But the interlinks are subtle and demand of the reader the embrace of that same cinematic gaze that defines the telling of this novel: the reader has to remember that a the plastic bag will reappear as a defining moment in the emotive core of other protagonists inhabiting this city whose wn core is defined by the precincts of the railway line at one end and high rise apartments at the other. In between the skywalk on which the dispossessed make their homes as ladies in their clackety-clack heels pass by. For Zaidi, this contrasting scene of poverty and middling affluence is not the site for social realism, breast-beating about the iniquities that plague the city. They are the locations of illusions, of yearnings, and glimmers of redemption from love denied or a life despised.
On the skywalk walking across to their high rise apartment gated community , a clutch of “kitty” club ladies clackety-clacking home after a night out, witness the “up-down” movements “under a blanket” covering a beggar-man (who makes a living finding plastic bags with the promise of life thrown on the railway tracks) with disgust but also with some vicarious curiosity; the protagonist of “A Woman Encounters Love in Illicit Places, and Watches Over her Lover’s Wife” wonders what they would have done if hey were to confront him even as she records his “matted hair, bony ankles. His vigour”; an interiorized dialogue breaks out like a rash in her head that concludes with the imagined riposte: “What are you looking at? Never done it yourself” (p 63. Italics in original.)
Soon the author takes over recording and we see the woman, a housewife and mother of two kids, who “always displays her rosy gums , does not press her lips together when a camera is pointed at her” step out on her sixteenth floor balcony. A yearning overwhelms her, a photograph captivates her; destiny calls. Zaidi leaves it to the reader at this point to imagine where it might lead
Zaidi’s use of the eye-is-a-camera technique works democratically. As author, she allows the camera to be held by almost all her protagonists as a result of which the reader gets to “see” with a stranger’s eyes. In the story cited above, the kitty ladies who enter their gated community pass the security guard, commonly called “Security” who flashes a smile and stares at them in a way that arouses their ire: “This fellow is a bit over” they think . They cannot define what he is “over” about. But “it is embarrassing. His over-ness.” (p66). The internal dialogues continue as they imagine what they think he would be imagining a group of ladies “…blushed faces, wobbly gaits, cleavages on display , the whiff of liquor on their breath” must have been up to.
“Perhaps he too holds a picture of such women in his mind. Rutting away. Not on the skywalk, of course but still…How can anyone know what transpires between a woman’s legs just by looking at her outdoor self?”” (p 67)
The next story focuses on the security guard and we see the world through his gaze, his sense of self fashioning his insights about the dangers and non-dangers faced by men like him; his zoom-gaze up at the high rise, the sixteenth floor where the woman with the gummy smile lives, presages the enactment of a tragic destiny but it also does so by tying together his insight into life-threats– “Balcony so high railings so low . This urban habit of hovering so far above the earth…The earth was given to us as sanctuary.” (p76) Zaidi leaves it to the reader to weigh the meanings encoded in the gaze, of the ways of seeing.
What illumines the interpretive articulations of the eye-as-a-camera in “City of Incident” is the dialogic character of the gaze and its irresolution both of which give the stories their sense of refracted reality. Unlike documentary type fiction, Zaidi stays away from the temptations of authorial normative articulations. The city, and in this case, one with a railway station named Churchgate, is no paradise. Its easy tolerance and indifference that allowed its inhabitants the space to do their own thing has long gone and now the temptations seducing literary fiction to mirror the bigoted and divisive realities, beckon. Zaidi stays away and resists by not naming the city of incident, by refusing to contextualize her story/stories with the frames of a communalized subjectivity.
Even so, Zaidi enriches the storytelling by using the Bakhtinian sense of the dialogue, interiorised and between protagonists, articulated or imagined. That dialogic stream enriches the gaze and offers up multiple ways of seeing that is evident for instance in the episode “A Man with a Dead Wife Comes Upon a Balloon Seller and a Baby.” The scene takes place outside the gates of the high rise where a resident who has just suffered a tragedy encounters a balloon seller “pushing a pram , a bunch of red balloons bobbing above his left shoulder.” The dialogue begins almost immediately; it defines the contours of the episode, the emotive core of both the participants and the security guard who is carefully watching out for dangers. The balloon man wants to sell a balloon; the resident, he is from the tenth floor nurturing his own terrors, wonders whose child it is. “Drugged kids. Beggar mafia” The inner conversation continues with the resident wondering whose child it is, about its mother,, sure the balloon seller will use the usual trick of asking for money to feed the child. The internal dialogue veers onto strange pathways; is the child borrowed for the purpose? Did he get some kind to blow up the items even though the kohl-eyed fellow looks healthy enough to do it himself? “You can’t just look at a man’s and decide. These are complicated balloons”
And then “The man is asking you for flour now. He does not want a coin, he says. He wants to go home and cook.” (p107) Your nerves tingle with questions. “When and how did this man learn to cook? Who taught him? You are still struggling with the kneading of the dough.” Self-pity overwhelms him as does a terror, not of being alone but of being iunloved.
“A lot of people loving you a little does not fill the shrinking pool of calm in your chest. Little dribbles of how-are-yous, feet shuffling around you, artfully tipping their always-here-for-yous. ” (p 108)
And it goes on, this dialogue with the self while the “balloon man is still looking at you, smoky eyes glistening with hope. A sort of dread too. What dreadful thing does he see in your face?” “Where is you woman?” you want to ask and that unstated query lets loose another round of dialogic ruminations on the fickleness of women.
The richness of the novel’s dialogic imagination rests in large part on its outcomes; nothing is resolved; the dialogues do not form into neat conclusions like syllogisms but remain irresolute and ambiguous. The resident confronting the balloon seller cannot decide the man’s intentions from his face. Similarly, in an earlier episode,, the security guard ruminates that faces do not portray a human being, the dangers he poses or the qualities of a woman. The railway tracks are lifelines but they also foretell death. A young housewife, seemingly happily married with two kids, has a fascination with the train that is almost liminal. Four hundred steps to the station from her high rise; as she walks back counting her steps “her head is filled with a black square. “ A clean black square of night had locked eyes with her across the railway tracks.” {p 48) White light bounces off he metal pole that divides the black square. And as the train she is staring at on the opposite tracks pulls away “it seemed to her as if the black square of night was twisting round to look at her, as if a crooked finger had beckoned.” An epiphany but it should not lull us into complacency; a darker destiny awaits her.
Reading Zaidi, gives one a sense that through the stories of those twelve , the city emerges as the chief protagonist. But not quite in the way one would expect for not only is it not named but its streets and neighbourhoods are conspicuous by their absence. The eyes of the cameras are transfixed by life and death between the railway tracks, the high rise apartment blocks just four hundred feet away as the young housewife counts them and the trains on which commuters jostle, shuffle, scuffle and let live by observing. It is a tribute to the suburban railway life that violence is so rare. But death isn’t. In Zaidi’s novel however, cruel and macabre as incidents of life cut short are, life asserts itself. This sounds a worn out cliché; it could and would be in the hands of a formulaic fiction craftsman but in Zaidi’s novel it isn’t. The assertion of happiness, contentment, a good life, a jolly ending, call it what you will, is as the last episode evidences, a fraught one.
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Annie Zaidi is the author of Gulab, Love Stories # 1–14, and Known Turf: Bantering with Bandits and Other True Tales which was shortlisted for the Crossword Book Prize (non-fiction). She is the editor of Unbound: 2,000 Years of Indian Women’s Writing. She won The Hindu Playwright Award in 2018 for her play Untitled 1 and the Nine Dots prize in 2019 for her essay ‘Bread, Cement, Cactus’. Her novel Prelude to a Riot won the TATA Literature Live! Book of the Year Award—Fiction in 2020
Annie Zaidi in The Beacon
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