Maximum Drama

Lindsay Pereira's The Memoirs of Valmiki Rao is a modern retelling of the Ramayana set in Mumbai in the 1990s

- Palash Krishna Mehrotra

THE MEMOIRS OF VALMIKI RAO By Lindsay Pereira PENGUIN VINTAGE

This is the story of Ganga Niwas and Sri Niwas, two neighbouring chawls in Parel, Mumbai. Valmiki Rao, a retired postman and resident of Ganga Niwas, writes down his memories of the year the Babri Masjid fell in Ayodhya, and the riots that engulfed Mumbai in its aftermath. The running theme: “What did people in his chawl have to do with a mosque that was being attacked in a city none of them had ever seen?”

The novel has multiple strands. It chronicles the rise of the Shiv Sena, and the opportunistic alliances it struck with the Bajrang Dal and the VHP. In the middle of the 1980s, festivals like Gokulashtami “started to get bigger.... That is when politicians and Shiv Sena leaders began transforming them with money”. In 1984, the Bajrang Dal appears on the scene. By 1992, new slogans like ‘Jai Shri Ram’ and ‘Chalo Ayodhya’ enter the chawls’ vocabulary: “They wanted a temple for their God even though none of them bothered visiting the same God in Parel.” This part is about the nationalisation of Lord Ram, one amongst many gods in the Hindu pantheon. The book works well as a complex potted history of the rise of the Hindu Right in Mumbai. We are told how older Sena shakhas have “embrasures—little openings through which cannons can be fired”, while the new ones sport “bright orange walls set against brass-coloured doors and blue-tinted windows”.

The second strand is a tragic love story, which involves characters from both chawls: