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Review: Ib’s Endless Search for Satisfaction by Roshan Ali
There is satire, humour noir, and word play in this debut novel
In an unnamed city, a boy grows up, schleps through vacuity, malaise and abject melancholia towards being a grown-up.
With a muse like Saul Bellow, Roshan Ali is in good company. Self-professedly influenced by The Adventures of Augie March by the Nobel and Pulitzer winning Canadian-American writer, Ali’s debut novel, which he grappled with over a number of years, shows a certain promise. That Ib’s Endless Search for Satisfaction made it to the JCB prize shortlist late last year is testimony to that.
Ali’s Ib is Everyman; he is that part of our collective psyches on a quest, looking for a raison d’être. His is a prosaic personality, but Ali infuses his life trajectory with picaresque elements. The narrative opens with Ib’s soliloquy, delivered in a single breath, about the emptiness within him and the city, about death -- because “death is certain”, and how his history, the story of his “slimy unmiraculous” birth is as insignificant as the rest of his life -- at least the part that we are going to be privy to in the course of the narrative. The entire story is through his sorry vision of the world.
Ib is as fluid and amorphous as his grimy grey city. As a child, he has imaginary friends who live in the narrow confines of his physical space, in a house that he shares with his schizophrenic father Kamran and his mother Rukmini, who is “nice -- a deceptively small word that is exactly as simple as it sounds -- and never yelled at any servant, and even refused to call them that.” There is school and adolescence, and the domineering spectre of Ajjus, his grandfather, who is only monetarily benevolent; he is the provider for Ib’s family.
Ib is clearly Ibn Batutta, the 14th century itinerant Moroccan scholar, who roamed the world. There is a time when he visits his father in the hospital and his Appoos calls him that. One may also conjecture that Ib is a dyslexic rendition of id - that component of man’s personality in Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of personality, which is made of unconscious psychic energy that works to satisfy basic urges, needs and desires.
Ib plods through life, insignificantly traversing a monochrome urban landscape littered with the customary potholes that life throws up, and peopled with a spectrum of characters, There is the faux sadhu type, mouthing endless platitudes and vociferously peddling his brand of bizarreness. “There was something in him, a strange mixture of wisdom and confusion, an accuracy of experience, yet no loyalty to the truth.” With him, Ib undertakes a half-crazed journey to a cave in the mountains that is surreal and at once redolent with the sights and sounds of real time small town India. Father George at the church where Ib momentarily takes up a job in the church library “was a creature from the past, a harmless monster from a foggy era of superstition and magic, blinded by the clarity of modernity, the sharp edges of technology and science.” Another job-giver, Bagram the builder’s offerings are of the worldly kind, and the Principal of the school where Ib seeks employment is the type of vainglorious masculinity one meets a plenty in real life. Elsewhere, an all-too brief erotically-charged encounter in rolling mist leaves an impression on the protagonist.
Ib’s fight with his inner demons, his vapid-turned-depressive existence and the ensuing melancholia, his muddling meandering into a black hole-like-nothingness forms most of the fabric of the narrative. Does his predicament evoke empathy? Perhaps only a modicum of sympathy, as the bildungsroman makes for a patchy psychological and moral graph of the ambling protagonist.
The true hero of Ali’s tale is undoubtedly the prose. Almost every sentence flashes with delight. There is satire, humour noir and word play. There is no extravagance, nor is it spartan. In places, it is poetry reformatted, and one wants to savour some of that. “Father, father deluded, was mad as a flag in a storm, was rocking crazy and fun in his own crazy way. He went nuts shortly after my birth and nobody seemed to know why…. Thus I had no father, or no fatherly father, thus no father, and fatherless I found my own patrons.” It is the everyday mundane recounted with a delicious twist. And so, even the meaningless assumes a meaning.
The book is an anthology of miniaturised essays, little snippets on childhood, school, growing up, religion, politics, mental health, relationships, love, education, as seen through Ib’s eyes.
The “perhaps, perhaps, perhaps” title of part one refers to the song, made famous by Doris Day, from the Spanish original, and covered by the band Cake. In all likelihood, it could be a nudge about how there are no easy answers to questions in life.
Ib’s search for satisfaction in life could well seem to be in partial congruence with his creator Ali’s finding his feet as a writer, but while one teeters on the brink of a precipice, the other pronounces his arrival on the scene as a man of words.
