Three quarters of a century have passed since India’s independence. Now, midnight’s great-grandchildren face a country fractured mentally as much as socially: half democracy, half westernised, half madhouse, half global superpower, where gurus, imams and gyrating TikTok stars vie for the hearts, souls and wallets of hundreds of millions. “You know, the problem with this country is that we believe money will solve everything. It doesn’t,” says a Muslim character in Santanu Bhattacharya’s debut novel, his family victims of religious riots. It may seem trite, but this was indeed the hope that India lived on until the mid-2010s. Yet a rising tide means floating boats no longer. The common people have become cross-tickers at elections, another character says. They are “little specks of dust … They will never be anything more, and there is nothing lesser left for them to be.”
Shubhankar “Shabby” Trivedi is the witness rather than hero of One Small Voice. As a child at a wedding, he watches a mob immolate a young Muslim tailor – “a column of fire with the face of a man on it, flames licking the body” – and is profoundly affected. The novel follows his attempts to outrun the mental and societal forces haunting him, as he moves from the socially conservative northern city of Lucknow to find life and freedom in the cosmopolitan, hard-drinking, dope-smoking, anything-goes fantasyland of mid-2000s Mumbai.
