In Raj Kamal Jha's first novel The Blue Bedspread, readers stood on a Calcutta balcony and watched the snow fall; in his second book If You Are Afraid of Heights, we climbed onto the back of a crow to float up towards the top of an impossibly tall building; in Fireproof, his third and most unsettling novel, we stand on a street and thud thud thud, a strange rain of bodies begins to fall around us.
Jha's dreamlike, elliptical prose speaks directly to his readers. It compels us to go beyond his fantastic images and see what is only too real – to see not just the edifice rising endlessly towards the sky, but also the narrow service lane choked with garbage wrapped furtively in plastic bags, a dreary place where hardly anyone ever goes, and at the end of which we will discover the body of a child who has been raped, murdered, and thrown to the bottom of a canal.
Not a pretty sight, and neither are the methods of Jha's prose pretty – one reason why his writing tends to attract extreme reactions. He won't just tell you that the baby has no arms or legs; he'll add, "None of the four, not one, neither left nor right." He'll play with words, use capital letters in the middle of sentences to drive a point home, draw us into the most ugly dreams. "An arm shoots up from within the toilet bowl, grabs me, pulls me down." No, not pretty.
But how powerfully his novels work to force the reader's attention on to things easily ignored or forgotten – not only the violence in the world outside, but also the brutality within the human heart. Welcome to the Ahmedabad of Jha's Fireproof, a book whose front cover has on it neither the title nor the author's name, only the words HELP ME in reverse, in block capitals drawn darkly on the grainy blue of the book jacket, with parts of the word already fading out of existence and the E dripping inkily, desperately, down the page. Even before they appear in front of the central protagonist, the words challenge the reader with their sharp immediacy. Did people call out? Did we hear? Would we have…? – Already the uncomfortable questions are forming in our minds.