Like most words that mean little but pretend to say a lot, secular was one that I did not encounter by accident. Its meaning, and the shadows of its connotations, had to be taught, along with other words that signified adult boredom to my bored-of-childhood eyes – success, democracy, corruption, among others. And like many of these words that lived on the margins of my consciousness before they actually came to reside there, wafting in the breeze of overheard conversations – a father's debate with a colleague, a mother's complaint to a friend, and often in the accent of a television newsreader – secular was a word I continued to mishear all my childhood. How could I have thought of this word as just another variety of the air cooler, a brand called Say Cooler? But that is another story.
Like most 15-year-olds whose only expectation from a word such as this was the reciprocity of a few marks as acknowledgement for recognition on a question paper, I too surrendered to its mild ennui. I memorised its genesis and the incantatory phrase with which it had been welcomed into the Indian Constitution – which was then, for me, an imagined obese book with solutions for all the world's problems, including my mother's constipation (because it sounded very close to 'constitution'). Almost two decades have passed since I first wrote the word in a notebook – and how worldly-wise it seems to have become since then!
This summer I read two Indian English novels within weeks of each other, both of which deal with the secular in complicated and far-reaching ways. Both are debut novels by, to use an inefficient colloquial, Bombay writers: Amit Varma's My Friend Sancho and Chandrahas Choudhury's Arzee the Dwarf. First, the storylines. In Varma's novel, a young man named Abir Ganguly works at a Bombay tabloid called the Afternoon Mail. One night, called by the police to cover an arrest, he hears the sound of bullets and then the scream of a girl. He is asked by his editor to turn this report into a human-interest story, and so he meets Muneeza, the young daughter of the victim, a Muslim who is falsely implicated by the police. The novel, in Abir's first-person narration, becomes a record of the developing love story between the journalist and the victim's daughter. Choudhury's novel tells the story of Arzee, a dwarf who is lovable and irritating in turns. This is also a love story, one about the "midget man" and a Christian hairdresser called Monique, narrated in an energetic and quivering third person.
Reading these two novels in succession, and being aware of a few personal details about the writers, it was difficult not to play a bit of spot-the-similarities game. To begin with, both the writers used to blog at www.middlestage.blogspot.com, a fine blog about literature and ideas, which Choudhury now runs alone. (Varma is one of India's most famous and popular bloggers and, like Abir, the journalist in his novel, I have suffered from withdrawal symptoms when his www.indiauncut.com has not been updated regularly.) Both novels are set in Bombay; and while Bombay might not be Bloomsbury, it is fascinating to see how the Maximum City continues to inspire diverse narratives of belonging and otherness. "The rhythm of Bombay is relentless," writes Abir in Sancho. "[I]n one ear I hear the excited heartbeat of Mohammad Iqbal … in the other the sound of Vallabh Thombre."