Freefalling In Delhi: Review of Karan Mahajan's 'The Complex'

In Karan Mahajan’s new novel, The Complex, a Delhi family, shadowed by the promise of its past, comes undone. Religious majoritarianism and fascism smear the fabric of its domestic saga. Daggers get drawn swiftly as ego, lust and power collide on the stage of patriarchal horrors. The central Chopra clan is one of those big, boisterous families clogging Indian fiction for decades. They storm in, fractured, flailing but always arrogant. The Chopra compound at North Delhi’s A-19 Modern Colony is a hotbed of self-destructive passion. None of the characters in this Punjabi ensemble are morally pristine or easily redeemable. Some stray, others readily violate and threaten. The leeway varies for each to crawl back to their former selves. The Complex is a magnificently daring novel, snaking into the rotten heart of a nation and a family. It took me in with every cascading horror, even as I dreaded what might transpire next.

Early in the narrative, the US-based Gita Chopra is sexually assaulted at a family wedding in India by her uncle-in-law, Laxman. He downplays his crime, urging her to stay put for the sake of his wife and children. The only person a tremulous Gita confides in, a Chopra aunt, gaslights her, abetting Laxman. Families fortify their borders against any assumed outsider, be it a daughter-in-law threatening the balance. Mahajan nails these beats, especially Gita’s hovering guilt that she herself may have been culpable and invited the assault. She doubts herself before being wholly discredited and shut down.

The aftereffects ripple over the entire narrative breadth. This episode unleashes a domino effect. The Complex is rife in hushed crimes. Their repression triggers a chain of complicity. Frequently, it wades into violence, with women routinely flung in its crosshairs. “To live in the complex was to be insecure,” the narrator underlines. “It was to know that real estate was fate; it was one’s life.” Laxman exemplifies this insecurity curdled into absolute grotesqueness. Each spurning tips him over into more nastiness. But the entire clan gloats in putting each other down. Generations, cutting across kinship ties, inevitably plummet into feuds. The compound can barely hold its residents amidst posturing reassurances of togetherness. A carefully honed front of faux civility ruptures as decades roll and resentments accumulate.

The Chopra complex becomes a battlefield where loyalties are swapped for uneasy negotiations and open secrets. Laxman’s wife, Archana, turns a blind eye to his licentiousness. Lies, manipulation and deception are enmeshed into how characters interact, demand leverage. Mahajan prises through traditional notions of a big squabbling Indian joint family to reveal pure ugliness. Characters primarily operate through spite and ambition. Each one grudges every tiny step of progress the other makes. Scandal and treachery shoot through subplots. There’s even a murder. Envy is constant. Gita feels she’s floundering in the States, while her relatives scorn her privilege. She’s what they aspire for, though she herself feels hollowed-out, rudderless in the West.

Mahajan keeps shifting the perspective among the ensemble, though the trio of Gita, Laxman and his sister-in-law, Karishma, remains central. They are as entwined as the past in what’s yet to come. S.P. Chopra, the lofty statesman who’s said to have played a key role in shaping the Constitution, towers over the book. His legacy chases the family whose failures magnify in bitter contrast. Karishma’s vain husband, Brij, can barely stick through a job. He directs all his dissatisfied fury  on her, pushing her to the abyss.

The Complex also appears to be in dialogue with Kiran Desai’s Booker-shortlisted novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. Exile, displacement, immigration and assimilation are central to both books. The attitude and philosophy differ, though. If Desai stretched a globalising identity hopping across cultures, constantly churning, Mahajan imposes finality upon a journey between India and America. Most of The Complex unravels in the 1980s, whereas The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny skirted the turn of the century, the birth of a new millennium and its seemingly endless possibilities. Mahajan is zooming in on a time before the floodgates to the Western market had opened on Indian shores. India was still a socialist economy. Gita and her husband, Sachin, are caught on the precipice, never escaping the compound vortex until they return to Delhi. “But did one really owe a country?” Sachin wonders. Sachin haggles to assure himself of having put India far behind, but it’s another form of denial. Soon, India will draw him back.

Gaping holes in the couple’s Western assimilation sharpen when juxtaposed against Laxman’s possible business partners in Detroit, Vir Malhotra/Val and his wife, Simranpreet/Cindy. The latter couple is thriving, having “erased their Indianness”. Gita snidely observes how Archana switches to an American accent in addressing Cindy: “these centreless Indians!” What Mahajan shrewdly accomplishes in this single scene is place cheek-by-jowl contesting notions of displaced Indianness. There’s incredible tension, awkwardness of performing for an internalised whiteness. Situated differently as to how each interprets their immigrant identity, there’s a nervous testing of ground. Gita judges Cindy severely, but eventually a friendship strikes. Gita doesn’t prefer the Chopra complex but cannot quite shake off an India return. Cindy has totally cast off any attachment, smug in American luxury.

A novelist with an unsparing social lens, Mahajan maps the Chopra legacy and future on India’s political landscape. The 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom and the 1990 Ram Rath Yatra form crucial latter turns. So does the furore over the Mandal Commission. Mahajan traces a thread as to how hate and prejudice manifest itself anew in each subsequent generation. Masked beliefs of an ancestor like S.P. rear themselves brazenly in his children, grand-children and so on. The Nehruvian dream shatters by the end.

Laxman takes over the pages completely. His recourse to Hindu fanaticism stems from a desperate stab for power. Being the Chopra brother who didn’t make it to America, politics is his big revenge. It’s how he grows to scale high on hierarchy. His viciousness is secondary only to his complete self-aggrandisement. His ego, that seems to be under constant duress, propels him to hunt out women for seducing and gaslighting before cursorily filing them aside. He has no compunctions.

Yet, Mahajan is wary enough not to foist the women in the novel with unrelenting victimhood. From Gita to Karishma, they battle despair but also transgress boldly against structures and expectations. Karishma startles Laxman by commanding as much power in their illicit relationship. It thrills him. Nevertheless, the minute she withholds and pulls away, he batters her. He won’t allow her to have the upper hand. There’s a bid for freedom from unfulfilling marriages, which often pans out disastrously. The novel is strewn with crumbling relationships.

Even as Mahajan shows the deep familial scars, he doesn’t shy from establishing Laxman as a rank monster, preying upon women to feed his failures. “When he finds no place in history, desire steps in,” the narrator emphasises. Raging at rejections and setbacks, he sends the whole family spiralling. After every enterprise falls through, the Hindu Right becomes his receptacle for demonstrating his control. Unafraid of its direness, The Complex can be a tough, unremitting read. Mahajan has no interest in softening his characters. So, their questionable decisions chafe and unsettle. It’s rare to encounter a novel that forces you to sit with blinding discomfort.