It is imperative that a book called Engglishhh must be reviewed according to numerological principles, even though it might subtitle itself 'Fictional Dispatches from a Hyperreal Nation', and even though that might necessitate the creation of a more holistic system of numerology than the one constructed by Roohann Shahha, the adorable, dyslexic poet of the titular dispatch--a metasystem more suited to this cruel and real world of hypersquare editors, armed with spellchecks, who have no inkling of the subtle mysteries that numbers and letters work in conjunction. In fact, the metasystem is based on what Shahha and his expert committee arrived at but is simpler in application: it takes into account page numbers, the number of paras, the number of sentences per para, the number of words in sentences. Since these numbers wield an overarching influence on the numerological values and karmic significance of the individual letters in the text, adjusting them according to some simple rules makes it possible to avoid awkward spellings (such as this reviewer's name) and yet counter the baleful sway of inauspicious English. It's a stealth weapon that will empower Shahha to type, without the words lighting up in red, that in our post-Western, post-textual, recessionary world order, his "Engglishhh maarks t een o Worsteen doomnatnn oof t worllld".
An example of how this metasystem works. The dispatch called 'Engglishhh' runs from page 11 to page 22, twin numbers both. All that was required in writing this review was that the first sentence of the para about that dispatch had a word-count either 11 or 22 times the number of sentences in the para. Rest assured that every para of this review--and this review overall--follow similarly simple yet effective metarules. Now, down to business.
In its spunk, in its spiel, in its mimicry-in-English of street speech, in its cast of characters and in its tragicomic crudities, this is a Mumbai book, and in its tenderest account, called 'Balance Sheet', winding meditatively from page 118 to 132, a young, US-educated Muslim accompanying the body of his father takes a long and metaphorically circular route through the city in an air-conditioned ambulance, from one landmark hospital--via an Ismaili Khoja kabrastan in a precinct the dead man had struggled to escape--to another; from the painful death of his father in one hospital and a burial that his relatives take charge of--the ambulance inching, siren blaring, through possibly the worst gridlock of the century--to the bawl and scent of his washed, newborn son in another.
This is also a Bombay book. The acerbic bookseller of the 'New and Second-hand', worried about geriatric penury, hankers more after the riffling of the currency bundles the shop will bring as real estate than that of books in the hands of lamenting bookshop lovers and the Fading Bombay brigade. Yet Engglishhh, the book, is dedicated to a real bookshop called the New and Secondhand that closed down in 2011.
Bad things happen in inappropriately paginated dispatches like 'Nice Water' and 'About Your Cell Phone'. A domestic help treasures an unopened bottle of sparkling water thrown at her from a train as she eases herself by the tracks. When her employer's toddler spills it, the poor woman can't bear to see it wasted and, cursing the child, licks it off the floor. She loses the water and her job. A wastrel who steals a mobile is hurtled through events that end with a handgun rammed up his you know where.
This reviewer's conceit, like the allegory of anagrammatic Arnold, clown-mascot of 'MmYum's', must eventually run out of juice. So the number games of some dispatches and the self-referential jokes in the 'One-Hit-Wonder Literature Festival: Welcome Kit' must be left for readers to eureka over. But we cannot go without coming--finally, finally, oh finally!--to the Indian porn director's flamboyant speech (pages 23-26) exhorting his leading lady to do her bit against the persistent influence of our white colonisers.
P.S.: Such is the power of the metasystem--which Shahha and his committee are verifying--that the crazy-quilt charm of this review matches that of the book. Its crotchets are the result of not waiting for Shahha's green light.
A shorter, edited version of this appears in print.
