Book: The Bellboy

Author: Anees Salim

Publisher: Hamish Hamilton

Price: ₹599

Islands often make for fertile narrative terrains in fiction. Anees Salim, however, breaks with the usual practice of ensconcing a plot firmly within an island. Instead, his narrative takes shape as its protagonist moves between the island and the mainland. Yet Manto, the island hometown of the teenaged protagonist, Latif, undergirds the novel, appearing to be, at first glance, a foil for the pervading sense of doom emanating from the hotel where Latif works. But the island, which is presumably fashioned after Munroe island in Kerala, is in danger of being submerged in some years — an imagined end the author plays with, showing off his wry humour and narrative feints.

Latif is a dreamy boy with an appetite for life who starts working at a hotel in town which is a boat-ride away from his island. Much of Salim’s novel follows his travel every alternate day to and from the island, and the fantasy worlds Latif is immersed in, at home, at the salon where he receives his special haircut, and in his time at the Paradise Lodge. A desolate air is spun over the world the characters inhabit. Guests often come to Paradise Lodge to die. While Latif’s ruminations about his future and his gusto for make-believe stories initially offer a sort of texture in the form of resilience against the forlorn images of people travelling to die away from home, eventually rivulets of grey run across the narrative in all directions.

The novel is so laden with the themes of decay and doom that it would be impossible for readers not to wonder about their import. A sinking island, Latif’s father being dragged to his death by the ecologist he was trying to save from drowning, a hotel for guests who check in to end their lives all appear to be allegories for an end of some sort. But like many innuendos tucked here and there — such as an incriminating piece of newspaper with the headline ‘Saffron Sweeps Nation’ — they are so many that they collide but, on the other hand, are also so finely entwined that all that is visible from afar is an impressionist’s en plein air of an ending. Regardless of the overarching melancholy of the narrative, Salim works with language almost playfully, producing filigrees of decay and gloom with his writing. Without this agility the novel would have been an excruciating read.