Book: The Stranger In The Lifeboat
Author: Mitch Albom
Publisher: Sphere
Price: Rs 599

God moves in mysterious ways. In “inspirational author” Mitch Albom’s latest book, The Stranger in the Lifeboat, God is pulled out of the water into a lifeboat. To clear all confusion he (the author uses the pronoun in small letters) immediately announces himself as “the Lord” to the shipwreck survivors cramming the lifeboat. But the human mind, alas, is full of doubt.

Even as the Lord’s pronouncement is greeted with a mixture of belief and scepticism, he offers a deal. He says he can save them all, lost in the sea as they are, with hardly any food and water or hope, surrounded by waters thick with sharks, if everyone believes he is who he claims he is. In short, he wants unconditional, unquestioning faith. What follows is even more confusing. Some of the survivors do offer “the Lord” what he wants, but irrespective of their faith, or the lack of it, almost all of them look headed for their watery graves. Yet the book is supposedly a book of faith. The one message that the reader is getting is that she should never lose faith — in love and hope. One survivor is demonstrating that by tirelessly writing a journal addressed to his absent lover, while dodging sharks.

I wish it were that easy. This book is, of course, an attempt at a parable — Albom’s other books, most of them New York Times bestsellers, often feature the word ‘Heaven’ in their titles — and everything is a metaphor. But at a time when the world and our lives have been devastated by a deadly virus, such easy prescriptions hurt. More than the faith that is being advertised here, one wonders about the figure who calls himself God. Despite the book, we wonder what does he do for humans, who seem to perish in a completely random manner, in the book and outside it? The disturbing thought that God may have abandoned his creation enters the head.

There we slip again. But Albom succeeds. This book, too, was a New York Times bestseller. Faith can be very good business. The darker the times, the more it sells. In whatever package.

Albom’s fiction — or should we call it “content”? — is one. As if to deflect attention from the benefits of capitalism, he inserts an anti-capitalistic plot into the heart of his book. The ship that was destroyed carried the rich and famous, including a former American president and owners of leading global tech companies. A radical person had decided to blow the ship up, to draw attention to the vileness of capitalism, consumerism and the lives of privileged “pigs”. Unfortunately, some of the capitalists turn out to be far more convincing and likeable than the ones who embrace faith. To depict goodness, not to mention the divine, is a great challenge. Even in Milton’s hands, Satan ends up being so much more dazzling than God. In Albom’s hands, the divine is just boring.

And he seems to be all right with cultural and racial stereotypes. One of the survivors is called Latha Laghari. She is a Calcuttan, perhaps a Bengali? She was apparently born in the “Basanti slums of Calcutta”. “There was no electricity and no running water. She ate once a day.” Her parents died in a cyclone and she worked in a meat-packing factory. She studied chemistry and went on to own a Fortune 500 company.

It may be useful to remember here that Basanti is in Canning, in Sunderban area, prone to cyclones. The power of associations is immense, but may not lead to truth. Would there be meat-packing factories in Calcutta six or seven decades ago where little orphan girls worked? If there were, it would be a very interesting area of research. Latha Laghari? Really? Or does he mean Lata Lahiri? But these nuances would only matter locally, not globally. No electricity, no water, one meal a day? Oh Calcutta! Your present may not be perfect, but how long will you persist as the world capital of poverty? Is Albom even aware that someone in Calcutta may read this and feel offended?

Or should we just say Slumdog Millionaire and Salaam Bombay and join our hands in a Namaste?