Book Review: A Redemptive Tale Of Losing And Finding

With his debut novel ‘The Other Side of the Rainbow’ published recently, Niranjan Nayak, an English professor at Puri’s SCS College, embarks on a transformative journey — from the routine life of an academic to the exciting life of a writer.

The novel is about a friend’s loving recall of a friendship formed at the college of their dreams a long time ago, a friendship that was cut short by a cruel stroke of fate. The novel transports the reader back to that past in an effort to comprehend what appeared incomprehensible to the actors themselves.

A steady and unrelenting focus on the thought processes, delineated through two ‘I’ narrations, Arun’s and Rajiv’s that alternate with each other, lifts the novel from the plane of a light-hearted campus novel to a serious engagement with the labyrinthine alleyways of the mind. The verse with which the prologue opens sets the stage for the excavation of the past. Not an easy task given the failure, as the verse tells us, to see the ‘invisible me’, to hear the ‘tumult in a silent zone.’ The second metaphor is close to George Eliot’s ‘roar which lies on the other side of silence’, suggesting the rationale for the novel’s title, ‘The other side of the rainbow’.

To say what cannot be said with the words that the polite society has handed to us and to peek into the abyss is the forte of three categories of truth tellers — the fictionist, the philosopher and the psychologist. But to do these two seemingly impossible tasks of speaking and looking against the grain while not abandoning the grain itself, is the province and forte of the fictionist alone. It involves the writer in fracturing syntax, in forcing words beyond and against their conventional meanings. Nayak doesn’t fracture syntax, but he does the latter in ample measure through his resort to paradox, oxymoron and conundrum. For Arun, beginning and end merge. For Rajiv, destination is not destiny.

‘Life’, said Bertrand Russell, ‘is an uneasy awakening between two sleeps.’ Arun and Rajiv, the two protagonists of Nayak’s tale and those of us who are among their auditors, would tend to agree. They themselves speak in paradoxes and conundrums. Arun and Rajiv are ordinary students who become friends during their four-year residence at Ravenshaw College. One of them – Arun, the son of a ‘pakodawala’ — comes of a dirt-poor family and the other – Rajiv – just a notch above, namely a lower middle class family.

Though they share a bond, they seem headed in different, almost opposite, directions. This is thanks as much to their differing social backgrounds as to their different psychological orientations. Arun wants to flee his fatherless and shelter home-ridden past, good grades in examination his only vehicle. Rajiv wants to flee a father-dominated oppressive present, with alcohol as his prop. Arun is mother-fixated and Rajiv is caught in a bitter oedipal struggle. The fact of Arun being intellectually gifted and Rajiv being lackadaisical goes into the mix as well, making them the perfect unlike poles that attract rather than repel.

The excruciating tale that the novel tells takes shape from the sweetness of their intertwined lives and the bitterness of their interrupted friendship, with two potentially romantic entanglements — Arun’s with Ruby and Rajiv’s with Saswati, threatening to derail it.

Arun’s unrequited feelings for Ruby, a girl his social superior, complicates their friendship, bringing into it a deficit of trust and openness. Rajiv’s words capture the fraught relations quite well: ‘We were three hands of a queer structure that looked like a triangle that didn’t have any corner or meeting point’ (p. 173). Rajiv too cannot bring himself to love Saswati. It takes its toll on both, but more cruelly on Arun. It is painful to read the climax revealingly given the name: ‘A Tree Sheds Its Leaf.’

Does the setting of Ravenshaw College play a part in this sad human drama? Or is it only a mute backcloth? Nayak is clearly not writing a novel to document Ravewnshaw College. But his novel darkly hints at how the lives of its young population are warped by academic competitiveness and snobbery related to status. Arun’s breakdown is ultimately caused by his dark and brooding disposition. But it is exacerbated by family expectations and an uncaring environment, making for a potentially tragic tale.

Rajiv survives to not only tell the story of wasted opportunities, broken dreams and shattered hopes but also to give his life some closure by revisiting Arun’s village after thirty years. His chance meeting with Saswati also helps him to heal. Thus a melancholic and disturbing tale is turned into a redemptive one of losing and finding. The novel is a gripping read.

Niranjan Nayak. The Other Side of the Rainbow. Notion Press, 2024. Pp. 247.

(Himansu S. Mohapatra is an academic and translator)