Paul Zacharia’s “A Secret History of Compassion” bravely drags the two disparate worlds of fiction and fact to a busy intersection with no traffic lights, then lets the readers enjoy the sheer chaos that ensues.
The book’s lead character, Lord Spider, an extremely famous author of popular fiction, has been tasked by the Communist Party with a seemingly simple task: to write an essay on compassion.
What seems like a relatively easy task for a prolific author turns into a full, dark comedy full of bedlam, forcing Lord Spider to eventually change the rules of the game by inventing an alternate meaning for the phenomenon of compassion itself.
In Zechariah’s quest for his elusive subject matter, readers encounter some of the most bizarre characters, including an ‘n’th reincarnation of Jesus, a Gandhi doppelgänger, a bull named after Tarzan, and an array of other bizarre and intriguing hybrid personalities that cross the line between blur fact and fiction. And by the way, Stalin makes his appearance and so does Satan, with an entirely new act.
In his quest to write the essay, Spider finds partners in crime, in the form of his wife and part-time philosopher Rosi and Jesus Lambodar Pillai, who is essentially a man with many different traits and exotic abilities rolled into one.
In the complexity of both the plot and the characters, the writer does away with the basic limitations of style and takes an irreverent look at philosophies, people, institutions, with potshots on them, as the plot moves in and out of the realms of fact and fiction, with a few breaks.
The irreverence is illustrated in parts such as the one in which Spider, in his early teens, “suffers” from an erection in the church during the service, when he has visions consisting of an angel and aliens.
He had heard that aliens have sticky sex things. As a result, he had a huge erection, just like the priest who sacrificed the sacred host for transformation into the body of Jesus. Spider was shattered. Oh, what a faux pas! What if Jesus found out? As a conscientious sinner, he had included this unfortunate event in his next confession. The priest told him that the erection was not worth writing home about, as it was only an expression of carnal desire for a geological feature. Jesus had better things to do than count idiot erections of idiot guys. But napping during Mass was a deadly thing.”
On a more realistic note, the novel, Zachariah’s first in English, after a series of short stories and essays in Malayalam, also contains an irreverent critique of the left-wing ideology, which struggles to find relevance in contemporary India.
Though his story drifts into absolute fantasy, there is a trace of regional earthiness, almost as if the ace author suffered a slight hangover from all the rich Malayalam prose he’s been dishing out over the decades.
Definitely a work to read to book a passage on a flight of Zacharias fantasy.
Book: A Secret History of Compassion
Author: Paul Zachariah
Publisher: Westland
Price: Rs 699
Pages: 431
