Along with Patna Roughcut, The Last Jet-Engine Laugh by Ruchir Joshi is one of the best books you’ve never heard of. It’s mildly futurist, set in the year 2010. In this novel’s world, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are allied in war against India. (The book was written just before 9/11 rejiggered the realpolitik landscape.) India’s best jet fighter pilot is a female, because short women better withstand high G-forces. And Netaji is alive.

The book’s muscular idea of Indian tech dominance reminds me of Serenity, which showed high-tech hovercraft parts stamped in Punjabi. It’s an uncompromising ode to Calcutta, Bengali slang and Indian nationalism, rarely pausing to define words and printed sans glossary. Para the pilot takes on a mysterious online opponent in a stealth chopper combat sim around Marine Drive which requires intimate knowledge of downtown Bombay. Another scene set in Calcutta benefits from gyaan about the city’s geography.

Unfortunately, like most futurism, the book is more about ideas than language. Joshi is more a scenario creative than a textual stylist, and the book hangs together loosely. This startlingly inventive novel is also saddled with an opaque title and an unfortunate cover. The author was wry about the result:

The Last Jet-Engine Laugh was then published by HarperCollins and, despite startlingly favourable reviews, it met a glass wall at the cash-tills in India. [Link]

Joshi reimagines reality in a very mutinous fashion:

… the delicious play with dialects and oddities of pronunciation… [and] revisionist account of things or stories of Concepts we almost grew up with — Netaji, Gandhi, Emergency, Bhopal, Ayodhya, Mrs. [Gandhi]… 1971, Indo-Pak-China wars… [Link]

Hurree Babu writes:

… read the book after a long, bland diet of Carefully Crafted Luminous Works by Indian writers and dove into its pages with great pleasure… Para [the pilot]… comes close to being one of my all-time favourite characters. [Link]

Ruchir Joshi understood another aspect of writing about sex: it’s not about the body, but the mind… Suman and Mahadev’s story unspools through the lovemaking, the track running in parallel in Paresh’s head as he sees images of his mother leaping for the last time back across the narrow galli that separates her roof from Mahadev’s: “… She felt, for a moment, like a kite that had been cut loose.” [Link]

The Telegraph reviewer was hoping for fatwa fireworks and was sorely disappointed:

Some years ago the novelist Ruchir Joshi began his writing career with a short story called “My Father’s Tongue.” One of the central ideas in this story is the schoolboy protagonist’s rebellious distaste for the piously nationalistic image of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose with which — like many “good” boys growing up in Bengal — he is force-fed all through his schooldays…

In Joshi’s novel… this same imaginative iconoclasm… expands… into a considerably more theatrically absurd manner of disposing of Netaji… Joshi was now burying an ice-pick into Bengal’s holiest cow… The book came attached with a mile-long fuse and the lack of combustion around bookshops does not suggest to me that Hindus in Bengal or anywhere else are unprejudiced as a people. It only suggests… that few Indians read books…

I must confess to being disappointed by the lack of fireworks. I was hoping that my favourite hypothesis about Hindus — … no less intolerant and no less violent than Muslims and Christians, they’ve just had fewer opportunities because they’ve always been at the receiving end — would be proved… [Link]

Despite the shambling, Memento-like intercutting, the author’s made me an admirer. I’m very much looking forward to the next book.