Review: She Will Build Him a City - Raj Kamal Jha

She Will Build Him a City is a sprawling novel which takes in love, bereavement, poverty, wealth and family in the ‘New India’. While the prose is heavily influenced by Magic Realism, there’s something Dickensian in the way that author Raj Kamal Jha charts the life of an orphan, adrift in the city, taken in by a band of outcasts and subject to the vicissitudes of fate. At times the story is a little fractured, with multiple narrative strands and interludes, but there is a satisfying richness to the writing which maintains the reader’s interest.

The stories themselves are simple enough: a baby is abandoned on the steps of a children’s home, wrapped in a red towel; a mother (Woman) struggles to communicate with her damaged daughter; and a young man (Man), alienated by his wealth, trawls through Delhi, searching for interaction with the beggars who line the streets. Within this construct, though, Kamal Jha weaves a rich, intricate web of interlinking narratives and memorable imagery. Woman drifts into stories from her daughter’s childhood, returning to the comforting image of a twelve-foot tall guardian angel who watches over her. The boy, named Orphan by the staff at Little House, escapes after a storm, and is guided to a new life by a talking dog. Man becomes obsessed with Balloon Girl, a homeless child he encounters on the street, who later appears to him in visions. The digressive storylines also include interludes told from the point of view of balloons and giant cockroaches, as well as the talking dog itself.

There are two key elements at play in the novel. The first is the alienating effect of city life, the way individuals can slip through the gaps in society and find themselves adrift. The characters catch glimpses of each other as they progress through the city, but rarely interact. Each has their own personal tragedies and obsessions, but to others they are simply anonymous faces in the crowd, a sense reflected in the author's decision to give his characters generic names. In contrast, Kamal Jha also portrays an alternative, outcast society, made up of people who beg at traffic lights: 'Uncle, who has neither arms nor legs... a boy-girl combo who show up in the morning and leave by sunset. Girl does cartwheels, boy cleans windows'. In one memorable scene, reminiscent of something from Ballard’s later novels, they go to play in The Mall at night, sneaking in past sleeping security guards. While these characters exist in desperate poverty, they also offer the possibility of nurture in a communal environment.

Secondly, there is the importance of fate. Orphan is discovered and cherished by staff at the Little House, and is offered for adoption to the TV celebrity Priscilla Thomas. Mr Sharma, director of the orphanage, even promises to make 'adjustments' to ensure that she isn't kept waiting, but she picks Sunil, a boy with Down's Syndrome and leukaemia, and Orphan is left behind to follow an entirely unpredictable path. Balloon Girl is picked up by a stranger, with no way of knowing whether his intentions are kind or malevolent: again, two very different paths are possible for her.

The city of Delhi itself is bought to life by Kamal Jha, who describes the crowded streets, bright lights and oppressive heat. The author is not afraid to criticise cronyism, and its consequences: power cuts, occasional disasters, the collapse of poorly built walls in high winds, traffic jams. We see the world of VIPs and even VVIPs: 'that's how it's done in this city. Strings are pulled, puppets are moved, there's some shouting, there's some cursing, followed by the silence of resignation'. There is a graphic account of a gang rape, and ongoing protests against power shortages and the government's plans to reserve education places for children from backward castes play out in the background of the novel.

She Will Build Him a City is certainly a bold and complex novel; Raj Kamal Jha develops an intricate plot within a relatively small page count, still finding time to embark on some elaborately fanciful set pieces amongst the more grittily realistic sections. Man’s deterioration into paranoia and fantasy is compelling, and the community of beggars are involved in a number of memorable scenes. It doesn’t always work; although the interplay of fantasy and reality was well-balanced, sometimes the narrative felt overly fragmented, and there were times when my interest dipped. In terms of social commentary, I don't think the novel had the strength of, for example, Mahesh Rao's The Smoke is Rising, but it did capture the more personal interactions of the characters well, and the disparate plot strands were bought together effectively in the end.