Mysore, once the capital of a princely kingdom in South India, has lost its lustre. In Mahesh Rao’s darkly comic novel, grandiose futuristic visions are being floated: in a city desperate to reinvent itself for today’s brave new world, ancient temples and palaces are no longer enough. With India’s space programme about to send a man to the moon, Mysore must make its own giant leap. All hopes are pinned on what is destined to be a global tourist attraction: HeritageLand, planned as Asia’s largest theme park (think Mughal Waterworld — the Disneyland of south India!) And Mysore needs a new marketing slogan — ‘The Geneva of the East?’ suggests a desperate PR person. Well, at least there’s a lake.
While local government officials pull strings, line pockets and bully those they can in the cause of the great transformation, everyday life goes on. The city itself is a leading character: security-protected enclave and suede-panelled restaurant for the affluent; nightspots for cool youth; down-market coffee houses for office workers, slums clinging like barnacles to the respectable rim of town. Further out are the fields where farmers scrape a living off land about to be snatched away from them in the name of progress. Opulence and quiet desperation in tandem.
The Smoke is Rising scrutinises some of those lives: the elderly widow grown invisible, as elderly widows do, until she glimpses a chance of new happiness… the servant with a past she is trying to escape, drawn into a scandal with disastrous consequences… and — in the novel’s most powerful and unsettling thread — a young wife trapped in a life of domestic sadism.
Glancingly we encounter others — ambitious bureaucrats, social climbers, unscrupulous entrepreneurs, no-hopers — all struggling in the urban jungle where the modern world rides roughshod over tradition in a bitter clash between consumerism and old India.
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