'Across the River' Shows the Social and Spatial Divisions Always Present in India

The ‘river’ of Bhaichand Patel’s novel Across the River is the Yamuna. The specific stretch along its nearly 1,400-km course that this novel pertains to is the 52-km distance between the villages of Palla and Jaitpur: that is, Delhi. What lies across the river from Delhi is New Okhla Industrial Development Area, better known as Noida. As Patel describes it when setting up the scene where his two heroines, Seema Chaudhry and Madhu Gupta, eventually find employment after graduating from Delhi University: “Noida was developed to avoid the chaos that would have resulted from the rapid, unplanned expansion of the capital… The idea was to build a new world-class town, but in reality, it had grown haphazardly to become one big unplanned urban sprawl…”

This chaos, this haphazardness, this sprawl, is just as often used to describe the area Seema and Madhu call home: the walled city, Shahjahanabad, Old Delhi, Purani Dilli. Patel begins Across the River at a crucial juncture in the lives of these two friends, as they go to check on their graduation results. Seema and Madhu come from completely different backgrounds – Seema is Muslim, her family not outright poor but not well-off either; Madhu is relatively wealthy, Hindu – but they have been the best of friends ever since they met in college.

Now, even as they exult over having successfully graduated, tragedy strikes: Seema’s father Zafar dies suddenly of a heart attack. Seema, her mother Jabeen and teenaged brother Rashid are bereft, but when Jabeen’s brother Javed tries to persuade them to shift to Jabeen’s home town, Azamgarh, Seema puts her foot down. She would prefer to live here, in the city she knows, amongst people she knows. Javed finally agrees, but Seema is given an ultimatum: six months to find a job, otherwise it’s Azamgarh.

Seema’s desperation to find employment escalates as she realises that, in interview after interview, she is rejected simply because it’s obvious from her hijab that she is Muslim. In the meantime, Madhu has found a job at a garment factory in Noida, and she recommends Seema to her boss. What’s more, Madhu, well aware that the boss, Kantibhai Mehta, is bigoted and anti-Muslim, persuades Seema to wear a sari, no hijab. Seema, though weighed down by guilt at concealing her religion, ends up going along with this deception, and bags the job… only to fall in love with Kantibhai Mehta’s son, Mohan. And Mohan reciprocates, unaware that Seema is not quite the bahu his parents would be wishing for.

Patel’s greatest strength is a flair for storytelling. There’s never a dull moment in Across the River, with a decent level of suspense maintained throughout – what will happen to Seema and Mohan? Could there be any chance of happiness together? How? The descriptions, whether of Old Delhi or of Noida, of a swanky farm house in Chhattarpur or a chic mansion in Ahmedabad, bring these spaces alive, and the distances between those who inhabit them are equally well-imagined, equally real. And that across time; consider this vividly evoked Delhi experience from the 1950s:

“One day, he went all the way to Qutab Minar in a shared tonga. He saw Lutyen’s New Delhi that had come up just some decades ago, and went window shopping at Connaught Circle… He sat in the front stalls at Novelty Cinema, around the corner from the Cloth Market, Moti a bit further out, and the brand new Golcha on the main road of Daryaganj. It was here that he saw his first films. He enjoyed the Raj Kapoor-Nargis starrer Shree 420 for its songs, although he did not agree with the portrayal of the big city as a place of vice and evil alone…”

This ability to vividly but succinctly describe places, times, characters and emotions marks the entire book. A hand (of the film star Meena Kumari?) ‘the colour and texture of honeyed milk’; curtains ‘thin sheets that let the light in at dawn’, Navratri celebrations with ‘thousands of traditional diyas made of clay and fuelled with pure ghee’; even if it were only for the fluid, extremely readable writing, this book is worth reading.

If there is a shortcoming, it is in the somewhat uneven pacing of the story. At times (a description of an illicit love affair, for instance), the pace is languid and unhurried, rich in detail. Near the end of the novel, though, the writer suddenly seems to lose interest in the story and rushes to wrap it up – the scenes are unnecessarily descriptive but with the more important developments telescoped; people change their way of thinking a little too quickly; convenient events pave the way for a satisfactory end, all loose ends tied neatly up. It’s a hurried conclusion that does little justice to the characters Patel has otherwise built up so well.

However, this does not detract from the fact that Across the River is an engrossing book, a quick read that manages to make some pertinent points about the layers in Indian society, the schisms, the prejudices that seem to plague us at every step of the way. The Yamuna that separates Noida from Delhi isn’t just one divider; there are others, from religion to caste, from social status to wealth, all in some way or the other touched upon in this book. Patel’s book is a highly readable comment on our times, a novel that brings modern Delhi – modern India, too – alive in different ways.

Madhulika Liddle is a writer. Her most recent works are the historical novel An Unholy Drought and a non-fiction book, co-authored with Swapna Liddle, Gardens of Delhi.