“Two brothers, there were. They flew together. Garuda flew too high, too close to the Sun. But before she could burn him in her rage, Samati interceded. He took upon himself the bolt meant for Garuda. His wings were charred and he was hurled down to the ground. (…) Garuda escaped. But in punishment, words dried up in his throat forever, turning to ashes, like Samati’s wings. And to separate the two brothers, the Wall of Sumer came to be. This side we dwell, the daughters and sons of Samati, doomed only to gaze upon our sky-faring cousins, who come back to us from beyond the Wall, but can neither speak nor stay.”
This passage from the opening chapter of Gautam Bhatia’s The Horizon (the follow-up to his 2020 novel The Wall) is a near-perfect demonstration of the author’s narrative strategies across both books.
‘The Horizon’, Gautam Bhatia, HarperCollins India, 2021.
It’s a conversation between Maji and Rahul, two characters hiding from the cops, so to speak, after a heist sequence gone wrong. The uniformed men chasing them have just left their hideout – it is safe, for now.
Why, you might justifiably ask, do these characters pick such a delicate and emotionally charged moment to turn the mytho-meter all the way up to high Tolkien?
This is because The Horizon, like its predecessor, is a novel that understands both the appeal of and the danger posed by stories.
The Wall showed us how a highly structured and strictly hierarchical city-state like Sumer strategically deploys state-sanctioned stories for its hegemonic ends. The ruling aristocrats did not have to outlaw everything they were threatened by. In some cases they merely tweaked age-old stories and myths to discourage ‘divergent’ behaviour.
The Horizon, too, sees Bhatia’s characters telling each other and the readers a lot of mini-stories. Only in the hands of the good guys, these stories are origin myths, revolutionary poems, mystic love letters to the past Sumer has rewritten and the future it refuses to usher in.
Personally, I have always enjoyed this particular subsection of science fiction, where most of the traditional ‘action’ (full-scale warfare or even one-on-one combat scenes, in some cases) is off-page and characters with genteel voices pose ethico-philosophical riddles to one another, gradually unfurling the plot while they’re at it.
Isaac Asimov, despite his occasionally clunky dialogue, perfected this form in his Foundation novels, which counteracted his more conventional, ‘action sci-fi’ works (like the books featuring Elijah Bailey, although of course these were ‘merged’ with the Foundation series eventually, decades before ‘cinematic universe’ became a phrase).
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The Horizon doesn’t always stay within this mould – there are a few good ol’ fashioned ‘crossing blades’ sequences and I even saw the word ‘trebuchet’ in a non-typographic context after a long time. But this is where the book’s heart is.
‘The Wall’, Gautam Bhatia, HarperCollins India, 2020.
The passage quoted at the beginning takes slices and slivers from several mythologies, bits of Icarus swimming around with a kind of proto-Ramayana sauce. As The Wall showed us, Bhatia is very, very good at this hop-and-skip manoeuvre across literary and philosophical traditions.
Perhaps my only complaint from the earlier book was that outside of Mithila (the young Tarafian rebel at the heart of these books, seeking to go beyond the Wall of Sumer for Answers™) we didn’t really see much by way of character arcs. And I think more than a few critics must have pointed that out gently, because Bhatia has certainly improved by leaps and bounds in that department.
Like the Dragon Queen’s first fiery flight in Game of Thrones, we saw the first novel end with Mithila atop a gigantic bird, poised to cross the Wall. In The Horizon, we see the aftermath of what Mithila learned – about Sumer, about the religious Shoortans, about the legal and moral implications of state secrets.
Meanwhile, the people around Mithila are leading eventful lives. Her sister is now the spokesperson of the Shoortans, effectively while her girlfriend Rama now occupies her late father’s seat on the all-important Council. Of course, the personal history of the heroine’s family begins to collide with the ‘state secrets’ part of the narrative eventually – Joseph Campbell wouldn’t have it any other way.
The dialogue has improved, for the most part. Characters are less likely to sound like autodidacts with encyclopaedic memories this time around (although as I pointed out earlier, even Asimov wasn’t immune to this). Although, I suppose if written histories were banned in my world (like they are in Sumer), my memory, too, would see rapid growth. I’m also happy to report that Bhatia is swinging for the fences during the big, emotional moments. Like this passage for example – a risk-averse writer could not possibly have chosen this for the final draft.
“The boundaries between her body and the world disintegrated. It was as if the world was contained within the spiral, and it now poured into her ears: a rhythmic sound that swelled into a roar.
“The sea spilled into her.
“Mithila sank to her knees. She felt like her body was holding the world entire, a world without a Wall, and the ever-receding horizon was inside her, no, she was the horizon. This time she did not hold back the tears.”
Finally, a word about the Appendix – I really feel more writers should include generous (five or six pages at the very least) appendices in their works, like Bhatia does here, reeling off an impressive list of influences and citations, including Federico Garcia Lorca, Joan Baez, Milton and Christopher Okigbo.
I feel like it is a way of continuing – and vastly enhances – the conversation between writer and reader. If it were up to me, I would include detailed appendices and a profusion of blank pages at the end of every single work of fiction, especially speculative fiction (think about it: readers can draw maps or characters or even just make up silly in-universe songs and dirty limericks).
The Horizon is the concluding part of this duology – although I feel there’s more than enough to explore still, both past and future. It’s pretty common for writers of speculative fiction to set short stories in universes they have previously fleshed out in novels. I would like to know more about the beginnings of the Shoortans, for example, or the lead-up to the moment when written histories were first seen as a threat.
‘World-building’ is used far too lightly for a great many books, but what Bhatia has achieved with this duology really is worthy of the term.
Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based writer.