Pic/Hemal Shroff

Set in the peak of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement that led to the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya and the subsequent riots in Mumbai, Pereira’s novel is steered by Ganga Niwas’ old-time resident, the retired postmaster Valmiki Ratnakar Rao, who has been moonlighting as a diarist, secretly documenting the unbecoming of Rameshwar Shinde, whose life’s story is irrevocably linked with the gruesome events of the time. Rameshwar’s love interest Janaki and the local goon Ravinarayan Kumar are among the cast of characters in this modern-day retelling. That Pereira wanted to tell this story through the lens of an epic, is purely because of his own curiosity. “I have been thinking about myth and epic for years,” he shares. “Look at the epics in the East—the Iliad or Odyssey, for instance—and compare them with those from the East, Ramayana or the Mahabharata.” In the case of the latter, he says, the epics have impinged on our daily lives to such an extent that they spillover from the text into the real world, and have very serious repercussions. “I don’t see the voyage of Odyssey affecting the people of Greece today, or anything from the Iliad having an impact on the politics of the entire region where it emerged from. And yet, for us [Indians], these two epics not just affect our politics, but also our social fabric, and the way we think.” The Ramayana, he says, in particular, continues to be part of our collective consciousness. “But, there’s something very interesting about the Ramayana, which I believe has been lost when it comes to how we look at it today. It’s not just a story about exile; the notion of ‘Ram Rajya’ or ‘ideal state’ is also a very intrinsic part of it. The irony is that whenever we have pushed this idea, we have gone further and further away from what an ideal state should be.” That’s what the Ram Janmabhoomi movement did, he thinks. “The events and the myth had a direct impact on my city and me, and that’s why I had to take a personal approach.”  

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Retelling an epic, Pereira admits, is “incredibly daunting”. “There will always be someone who says that this book doesn’t do justice to what their idea of the Ramayana is,” he says, “But to be fair, I am not doing a faithful retelling. I am picking and choosing bits that would help my story.”

He chose to locate his story in a chawl for sociological reasons. “The chawls [of Mumbai] were like petri dishes... a microcosm of what was happening in the city at the larger level. These chawls also represented a group of people who were disenfranchised economically; this made it easier for any political party to take the residents, especially the younger lot, under their wings and train them to become these ‘warriors’. That’s how these areas became strongholds of certain parties,” says Pereira. There was also a logistical motivation. “From a narrative perspective, I had to also come up with this notion of ‘crossing over’ into Lanka. I had to find a realistic approach to do that, without it coming across as comical.. that was hard to do.”  

Pereira’s narrator Valmiki is a broken man, and not without reason. “The disillusionment he feels is real; he is someone who is writing a story at a time that’s radically different from when the original epic came into being. What would happen if the same chronicler had to revisit those same events in our time?” he asks. “Nobody who respects the Ramayana, can look at how we have reinvented the story of Lord Rama, and not be disillusioned.”