In Delhi the seasons are “human-fucked”, explains Tara Saxena, the narrator-protagonist of The Tiger’s Share. Autumn is the “season of smogs and mellow murderousness”; once the smoke arrives in October, “we could no longer see the sky”. Over summer the Loo, a dry “caramelising” wind, slurs through the city, while inside their flats people “lived as cheese and chocolate do in India, refrigerated”. Now and then comes the brief respite of rain. In its aftermath, people head out into the parks to enjoy the momentary cool, the only time when the air is “useably fresh, like a banana that is only one-third rotten”.
Food-related imagery abounds in Keshava Guha’s second novel; you are never allowed to forget that all things – produce, people, every species – are perishable, that from the moment of our birth the decay is inbuilt, and that such a truth is all the more exaggerated in a city where trash mountains leaking toxic gases rise up next to hospitals where babies take their first breaths.
The Tiger’s Share opens with a family summit organised by Tara’s father, Brahm Saxena, her Baba, during which he announces to Tara and her younger brother, Rohit, that he has decided to relinquish all obligations to them. “I will not be a burden on you,” he says. “But now my duties are done, you can expect nothing from me.” In the remaining years of his life he feels compelled to find and then act upon his deeper, more essential purpose – what he owes not to his family but to the world itself, in particular his own beloved and polluted country, which sees “every tree, every bird suffering, as if it has been told it must live but is stuck in a place no longer fit for living”.
“Daddy, you’ve gone full Greta,” is Rohit’s alarmed response. The resulting narrative unspools over the year that follows their father’s ecological awakening, with all the ways it alters the course of things for Tara and Rohit. She is a very successful lawyer; as an adult, he has mostly failed and flailed about, existing in his sister’s shadow – or, at least, this is how Tara sees it.
Brahm Saxena is the stable moral centre of Tara’s universe. If their family have a true religion, such belief “is rooted in him”. In The Tiger’s Share, Guha offers a wide, chaotic and morally ambiguous portrait of contemporary Delhi society (stratified across caste and class, but mostly skewed towards those in more privileged, affluent circumstances). Its breadth and ambition – with even the most minor characters fleshed out, each bookshop or park or neighbourhood visited an opportunity for Guha to thicken the text with some historical, political context – has echoes of Zadie Smith’s early maximalist style. Only Brahm Saxena remains untainted and morally pure. On his desk he keeps a photograph of Bhagat Singh, the revolutionary hero of the Indian independence movement who was executed in 1931 for killing a police officer (his intended victim was a police chief responsible for the death of an Indian writer, but he got the wrong man). It is Singh whom Brahm Saxena looks to for inspiration. “You could say he achieved nothing,” he admits to Tara. “But what he did was make people think, My Country is worth giving my life for.”
Two questions propel the narrative onwards. The first: what is it that Brahm Saxena will do? The second: why is this moral spirit so lacking in the sons of men like Brahm Saxena? “What was it with this generation of Indian men?” Tara asks rhetorically. “Why couldn’t fathers raise sons?” This theme of apparently hopeless or even corrupted sons versus brilliant daughters is reinforced through a parallel pair of siblings who know the Saxenas. Kunal and Lila’s very rich father has just died and a battle for inheritance is playing out, with Kunal convinced he deserves the lion’s share. One problem with Indian men today, Lila tells Tara, is that they think they are lions, social creatures who are loved and looked after by their lionesses, only to discover in adulthood that they are really tigers, solitary animals who exist in a “zero-sum game” of scarcity, with their sisters out to get them as much as anyone else.
Over time, Rohit becomes a kind of anti- or inverted Baba, taking to YouTube – a male trope we now recognise all too easily – to proclaim that man should not be content with survival but must instead strive for “thrival”, his own coinage, focusing on our own species’ prosperity rather than, say, animal conservation. Meanwhile Kunal’s company tries to create its own desh-bhakti curriculum to roll out in government schools. Desh-bhakti translates as patriotism (and these curricula really exist), but, as Tara notes, “everything depends on what that means”. Was Bhagat Singh’s revolutionary action patriotism? Could we argue that every environmental or ecological protest – something that becomes an increasingly important theme in the book – is a form of broad patriotism?
It is testament to Guha’s adroit, understated authorial touch that we are never given conclusive answers to such complex questions about patriotism, nationalism and how India’s identity is changing, only a range of responses acted out through his characters. And while we are chained to Tara’s perspective, through the subtlest of hints we start to wonder whether she, too, is failing to live up to her heroic father’s ideals – such as when she chooses to distance herself from those female lawyers who defend women in rape trials, since “no one took them seriously”.
After the heavy summer rain, many trees fall down across the Delhi avenues designed by architect Edwin Lutyens – “Planted while the roads were being laid out a century ago, they had grown tall enough to cover from end to end, in death, the roads they had been designed to ennoble.” The great trees fall and out of the wreckage it is up to the next generations to decide how they want to begin again.
• The Tiger’s Share by Keshava Guha is published by John Murray (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
