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Great comic characters, both in literature and in life, are rare:
one Falstaff for a posse of Hamlets, Lears, Romeos, Caesars, Timons,
or MacBirds; one Pickwick for booksful of Little Dorrits and Little
Nells; one Mr. Polly for all H. G. Wells’s Ann Veronicas,
real or fictional. Even rarer are those representative of a whole
people: a Colonel Bramble, a Hajji Baba, a Don Camillo. Ved Mehta,
in a slim novella (surely it is delinquent to call it a novel?)
has created a genuinely comic character who is as Indian as Bramble
is English.
Mr. Mehta tells his story in the first person. Mohan, a young
Indian leaving New Delhi to read literature at Oxford, meets his
uncle (“Chacha” is Hindustani for “uncle”)
for brunch. This uncle, who at eight dubbed himself “delinquent,”
was dressed in festive attire: a long golden coat, tight white
pajamas, and a starched muslin turban. “My uncle was without
question the greatest failure in the memory of our family.”
Only once had he worked—as master carpenter in a shop Mohan’s
father bought for him. After a week he had mortgaged the shop,
lost the money in one hand of Five Card Draw, “and started
on his long and successful career as a poor relation.” His
brothers, “according to their means,” helped him. Some
gave him monthly contributions; some had him to stay for long
or short periods; others adopted one, two, or three of his thirteen
children. “He farmed out his babies with a benign smile.
. . . Whenever it became known that his wife was with child once
again, his brothers called down curses on his head, for they were
certain this time it would be a daughter” and would need
a dowry. As the child was “almost always” a son, such
was the relief that “there was more celebration at the arrival
of Delinquent Chacha’s children” than at anyone else’s.
And Chacha’s nephews and nieces all adored him since “he
spent most of his time with us; he was a referee at our games,
a peacemaker in our squabbles.”
Mohan duly goes to Oxford, and after a year or so, receives
a fat letter from Delinquent Chacha, postmarked Suez. An American
film magnate has hired him to act the part of a seraglio sweeper
in a picture about an old-fashioned maharajah “who looks
like a Buddha and acts like a rake” and who is wintering
in Cannes with three hundred concubines. Alas, poor Delinquent
Chacha loses the job to a “professional student” and
instead gets one as porter at the All-India Taj Mahal Curry, Chutney,
and Soup Restaurant in Shaftesbury Avenue. Delinquent Chacha has
always dreamed of England. “It’s in London and Oxford
that I belong,” he tells Mohan, and considers that the sun
permanently set on India the day the British left.
The contrast between the sordid reality—Delinquent Chacha
opened the doors of taxis and slept in a large broom closet “overlaid
with cobwebs and crammed with mops and buckets and gallon-sized
tins of disinfectant and ammonia—and his dreams of being
like Mohan’s father, keeping a car and playing golf, are
both ridiculous and sad.
But there is a hilarious account of how Delinquent Chacha finally
really comes to Oxford, and how he is dressed—a broad mortarboard
with a red tassel, a long crimson gown with white facing, a red
tie, red socks, and suede shoes—and his tragicomic duel with
a Pakistani, ostensibly about the Taj Mahal but in reality about
everything that divides India from Pakistan. An equally hilarious
trial scene follows in which Delinquent Chacha, after dismissing
his lawyer, and in spite of having bought 578 pounds, three shillings
and twopence worth of clothes without having a penny to his name,
gets himself off scot-free.
But, like Falstaff, Delinquent Chacha is not merely comic. Mr.
Mehta keeps his reader not only laughing at but also loving, pitying,
and admiring his hero. By Mr. Mehta’s miraculous legerdemain,
Delinquent Chacha, with his nostalgia for the British Raj, his
lacrimae rerum line, and his absurd behavior—walking the
streets for two hours to shake the smell of camphor from his good
clothes before condescending to meet the American film director,
or writing his name daily with curlicues and flourishes, and a
CMG added, in the fifth-rate London club’s guest book—is
every one of us “as others see us.” He is a completely
“round” character, in the sense E. M. Forster defined
it. He can surprise us, and constantly does. (Whereas a “flat”
character has only one aspect or role, and can only reiterate.)
Delinquent Chacha is not merely three-dimensional, however:
he is four-dimensional. For he is not only himself, tragic and
comic, poignant and farcical, but is a representative, not merely
of India at a Model United Nations General Assembly in Oxford,
but of humanity itself, of all the ambivalences, all the dichotomies
inherent in l’homme moyen sensuel.
Mr. Mehta, in creating him, has shown us, through this idiotic,
loveable, laughable rascal, the Janus India he epitomizes, looking
both forward and back.
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