‘In a Future April’ by Paramita Ghosh: An Excerpt

Paramita Ghosh’s novel In a Future April is a political allegory on a South Asian concern — national liberation struggles and their contradictions. The overarching ‘date’ or ‘time’ in the novel is The Plebiscite which everyone is moving towards or rebelling against. The novel tries to draw on historical debates or key decisions and dates of international working class history and place it in a new setting. The underlying theme of the novel is how authoritarianism arises from the limitations of liberalism, and it speaks to our time in a way.

The Quint presents an excerpt from the book.

Street Theatre, Crime City

Argot Aristu was no professor of psychology but he understood that men and women wanted to be in business. He had begun a career in The Frontier in gum and cigarettes in a market short of them during the war and had realised that greed put in the service of chance could become good friends in the great game. He always acknowledged the part they had played in his life and never held formal schooling against those who turned up for jobs as journalists if they had not been to the right one. Grown into manhood in the back alleys, Aristu kept his M1 Girond, a semiautomatic, close to him. It slapped against his thighs as he moved around The Frontier in search of an unsentimental education. By all accounts, he was a good shot. When he took over the city newspaper, The Gentleman, except for the one instance at the beginning, he had not had to use force to make people listen to him. A poor parish priest he had befriended, regularly blamed himself at confession, over his friend’s excesses.

“If a man can fire a bullet that smokes for seven days, he has done well,” Aristu liked to say. “Correct me if you think I have done badly. I had no background in running a newspaper but I run one. I had no connection with the cigarette trade except that I knew how to smoke. Schools don’t teach you to take risks. They teach you to sit and stand, and then confuse you with moral science.”

The native obsession with education, he felt was a character flaw, the conspiracy of educated gentlemen and their continued thrill at having grabbed the best jobs -- as clerks. The qualities he looked for in his staff were different. He asked them about their strengths and weighed them as if they were onions and potatoes. “If you want a job, say that. Don’t say you can write well—what if I need you to sing well, as well?” Interviewing staff journalists, he would ask them to show him a portfolio of their best articles. Those who brought them along, didn’t always get the job. He didn’t want the staff reading his mind. There should be, he thought, no difference between a man and his shoe. He studied people with the same interest that he studied buildings. Both needed paint, upkeep. Both cracked, and he could wait for them. If a building was demolished, you could replace it. You could also re-wire men with new ideas if you could show them it was to their benefit. History was full of them and he was on its side.

When the news of the Plebiscite first broke out in The Frontier, he was settling a dispute in one of the units of his factory. One of his senior managers returning to the factory after a drunken fight at the bar had thrown the shoes of workers in boilers for piling them at the door.

“If you have whisky in your stomach, you do not take action,” he told the manager and told his staff he would sack him. He didn’t. The workers, who were baying for his blood, were calmed into better thoughts by promises of jobs to their relatives at his newest venture—the newspaper. Gum. Cigarette. Newspaper. For Argot Aristu, it was all the same thing.

It is said Aristu heard of The Gentleman when a young reporter from the paper landed outside his factory one day during the labour trouble. He had his guards break his left hand in warning to the right one and then had him brought into his office. He made him drink his tea with six spoons of sugar and then told them he had the highest regard for the profession.

“Unlike philosophers, journalists like specifics. I’m learning, so, what is your name?”

Soli said his name was Soli.

“Son, in a few months, I will be running The Gentleman that stands at The Hollow. I will be renaming it The Meat. Thought you should know if you are around next time we meet in that office.”

That evening, Aristu went to meet his friend, a mercenary, who had jumped off his ship to protest the distribution of bad rum along with inhuman cabin conditions. With Heaney in the middle, they met a man, the stockbroker, Marianoos, a former employee of The Gentleman, who nursed a grudge against the owners and wanted them to lose it. So, Aristu set out to outline his big plan. He had decided to have faith in the young stockbroker as he had faith in all self-made men and their thirst to make something of themselves, and self-madeness was what Aristu was after. He told Marianoos about meeting the new banks and its directors agreeing to put up the cash for a hostile takeover. He told him how he had had to scold, bribe and supply whisky, cigarettes and well-endowed women in private consignments to their houses to convince them.

“When it comes to being self-made, you will see I will not be found wanting,” he told Marianoos, who by now had started dialling and smiling into his telephone.

“Find the value of The Gentleman’s scrip and buy the shares at a higher value. You know how it can be done. After that, I know what I have to do.”

(Paramita Ghosh is a journalist with Hindustan Times. In a Future April is a novel that is part of the Radical Notes series published by Aakar Books. The book is just out and available on Flipkart and http://aakarbooks.in/)