If you are reading this, Geet, I want to tell you—you are gifted.
Scent of the Nameless is
the story of an ordinary middle-class man caught in a spiral of debt. Set
against the backdrop of the global financial crisis, stock market crashes and
growing consumerism, the novel explores how financial manipulation and economic
policies reach ordinary households, leaving common people to bear the
consequences of a system they barely understand. It is a modern-day testament
to the financial and social crises inflicted upon ordinary people by the market
and its machinery.
Cow's
urine is considered sacred in Hinduism. Traditionally, owning a cow signifies
prosperity, social status and religious virtue. Premchand's Godan is
worth mentioning here, as the cow occupies an important place in its social and
cultural landscape. In Chaturvedi's novel, however, the sweat emanating from
the narrator's body, which smells like cow's urine (called Gomutra in
Hindi, and the title of the original Hindi version), represents something
altogether different. The unbearable and inescapable stench becomes an identity
of its own—the smell of the tired, downtrodden and fatigued, of people pushed
to the margins, helpless and nameless, much like the narrator himself.
The
narrator is an ordinary middle-class man who takes a credit card from a bank
and gradually falls into the habit of spending. Initially, the idea of using
the bank's money to invest in the stock market fascinates him. He begins
reading the pink papers, following the market and its promises. But the market
does not reward him. He loses heavily, his savings disappear, and the credit
card debt keeps mounting. Unable to repay the installments, he begins looking
for ways to escape his creditors. Eventually, the bank's recovery agents manage
to track him down, making an already complicated situation unbearable.
The
novel begins with dark humour, but that is only the beginning. After reading a
newspaper, the narrator believes that planting a neem tree at home might help
him get rid of his debts. Of course, it does not work. His ordinary life
becomes a succession of mundane, troublesome and often absurd experiences. He
works as a store coordinator for a construction company, has no savings left,
struggles with mounting expenses and finds himself increasingly cornered by the
bank's recovery agents. The sweetness of everyday life is invaded by the sour
reek of cow's urine.
Baba,
the narrator's boss, is another elusive character. The narrator initially looks
towards him for support and perhaps even a way out of his predicament. But Baba
gradually comes to represent a peculiar form of authority—one that can offer
shelter, exercise control and eventually disown you at will.
One
of the most striking passages in the novel reads:
"It
was a time when the whole office was turning pink. My neighbourhood, my city,
my country, everything was turning pink..."
The
pink papers refer to the financial newspapers that cover the stock market,
investments and market economics. The narrator witnesses the stock market boom,
only to see it crash later, taking countless investors along with it. He is one
of its victims. But the commercialization of everything around him is equally
suffocating. The constant noise of celebrities, glamorous lifestyles, mindless
laughter, sensational news and the mania of being known to everybody becomes
unbearable. The narrator feels increasingly alienated from a world that seems
obsessed with consumption, visibility and superficial happiness. Chaturvedi's
observations feel remarkably prescient. He seems to recognize the impending
dangers of a society in which visibility and public attention gradually become
commodities in themselves, something that later finds its fullest expression in
social media.
The
narrator's life slowly begins to fall apart. Reality turns into something
resembling a dreamy nightmare, a world he can barely withstand with a sane
mind.
The
chapter The King Was Caught reminds me of the opening of Kafka's The
Trial. The bank's recovery agents find a way to trick the narrator into
revealing his address. He is months behind on his credit card payments, and the
bank executives who once persuaded him through pleas and promise to accept a
credit card now have become part of the machinery pursuing him. The irony is
unmistakable. The customer is king, but the market is the kingmaker. And our
narrator, once treated as a king, is now on the run before finally being
caught.
His
loneliness is perhaps the most devastating aspect of the novel. The narrator
begins having troubled dreams, and the voice through which he shares his
isolation is so compelling that we almost feel ourselves becoming him.
Sometimes eerie and surreal, the narration nevertheless has pain firmly rooted
at its core. This is a man wronged by a failing economy and pushed to the brink
of his existence. There is sadness, terror, defeat and restlessness in his
world. He even begins to doubt Baba, the very person he trusts to help untangle
his complicated situation.
"Completely,
hopelessly, devastatingly alone. I, an ordinary and insignificant man of my
time, was profoundly solitary."
The
chapter Time Is an Earthworm takes the novel into another territory
altogether. The narrator frequently addresses the reader directly, creating
poetic pockets and sudden explosions of thought. Reality and dreams begin to
overlap, and the narration moves into a hallucinatory territory where the
narrator becomes a critic, a satirist and, at times, an unreliable voice. The
transformation of a watch into an earthworm is one such extraordinary moment.
"We're
living in worm-like times. Our only job is to eat and excrete. And what we eat,
what we excrete, makes someone else's land fertile. They make a killing of it.
We're all earthworms, knowingly or unknowingly, enriching someone else's soil."
It
is a sharp criticism of consumerism and the economic system that thrives on the
labour and consumption of ordinary people. We work, consume and produce, yet
the real beneficiaries are elsewhere. At one point, even when there is no human
being around, a mobile network and a car service station remain. The absurdity
of the situation is striking. The narrator begins to feel that his life itself
has become a translation of the absurd. There are moments when the text feels
like a passage from a Dostoevskian novel. The horror of the financial crisis,
as experienced from the narrator's vantage point, is painful, suffocating and
equally absurd. Yet it is also an uncomfortable reality.
Consider
this encounter:
"Suddenly,
the bank guy was in front of me. I panicked. He grabbed my hand and said, 'The
joys you missed in childhood, the youth you lost to duty—we'll give them back
in old age. Just sign up for our pension plan.'"
The
humour is evident, but so is the cruelty. Even in his most vulnerable moments,
the narrator cannot escape the market's attempts to sell him another product.
The market does not recognize his suffering; it sees another potential
customer.
Baba,
meanwhile, becomes increasingly eccentric. The narrator suspects that his boss
is playing with his mind, perhaps even treating him as a guinea pig for his
strange ideas. He looks towards Baba for reassurance, but even he cannot offer
a solution. High inflation, mounting household expenses, unpaid installments
and the absence of any further source of credit leave the narrator utterly
helpless. The people surrounding him—his relatives and office colleagues—are
either unable or unwilling to help him out of his financial trouble. His
condition makes us sad. He feels low, desperate and incapable of thinking
clearly.
The
novel also plays with the philosophical idea of Advaita, the principle of
non-duality. The narrator tries to make sense of his circumstances through the
idea that seemingly opposing things are, in fact, one and the same.
"Truth
and Illusion are one and the same... The prey is the predator. The predator,
the prey."
He
searches for explanations, trying to understand what leads him into this
situation and whether there is any larger meaning behind his suffering. But his
frustration keeps growing. The unbearable smell of his sweat, the humiliation
and the mounting psychological pressure eventually push him towards an
outburst. Some of these episodes are funny, but they are also tragic when we
try to put ourselves in his shoes. His mental condition deteriorates, and he
gradually loses control over his thoughts and actions.
The
symbolic massacre in the novel speaks volumes about the suppressed individuals
who are ground down by the system. They keep moving along with it, working day
after day, yet remain economically deprived. They cannot openly defy the
machinery that makes their lives miserable because they know they will be
defeated. The desire to rebel exists in every suffering individual, but the
ability to do so does not. The narrator embodies this helpless contradiction.
His
hallucinations become increasingly disturbing. The finance minister's warning
about his imminent murder, for instance, reads as a symbolic representation of
a national economy betraying the very ordinary people it is supposed to serve.
In
the chapter Error and Omissions Excepted, Chaturvedi turns his attention
to the absurdity of consumerism and the devaluation of things. The narrator
reflects on how an object loses much of its value almost immediately after we
purchase it. Why does a second-hand product sell for so much less than a
brand-new one? What exactly constitutes wealth when everything we own is
destined to lose its value?
The
narrator's inability to think clearly becomes particularly apparent:
"...
I had not thought like that. In fact, I had not thought about anything. In
fact, I did not know how to think. In fact, I could not remember the last time
I had thought at all."
He
goes on to reflect:
"My
wealth is an illusion. Maya. Nothing more than objects meant to be consumed and
discarded. Wealth lives only on the other side of the fence."
And
perhaps one of the sharpest observations about the market comes in the
following passage:
"The
one who can sell run the economy—they shape it, they drive it forward. The ones
who can't sell become its prey."
By
the middle of the novel, we begin to feel that the narrator is drifting into
delusion. His circumstances become increasingly unbearable. The recovery agents
reach his office, threaten him with further action and make his already
unsettled life even more miserable. He finds no refuge among the people around
him. First, he is attacked by a pack of dogs; then he becomes the target of a
group of people playing a cruel prank on him. Each incident leaves him more
devastated, humiliated and defeated.
There
is an existential quality to the narration that shifts between the Dostoevskian
and the Kafkaesque. The narrator's encounters with the world seem to reveal
their meaning only in sudden, painful flashes of understanding.
"My
life was full of such incidents—encounters that revealed their meaning only in
sudden flashes of clarity when understanding ran deep."
Dream
sequences introduce figures such as Sant Gyaneshwar, whose lead the narrator
follows. The novel also brings in the Eight Immortals, who are destined to live
until the end of everything. These figures deepen the novel's preoccupation
with existence, invisibility, mortality and the human condition.
The
narrator continues to play with Advaita, sometimes treating it as a profound
existential idea and sometimes turning it into biting satire. Consider his
declaration:
"Aham
Brandasmi! I am a brand! But chasing power or being broke—hunger or
lack—they're the same thing. Advaita."
His
thoughts become increasingly wild, so much so that even Baba no longer wants to
listen to him. At one point, he makes a particularly provocative observation:
"When
they were crafting the idea of Shiva, the market was the hidden agenda baked
into it. And to make people endure it, internalize it, they spun religion
around it like cloth around a flame."
These
are not merely eccentric thoughts. They reveal a mind desperately trying to
make sense of the forces that govern its existence. Even when Baba, his only
refuge, becomes dismissive, the narrator continues to search for someone who
might understand him. The passages often feel like arrows shot directly at our
consciousness.
What
makes Scent of the Nameless so compelling is the way it combines
metafiction, satire, philosophical reflections and psychological disintegration
without allowing us to forget the human being at its centre. The writing may
sometimes feel surreal, fragmented and disorienting, but we always remain
inside the tunnel of the narrator's problems, sharing his suffocation. It is
difficult to read this novel without feeling his pain.
He
is, after all, an ordinary family man looking for peace and happiness for his
family. Yet the very things he works towards keep slipping out of his hands.
The economy fails him, the market exploits him, his surroundings offer little
comfort, and even the people he trusts gradually become distant. He is neither
particularly powerful nor important. He is simply an ordinary man trying to
survive in a world that seems determined to make him disappear.
And
perhaps that is what makes the title so meaningful. He is nameless not because
he does not exist, but because the system does not recognise his existence. His
suffering is real, his exhaustion is real, and his desperation is real. Yet he
remains invisible.
Geet
Chaturvedi gives this nameless man a voice.
And,
finally kudos to Translator Anita Gopalan for this superb translation and a
brilliant Afterword.
Translator: Anita Gopalan
Front Cover Art: Amogh Bhatnagar
Pages: 224
ISBN-13: 9789377307776
