‘Gunboy' review: A bloody good thriller set in the badlands of Maharashtra

Mint

a day ago

Shreyas Rajagopal, who published his first novel Saltwater (2014) under the moniker of Shrey, has emerged from a decade-long hibernation with his new book, Gunboy. And it's been worth the wait.
Set in Rannwara, the badlands of Maharashtra, it is as close to The Gangs of Wasseypur as you will get on the page. Unfolding in the same breathtaking pace as Anurag Kashyap's 2012 duology, Gunboy is a feat of storytelling—its 400-odd pages fly by before you know it—and told with a flair that standard-fare action thrillers can rarely muster. As a hardened literary fiction reader, I didn't expect the novel to engross me as much as it did, especially with all the casual and calculated violence, blood and gore, splattered all over its pages—the book isn't for the faint-hearted or squeamish—but by the time I was done with it, it left me spent but also moved.
A major part of the appeal behind the Gunboy is the craft and care with which Rajagopal builds the eponymous character, a skinny 12-year-old Tamilian boy called Arvind, who feels like a fish out of water in the suburban outpost where his father, an employee at the local steel factory, has been transferred. With his strange accent and broken Hindi, he is an outsider, rife for bullying in the hands of Jaggi Ranade, the spoilt brat of a powerful political leader. School is a waking nightmare of beatings and humiliation in the hands of Jaggi and his gang of senior boys, a reign of terror that inevitably ends in bloodshed.
Arvind suffers along with his best friend, a Bengali boy called Sudipto formerly schooled in America, another outcast like him, whose best means of self-defence is to piss his pants when beaten and force the tormentor to abandon him in disgust. Plump and pampered Sudipto is the son of Arvind's father's boss, but in the real world, the social dynamics between the two are turned upside down despite the difference of class and standing. It is Arvind, tough as nails, who steers the soft-hearted Sudipto through the tortures inflicted on them by Jaggi, scheming ingenious plans of escape when all his terrified friend can see is sure death by torture.
Into this world of schoolboy mafia war arrives Amar Singh, a sharpshooter on the run after a botched mission in Mumbai, with the long arm of the underworld in his pursuit. Amar is protected by 'the Gun," a mythical instrument of death that came into his possession when he was a few years older than Arvind. The weapon has saved him from certain death at least twice, but in Rannwara, it is lost in a scuffle and falls in Arvind's hand.
Rajagopal fractures the narrative voices into many pieces, giving short and urgent episodic bursts to his long cast of characters. The propulsive force of his writing not only provides the thriller with the kick it needs but also, at times, make it feel like the early draft of a screenplay of a TV series or movie in the making.
If the cinematic energy of Gunboy makes the novel a page turner, it is Rajagopal's gift for creating rounded and credible characters that keeps the reader's investment in the story high all through. Not everyone is given a solidly fleshed out back story, especially Amar Singh, whose transformation from a 16-year-old sidekick in the Mumbai underworld to one of its most feared snipers perhaps deserved more attention. But in the microcosm that is Rannwara, Arvind, Sudipto, Jaggi and their social circles are depicted with a piercing acuity.
The genteel privilege of the Chatterjees (Sudipto's parents) is contrasted with the god-fearing, middle-class, IIT-worshipping Tamil household where Arvind grows up. Then there are the Ranades. The patriarch is past his heyday, bedridden but still obeyed like a deity, the mother of his three boys is dead, while his three musketeers are each of a kind: Om, the eldest, is cerebral and cunning, while the younger two, Jai and Jaggi, are hot-headed brutes, foolhardy, and lusting for blood at the slightest provocation.
Thrown into this urban jungle inhabited by the ultra-civilised and ultra-barbaric, Arvind is an anomaly. Unlike his sister Srilekha, whose life's goal is to win her father's approval by qualifying for a seat at an IIT, he is a sharp kid who can already see patriarchal boorishness for what it is. As he labels his math teacher, Mr Ray, 'a vicious little man in a world of vicious little men." And yet, literally a little man in this dangerous world of grown-ups, Arvind finds himself radically changed, or rather released from the shell in which he had hidden his true self, after his chance encounter with Amar Singh.
Gunboy remains mesmerising because it gives the reader a ringside view into revenge as seen by a 12-year-old male child. Srilekha, who is also betrayed in other ways than Arvind, is held back by an innately gendered sense of duty, even love, until the very end. At 16, she too is a child, but one who has the demon of patriarchy breathing down her neck, punishing her for 'crimes" that are part of every pubescent youth's coming of age. Arvind isn't forgiven or protected by his misdeeds either. He has other crosses to bear, such as being born a male child in a society where, people, meaning mostly men, 'protest violence with violence and will be put down with violence." In Rannwara, especially, violence is 'the language of the state, the language of its people."
Even at home, almost all of Arvind's communication with his Appa is through the language of violence—beatings, verbal abuse, constant heckling. If it puts things in perspective, the story is set in the 1990s, where punitive parenting was the norm, not that it has been eradicated fully still. But Rajagopal gives us a chilling sense of what it was—indeed, still is—for a generation, and class, of children growing up in a country, where histories of violence are handed down like heirlooms. It makes the reader question all the welfarist narratives of India Shining out there, when in the big, bad world, there are gunboys like Arvind running amok, making headlines for crimes too shocking for words, as they grow up into men like Amar Singh.