This novel clings to me like a ghost, pulling me into a past I’ve never lived in but descended from.

The story threatened to be the usual fare, some bored City dweller runs to the hills, running into the arms of some novel savage with a heart of gold in a cliché so played out that only smutty novels can still tell such a story without embarrassment.

Our narrator Romi and his friend Billy are much like your middle class strivers today except of a higher caliber. You see this story is set in the fifties, right after the British Raj when the middle classes weren’t quite as pathetic as they are today. These were August men of learning who rather than visiting foreign shores in meek desperation came with a confidence that only generational privilege can endow you with.

They study abroad and are effortlessly back in power once they’re in India. Romi the narrator in perticular is so insulated in his position as an IAS officer that he rides his horse and lords around like a princiling. You might imagine the privileges that white colonial officers enjoyed took a little while to leave the upper echelons of the “service”.

His friend, Billy, by contrast has a gnawing awareness that ruins him. If any of you know members of this dying class, as I do through my grandfather, you’ll know that an extraordinary casualness defines a great deal of who they are. Great tragedy is often met by wit rather than any feeling.

Billy in choosing to study anthropology, in choosing to cohort with tribal folk loses all connections to his social class. You could read this novel as a curious look into a mad man or maybe a retelling of that long Indian tradition of leaving the material world to mediate towards enlightenment. The truth only emerges if you understand how the upper classes are at war with their own minds.

There are parts of this novel that hint at magic, at this great primitive truth lying right beyond civilisation. I found this the least interesting of all. Those of you who’ve actually crossed that line will learn that there is no other. There is no sacred knowledge that the poor or remote tribes possess, if anything you’ll find the agony of realising that you’re all the same, that even in the remotest corners the same benign inconveniences of the modern world flourish.

For Billy however these poor tribes folk represent something truly alien to the bourgeois, the psychological wonder of just being normal. You see the great traditions of the aristocracy will imbibe you with knowledge, discipline and character but still dam you. It is impossible to truly be rich in that way, in a system built on exploitation and also be well adjusted.

The previous owner of the book I was reading had foolishly scribbled that Billy should have practiced detachment in his life. Nonsense! Middle class nonsense! The upper crust of society is all about detachment. Honour and integrity have you chained to conventional society but rich families are perverse imitation of belonging.

Billy, realising his family doesn’t love him, runs to the forest like many sages before him but here he also runs into the arms of another woman. He begs his wife and family to listen to him but they can’t do it. Their world of high society is all about image and propriety. He is greedy and selfish, abandoning his family as many of our sages probably did. Most importantly he doesn’t stop lusting or conquer his desires -much harder to sanitise a man like that isn’t it? Yet this is probably an instinct that many noble enlightenment seekers also felt.

In the end Billy is welcomed into the tribe as a priest but I think that’s a rather pathetic end. Here’s a man from a class of society so alienating that you’ve got to run into the arms the very poor you exploit to feel anything. Billy talks about magic and the ways of the forest but would have probably have been just as happy if his wife actually bothered to talk to him or appreciated his job.

By the time Romi discovers Billy has run away from home and family, Romi is brutally crushing a tribal uprising caused by a drought. Romi hardly seems to dwell on the bloodshed or the fact that he could stop it, only lamenting the bad taste it leaves him with.
In the end Romi also dams the sad happiness Billy has carved out for himself. Despite being in charge of the entire district he is just another cog in the machine that kills Billy, probably the only person he loves. This is why that old ruling class was doomed, ultimately it created great and learned men who could not act out of love or even learn to get along with their families.

It’s a tempting and easy thing to dream of the great outdoors, a rural reprieve free of the corruptions capitalism, urbanism or modernity has wrought. Yet again those with their eyes open will know that no such sanctuary exists. If anything those are the breeding grounds for the most savagely casteist and capitalist classes out there.

It is the collective that is civilising, it is in the congregation of the poor, desperate in their solidarity that liberates. Whatever Moksha you can find in the mountains is a selfish one and as this story goes, just a sad refuge for those too broken to reach the people around them.