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Unpolished men feel a primal pleasure when they puncture skin and shatter bone.” Sample this bit on non-violence: “Polished men wearing expensive perfumes spend hours watching brutal cinema and television because it fills an aching hole in their soul created by politeness and civilization. Tejpal’s narrative pauses every now and again to offer reflections that touch on things beyond his fictional universe. This could be called “a novel of ideas” since the characters remain somewhat secondary to issues and debates. Here, you meet a “hustling medical representative cutting sharp deals with doctors”, construction labourers caught for “snaring turtles from a swamp”, men who are insecure about their masculinity and suspect that their wives are on them, and people who serve VIPs in need of staff to “wash and clean and fetch and carry for them”. His writerly gifts are deployed to give readers a fuller and deeper sense of those who have been banished by the law to the “frantic soup of sadness and madness” that they keep swimming and drowning in. While the other authors are protagonists in their own books, Tejpal isn’t. Each one is excellent – Hamid Ansari’s book Hamid: The Story of My Captivity, Survival and Freedom (2020) co-authored with Geeta Mohan, Kafeel Khan’s book The Gorakhpur Hospital Tragedy: A Doctor’s Memoir of a Deadly Medical Crisis (2021) and TJ Joseph’s book A Thousand Cuts: An Innocent Question and Deadly Answers (2021) translated from Malayalam into English by Nandakumar K. The Line of Mercy reminded me of three recent works of non-fiction that capture what life in jail looks like – hierarchies, routines, survival skills, economics of bribery, friendships and rivalries, and unforeseen kindnesses. It is also fairly gloomy but the romance, passion and comedy take the sharp edge off the darkness. In either case, looking for moments that could precisely map fiction onto autobiography might be a futile enterprise insulting not only to the writer’s intelligence but also the reader’s common sense. Others might choose to read for the author’s ringside view of the hells that he might have personally seen. Some readers might stay away from the book as they believe Tejpal to be guilty despite the court’s decision exonerating him. This needs to be read in context, for meaning is only provisional. This is logic only those in hell – inside or outside the iron bars – ever know,” he adds. “Not in the crude language of the law and its makers but in the infinitely subtler script of karma. You might ask who gets to decide whether someone is innocent or not, especially with the kind of criminal justice system that we have in India. Even those who had committed murder and rape – and shyly admitted to it – knew that they were innocent,” writes Tejpal. “Everyone inside the iron bars was innocent. They are not easy to label as villains because Tejpal has a substantial back story for each one – a story that is a slap in the face of every stereotype, a story that evokes a range of emotions, a story that will make you wonder why we, as a society, are so enthusiastic about retributive justice knowing its many limitations. The novel is set “in the thick air of a coastal town, inside the iron bars manufactured by the laws of men.” Rather than a story with a beginning, middle and end, what you must look out for is the cast of characters that Tejpal serves up. The seven months he spent in prison until the Supreme Court granted him bail seem to have played a defining role in shaping the form and content of The Line of Mercy.
MY DAYS OF MERCY ONLINE TRIAL
This 750-page tome comes a year after the trial court in Mapusa, Goa, acquitted Tejpal of all charges filed by the police – including sexual harassment and rape.
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He is in fine form, addressing existential questions with the mix of seriousness and humour that only a skilled craftsman is capable of. Author and journalist Tarun Tejpal, who wrote The Alchemy of Desire (2006), The Story of My Assassins (2010) and The Valley of Masks (2011) is back with a new novel called The Line of Mercy (2022).