Restlessly Wandering Through Delhi In Sarnath Banerjee’s Corridor?

It is situated in the outer rings of Connaught Place in central New Delhi. Jehangir Rangoonwala, the owner, calls it the “centre of the universe”. Rangoonwala has had forty odd jobs previously. He’s finally settled in the bookshop as an eager observer, an even more enthusiastic dispenser of his accumulated wisdom. He’s like a magnet, attracting all the bevvy of ancillary characters.  

The novel makes us privy to whispered secrets and rambling anecdotes of all passing by. There’s the constant impression of disparate lives being loosely threaded together, the city barely holding the friction of mixed outsiders. Bhrigu soaks in the insights of those he meets at the shop and culls together an elaborate sketch of wacky encounters at the very end of the novel. He drifts like a detached spectator. He views his wanderings as a healthy break from a curdled relationship with his girlfriend, Kali. He’s a commitment-phobe but he also can’t shake off the thought of Kali.  

To him, Delhi is a strange and unfamiliar entity. He feels cast off, doubly lost in existential panic. Calcutta, where his roots are, gives him an emotional anchor, a sense of security. Hustlers, street hustlers of all stripes populate the novel. Banerjee may invoke Baudrillard but more emphatically celebrates the lowbrow, the tacky and profane. Neither quest of the two men holds any shade of glory, even if they open with that impulse. More often than not, these become journeys fraught with frustrations and unrequited desires. The newly married Shintu Sarkar yearns for a cure that will magically fix his impotence. There are all these narratives he has internalised from magazines like Cosmpolitan about the perfect consummation. But how to also reckon with the bug of Indian conditioning?  

Shintu is confused, vulnerable and cripplingly awkward. It’s representative of anyone caught at a crossroads between acknowledging a burgeoning sexuality and an ethos of respectability. He makes clandestine visits to quack sexologists in the seedy alleys of Old Delhi. What follows him even there is judgement. Or is he merely projecting scrutiny? Shintu can muster no vocabulary for his sexual desires. To do so is almost made to feel like a betrayal of values. The hakim he consults underlines this, correlating morality with virility. As he rails, “impotency can be prevented by self-restraint”, strips from old Amar Chitra Katha comics on the “ideal boy” perforate the pages. Snippets from moral science textbooks and chart papers for school boys also flood these sections. Of course, Shintu ends up being duped and realises “sex is in the mind”. 

Throughout, Banerjee foregrounds the necessary, individual coming to terms with this tussle. Torn between tradition and modernity, characters navigate and forge their own meaning of pleasure, freedom and belonging. Shintu has to battle shame, Bhrigu an urge for Western-import materialism. The other characters in the novel are also locked in their own peculiar pursuits. Prof DVD Murthy, a forensic expert, hunts for a perfume that expunges “the smell of death”, Angrez Bosch in search of karma. Bosch knows it all: energy pyramids, “mastering the kundalini”, vipassana. Ultimately, he gathers his karma being vested not in some spiritual conquest but web designing.  

Inspired by Sooni Taraporevala’s photography which Banerjee himself acknowledges, Corridor is a quintessential city-novel, one that embraces Delhi in all its heat and contradictions. We get a semblance of a city-tour but Banerjee never buttresses contextual specifics. The novel is laced with an assumed familiarity with Delhi. In an interview with Guernica magazine, Banerjee adds, “my books serve as an archives of emotions and feelings, like a tonal history that captures how I felt at a certain time of my life…it’s not very informational”. Corridor is a chaotic, uncontrolled city symphony-a bustle of social relationships spilling over in a city space. To articulate the city chorus with precision, Banerjee glories in postmodern fragmentation, a heavily accentuated sense of interruption. Bursting through the seams of the novel is a rich panoply of eccentrics. These lives intersect but friendship-kind and genuinely connected-is rare.  

Corridor is jam packed with a barrage on the senses. There are cutouts from magazines, newspapers, posters, eclectic collages thrust into a disorienting mix. Banerjee doesn’t like neatly structured panels. Hence, the illustrations almost billow out of panels and dislodge textual scaffolding. Most are in black and white but occasionally color pops out. The novel is a massive intertextual swirl, punching together real-life events, historical markers, the fictionally mounted. Posters of Indian actors like Nargis sit cheek-by-jowl in the text with leftist and foreign communist leaders, from Jyoti Basu to Mao, that one of the characters, Digital Dutta, idolises.  

Corridor zigzags among a tapestry of characters, shifting through nooks and crannies of both Old and New Delhi. Banerjee is a skilful weaver of vignettes. The novel immediately distinguishes its fragmented nature with kitschy interruptions galore. No cue breaks up the sections, its setting-jumps whimsical and erratic. There’s no aesthetic uniformity. At one point we find ourselves hard-pressed in a South Delhi party, packed with intellectuals and artists. In these, there’s a whole lot of posturing, insincerity and superficiality. There’s no lingering, just a string of snapshots inserting us into various moods of the day at far-stretched corners. The dawn-quiet of Jama Masjid, before the prayer calls begin and the city erupts, feels as vivid as the by-lanes of Old Delhi that Shintu strays through.  

Corridor was published in the heyday of liberalisation. The markets had just opened up. Appetites for a Western style of living shot up. The novel bottles this frenzied rush, a consumerist surge. What does this plethora of choices connote? The space for private recreation is an endless negotiation; rather, the boundaries between the public and private increasingly dissipate even as the neoliberal constructs draw up more divisions. “Delhi is the city of couples”, and Bhrigu “prefers being single”. In Delhi or any city, intimacy and pleasure find no shelter at home. Parks become a refuge. Rangoonwala’s bookshop is another space where the public and private blend. In spite of the congestion, characters feel comfortable enough to exchange the most intimate secrets. It’s an open space, with the warm intimacy of a home. In Corridor, Banerjee is disruptive and playful in his canvas on urban alienation, but you’ll find glimpses of wry affection throughout.