The Song of Kahunsha: A Dream for Bombay

Anosh Irani

Reviewed by Niranjana Iyer

Bombay, it seems, is a persistent muse. Decades after leaving the city's shores for orderly lands far away, the imaginations of Rohinton Mistry, Salman Rushdie, and Suketu Mehta (to name but a few) are still compelled by the city's exuberance and squalor. Vancouver-based Anosh Irani now joins the ranks of the Bombay-inspired with his novel The Song of Kahunsha (Doubleday Canada, 2006).

Chamdi, who has spent all his ten years in a Bombay orphanage, has a dream. Who doesn't? This is especially the case in Bombay, a city which on a daily basis scoops hundreds of people in search of a future into its grip. Chamdi's dream, however, is not for himself, but for Bombay. He envisions a city shorn of all sorrows where flowers bloom everywhere, police-tigers roam the streets to forestall crime, clean rainwater gushes out from every tap, and everyone lives in harmony. The name of this mythical place is Kahunsha, "the city of no sadness."

When Chamdi runs away from the orphanage to live on the city's streets, however, he soon realizes how distant that dream is: Bombay is pitiless, and he is starving. Just as Chamdi is about to faint from hunger, though, two seasoned street-dwellers offer him help. Sumdi and Guddi, a brother and sister duo his own age who make their living through begging, give Chamdi food and shelter.

Chamdi initially reads as a rather precious character. He possesses an abundance of noble qualities—all of which, egregiously, are revealed in his musings on life and religion, rather than through plot development. This ten-year-old thus believes "real prayer means sending a bright thought, like 'thank you' or 'I love you' to heaven." He sends this thought to god: "I promise to try to be happy." Chamdi even acknowledges that he's better off than many others: "blind people, or children with diseases, or even stray dogs with so many holes in their bodies." Irani tries too hard to make us warm to Chamdi, and the result is an orphan who's more Pollyanna than Oliver Twist.

Once Chamdi meets Sumdi and Guddi, however, the story ceases all attempts at sentiment and hits its stride. Under Sumdi's no-nonsense tutelage, Chamdi learns to beg for coins at the traffic stoplights. There's a wonderful episode where Chamdi tells Sumdi a story in return for getting to keep his first ever earnings from begging. That story, "The Boy Whose Ribs Became Tusks and Left His Body," alone is worth the price of this book. Irani's gifts as a storyteller burn at their full wattage in this episode.

Begging is difficult, dangerous work—and not just because the children must dart through the traffic and swallow the pollution from the exhaust fumes in the blistering heat of Bombay. The beggars report to Anand Bhai, a vicious underworld don, for whom slicing away the eye of an errant accomplice is all in a day's work.

Sumdi and Guddi have long nursed a plan to steal the offerings from a nearby temple and use the money to escape from Anand Bhai. Chamdi would be the perfect accomplice—he is a fast runner and also thin enough to slip through the temple's window bars. Feeling beholden to the siblings, Chamdi reluctantly agrees to the scheme. Fate, however, intervenes; the day of the planned robbery, Bombay is hit by bomb blasts.

The Song of Kahunsha is best read as Irani's emotional response to a beloved city's pain, rather than a reasoned dissection of the 1993 Bombay riots. The author details the horror of those days through the uncomprehending eyes of the young protagonist. Chamdi, caught in the middle, is a helpless participant in the religious violence engulfing the city. And his situation is even more poignant given that as an orphan of unknown parentage, he belongs to no religious community: he is merely "Chamdi," identified by no more than his skin. Even as Bombay turns malignant, Chamdi struggles to hold on to his dream of Kahunsha; a metaphor, perhaps, of the city's struggle for peace in the aftermath of its terror.

The prose sometimes sags. Irani has a tendency to explain everything, and then tack on a summarizing sentence, to make sure that the reader "really" understands. A sample: "He [Chamdi] wonders what would happen if the orphanage were in the heart of Bombay. He would have to hear buses rumble in a mighty manner all day long. Jyoti has told him that the buses of Bombay have no respect for human beings. His own eyes have marked how cruel buses are to humans—they prevent people from getting on, and the people who do get on are forced to hang from the buses in the most dangerous manner."

The lack of authorial polish, however, doesn't diminish the impact of the novel. Irani's flights of imagination are often wondrous—Kahunsha is a lovely creation—and his empathy with his characters intense. Above all, this book is suffused with the sights and smells of Bombay; every page reveals that the author's love for the city is nothing short of enormous. It is hard not to be moved by the ardor with which Irani serves his muse.