Book Review: In Pankaj Mishra’s ‘Run and Hide’, an Imbalanced Look at Worlds Within and Without

It is easy, when confronted with what feels like a constant tsunami of bad news – both personal and political, bringing with it precarities financial and social – to turn completely inwards, to place your own angst above all else. That self-involved angst though, most who have felt it come to realise, serves no one, perhaps least of all yourself; it makes you forget, in most cases temporarily, that finding solidarity and connection, love and belonging, purpose and meaning, is possible only when at least one eye is turned outwards.

If that angst – easy to understand in yourself and in others, though sometimes hard to forgive – were a novel, it would be Pankaj Mishra’s Run and Hide.

Mishra’s return to fiction after a gap of two decades shines in ways that his prolific non-fiction has in the interim: in its understanding of a changing India and the rise of a populist, right-wing Hindu leader with no qualms about banking on violence; and its understanding of an unchanging India, with continuing violence based on identities of caste, class, religion and gender, in ways both subtle and explicit.

Mishra’s prose, in Run and Hide, has the clarity and descriptive prowess of a non-fiction writer combined with the artful metaphors and lilt of a novelist. Particularly in the many moments when the narrator returns to memories of his childhood, Mishra’s use of language reveals his brilliance. In others, though, the scene is almost over-explained – with each detail of a setting described so minutely that the larger picture is blurry.

Run and Hide sets out to describe the crises this India can create for an individual, particularly one able to climb the elusive ladder of social mobility, and that too on his own terms. But in latching on to this one man’s very personal, even individualistic, angst, the light that the book could have shone on contemporary society hits a black wall inside the narrator’s head.

The narrator and protagonist, Arun, is an IIT graduate who grew up in a small town centred around a railway junction. His main aim seems to be to escape his past, which he is unable to reconcile with his transformed present. Yet that past has, of course, shaped who he is – and so running away from it, but running towards nothing in particular, does little to lessen his alienation.

Arun is writing this book as a memoir; but also as a letter to a woman he left – an explanation of the many parts of himself he was unable to share with her. He met Alia through his IIT classmate and friend, Aseem, who too rejected the traditional corporate doors that opened after their degree and instead chose to use the contacts built in that time to start a literary and investigative publication. A third classmate – Virendra – too plays a recurring role. A Dalit, Virendra faced humiliation and discrimination during his time in IIT; after graduating, however, he is the most traditionally successful of them all, building a career in finance in the US before he is arrested for insider trading.

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As a result of the novel being entirely in Arun’s voice, the reader too is trapped in the narrator’s private, even selfish, angst. Though the book is supposed to be multi-charactered, Arun’s predisposition to being excessively fascinated by his own thoughts makes him an unworthy narrator of the lives of others; even by the end of the 300+ pages, the other characters feel like people you have bumped into a few times but been unable to get to know. Mishra fails to provide us with a different or deeper understanding of their individuality, their choices, their trajectories.

Instead – perhaps to drive home the point that they are all ‘grey’ characters, playing their own part in ensuring that unequal structures of power stay just the way they are – everyone other than Arun is defined by simplistic binaries and contradictions. Alia grew up rich, and still lives a lavish life on her parents’ money; yet is convinced she needs to leave her own mark on the world and insecure that she may not succeed. Aseem becomes famous for his investigations in Kashmir on human rights abuses by state forces; yet his big Delhi parties are attended by people accused of similar crimes against the marginalised. Virendra has made it a point to leave behind the country that treated him and his family as worthy of only oppression and instead amass wealth through any means possible; yet in his will, he leaves money to organisations fighting discrimination of the kind he faced.

That Arun chooses to see and describe his friends this way says something about him: that even when it came to those closest to him, or those who had the biggest impact on his life, he was unable to look outward for long enough to discover the nuance and depth that each individual contains. It also says something about the book: being preoccupied with explaining Arun’s internal contradictions and feelings, it did not take the time to shine the same kind of light on the world he inhabited.

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Of course, it is entirely common for authors to choose one person – whether or not they are using the first person – through whose perceptions, opinions and interactions readers enter the described world. In the most successful of such novels, the author is able to strike a balance between exploring the internal workings of this narrator or protagonist and creating a convincing picture of the society they live in.

The themes of Run and Hide, combined with the writer and thinker that Mishra is, could have been a portrait of our times, weighed down by the baggage of history, vexed by the wirings of the present, yet searching for silver linings of the future. Instead, it is more an incomplete portrait of one man’s mind – a portrait only of what he thinks about himself, and not of how he interacts with the world. That, perhaps, is what makes it difficult to really feel the depth of the troubles Mishra is writing about. Because fiction, like life, craves a self-aware engagement with the outside world.

This article was first published on The Wire.

Featured image: Pariplab Chakraborty