The Temple-Goers, journalist Aatish Taseer’s debut novel, is a novel about friendships that cross socio-economic barriers, the distinction between the rich and the poor, ambition and pride, lust, love, religious faith,bitter hatred and the struggle for cohesive national identity in contemporary, postcolonial Delhi. The divide of traditional beliefs and practices collide with the contemporary and modern beliefs and practices brought to India by student émigrés shape the difficulties of developing a cohesive cultural and national identity. In The Temple-Goers, these issues are explored through the relationships of a privileged writer named Aatish Taseer who befriends an ambitious, significantly poorer young man, Aakash. Aakash’s assimilation into Aatish’s world sets in motion a number of irreparable changes in both of their lives.

Delhi drawing rooms. They were what I remembered of the city from my childhood. Perhaps it was Delhi’s fragmented geography, or that it had no real restaurants the way Bombay had – restaurants that were not attached to five-star hotels – or just that it was an old city, closely bound, with people who all seemed to know each other, but there was no setting, no cityscape more evocative of the city I grew up in than a lamp-lit drawing room with a scattering of politicians, journalists, broken-down royals, and perhaps an old Etonian, lying fatly on a deep sofa. And it was a dinner like this, with two blue and red glass fanooses burning in a corner, jasmine floating in a porcelain dish on a dining table draped in a white tablecloth, with white-on-white chikan-work flowers embroidered on it, and the over-strong aroma of a scented candle, that my mother gave for the writer.

After a stint in London, Aatish returns to Delhi to revise his novel, he spends his time with his devoted girlfriend, Sanyogita, and attend numerous parties and events. Recommended a gym by a family friend, he meets the enigmatic trainer Aakash. The two build a friendship which seems to be based on mutual admiration or envy of the other. Aakash, though living in a poor area of Delhi and with no entry into the privileged world that Aatish lives in, manages to integrate with Aatish’s social circle and significantly improve his social standing. Throughout the novel the writing is lushly floral and colourful, as Aatish casts a watchful and aware eye over his surroundings, both those familiar and unknown.

The light in Delhi had changed; it came now from another angle, and far from striking the surface of buildings, seemed to lose its footing on rooftops and columns. And though it was warm, you could sit in it for hours without breaking into a sweat. Hazy and scented with smoke, it rose like a glow from the city, heightening the sensory power of the Delhi winter. The bougainvillea, the occasional smell of kebabs, the wail of a garbage collector created so acute an impression that it was as if some part of an old photograph, having shed the inertia of years, had gently begun to move.

Using himself, or a fictionalized version of himself, characterized as a writer allows Taseer to subtly provide an interesting form of self-criticism, in a way preempting any criticism from the reader. It’s a clever technique, but not used to excess. Aatish receives the long awaited readers notes from the revised version of his novel; Aatish and Sanyogita discuss the merits of the work of Aatish’s writer friend and mentor; Zafar, Aatish’s Urdu teacher and renowned poet, and the writer friend provide him with writing advice – all of these incidences add a touch of self-awareness to the text. Not enough to distance the reader from the powerful narrative, but enough to give reason and evidence as to why The Temple-Goers is written as it is.

His face brightened. ‘Writing something modern, I hope,’ he said, ‘something fresh and original.’ Then using the English words ‘fiction’ and ‘non-fiction’ in both instances to mean fiction, good and bad, he said, ‘In the way men live today, the pressures upon them – and there are great strains and injustices – you’ll find fiction. The past is all non-fiction.’
‘And write in English?’
‘In English,’ he answered firmly. ‘The Indian languages are finished; or, at least, literature in them is finished. When I began there were magazines, poetry meetings, the progressive writers were still around, poets could write for the screen, there were readers, libraries, critics – all gone, swept away in one generation. It’s a very fragile thing, you know, literature; it needs an infrastructure. You can’t spend your life writing into the dark like me.’

The blurb and prologue of The Temple-Goers hint at a highly televised murder which doesn’t really come to the forefront of the narrative until the last fifty pages. While I did enjoy the rest of the novel, the gradual build up of Aatish and Aakash’s relationship and the gradual decay of Aatish and Sanyogita’s relationship, the vivid imagery of an India still trying to find it’s identity and the profound schism between the country’s rich and poor – the set-up in the promotional material or the introductory chapter of the supposedly crucial murder (and, presumably, who committed the crime, and all the how and why questions that come along with it) creates an expectation which is never quite fulfilled. When the murder and its wide reaching repercussions do reach their climax, it feels all too rushed, given the languid time spent on all the other details of the narrative. This horrific event, the brutal murder of a character we have come to know not intimately, but enough to feel the shock, however predictable it is, and the ways in which the convictions play out are accelerated so much that their effects aren’t as deeply felt as other aspects of the novel. Perhaps this expedited account is to suggest the stark difference between the daily realities of Delhi and how quickly events can change our circumstances, our relationships and our friendships. Regardless, I wish it had been drawn out more, reading another two hundred pages of Taseer’s vibrant writing would have been a pleasure.

A compelling narrative about friendships and rapacious ambition, and a portrait of a modern, changing India, The Temple-Goers really surprised me. From the promotional material and vague recollections of interviews and brief mentions in articles, along with the publicist-ready catchphrase of “the Indian Bret Easton Ellis”, I expected something a lot more dry, amoral and disconnected. Instead, The Temple-Goers offers a rich insight into another culture undergoing an immense shift, while personalizing this through understandably flawed and conflicted characters.

[Disclaimer: publisher supplied advance reading copy. An extract of The Temple-Goers is available online.]