The Tale of the Missing Man

“Zamir Ahmed Khan was an emotional, hypersensitive soul who didn’t get with the program or put his best foot forward in a smart, deliberate way. Instead, he stumbled.”

In Manzoor Ahtesham’s The Tale of the Missing Man, protagonist Zamir has a mysterious illness characterized by debilitating ennui. It’s become so bad, in fact, that he’s jobless and his wife and his children have left him. Zamir’s story weaves in and out of the past and the present – in the present things go slowly from bad to worse, while in the past we see small, banal scenes only heavy because we know where they lead. He has a schoolboy crush, but learns the girl is otherwise engaged; he and his best friend part ways for further education, and his best friend doesn’t stay in touch as promised; he falls in with small-time crooks, one of whom goes to the USA and one of whom, after defrauding him, marries into his extended family. He doesn’t agree with the religious fervor of the student protestors around him, but he’s not areligious, and along the way, he gradually falls shorter and shorter of his Muslim ideals: he drinks, not just once but again and again; he has an affair and then has a series of those, too. He does achieve his literary goals, somewhat, by having short stories published in literary journals, but he uses pseudonyms and never tells anyone. The story starts with him seeing yet another doctor to try and get help, realizing that it’s the same doctor he started with, and ends with an epilogue in which we learn that when he does try to retrieve his family, he’s unsuccessful – not least because on the night of the Union Carbide tragedy, he’d been on one of his desultory not-quite-benders, a more serious example of a lack of presence.

And yet the book is not sorrowful at all. This is primarily because of the ‘authorial’ intrusions, where a narrator interjects, framing the novel as one not only about the minor tragedy of a misspent life, but as one about the major tragedy of a misspent half-century of Indian independence. We stop wondering if perhaps this is a book about mental health, and instead think of Zamir as we are explicitly told to: as a ‘missing man:’ a non-autobiographical authorial not-quite alter ego, someone the author feels viscerally connected to but cannot quite see clearly. So there are several layers here, dampening the sentimental aspect of the story and heightening the philosophical. Zamir feels like a carbon copy of himself; the author feels like Zamir is a non-copy double, Zamir and his best friend are the Hindu-Muslim sides of a coin called ‘conscience’ (as their names mean) and all of these senses of self are tied inextricably, but not neatly, to the collective. As the India around Zamir progresses in a way that leaves no room for reflection, no room for anyone but those able to keep their eyes on the economic prize, we are led to wonder: what, indeed, could have been?

The Tale of the Missing Man is quite well known in the original, and Grunebaum and Stark (who, full disclosure, were amongst my professors at the University of Chicago) capture the geographical and class specificities of tone very well, while also creating a version that requires no previous knowledge of Hindi or of Bhopal – though one can expect anyone who reads this novel to want to read more about the city that plays such a large role in this work.