How many of us ever get a chance to follow our dreams? Even rarer, to double back on life, to go back to square one, and follow a passion rather than a profession. In an India where an emphasis on bland academics, on being an engineer-doctor-lawyer-banker-civil servant still holds sway, a profession in the arts is often frowned upon. Worse still would be a profession in the performing arts: nautanki is a pejorative. In such a situation, for a banker to go back to his passion—theatre—and that too in a small town is a novel, daring idea.
Annie Zaidi’s The Comeback: A Novel is a story about such a person: Asghar, nearing 40, a married man, father of two daughters, and a banker in Lucknow. ‘Successful’ in the conventional way of middle-class India, Asghar’s life receives a jolt when his best friend, the now well-known film actor John K, gives an interview. Reminiscing about college life and college theatre, John talks about Asghar doing stage productions in college, at the expense of studying for his exams. John laughingly confesses that he helped Asghar in the exams by standing outside the window and telling him the answers. And just because of that, Asghar’s bank now fires him, claiming that his graduate degree is invalid.
Told from the point of view of John (who is actually Jaun Kazim; ‘John K’ is his stage name), The Comeback takes off from this point. Asghar goes back to his hometown, the fictitious Baansa, not too far from Lucknow. Far away in Mumbai, John tries to deal with the guilt of having wrecked his friend’s career. John’s desperation builds when he realises how badly his carelessness has affected Asghar: not merely in a practical sense, but emotionally. John’s increasingly wild attempts to get through to Asghar, to apologise, to find out what Asghar is doing (setting up a theatre company in Baansa) and to revive that old friendship play out against a backdrop of show business in Mumbai and in Baansa.
Zaidi’s background in theatre holds her in good stead as she sets the scene in The Comeback; the vividity with which she evokes the space, the characters, and every little detail could only have been done by someone who feels deeply about her subject. Small-town India comes to life in a matter-of-fact way that does not exoticise the mofussil. The storyline is absorbing, the characters well-etched, and the narrative written in a light, often witty style that is immensely readable.
What really stands out is Zaidi’s ability to plumb the depths of human emotion, to understand and to depict how we think and behave, and what moves us and how. In the hands of a less skilled writer, this could have been a simple tale of an attempt to recover an old, damaged friendship. Zaidi blends into it so many nuances, so many interesting shades of meaning, the story becomes something more.
There are John’s struggles with his own self, his desires, and his guilt: the guilt attached to his overweening ambition, for instance, which has led him, over the years, to betray other people, too, not just Asghar. There is, too, his (long-suppressed) love for theatre and the lurking knowledge that it is in theatre, not in the glittering world of cinema, that John will find his true sense of accomplishment. And, of course, there is John’s very deep affection for Asghar.
But entwined amidst all of this remorse and afterthought, there is John’s own ego, his own need to ‘show Asghar’ and, perhaps, to show the world (and himself?) that he, John K, is not a one-trick pony who can play the villain in film and OTT over and over again.
The Comeback is a short book, less than two hundred pages long. It’s an easy, quick read, yet it manages to be that rare thing, the book that entertains while making you think. It talks—with a light hand—of universal truths like betrayal and friendship, ambition and selfishness, passion and duty, privileges attached to gender, and much more, yet in a wonderfully subtle way. You won’t regret reading this one.