| BOOKS: INREVIEW
Of Pox and Puppets
By
Shailaja Neelakantan/NEW DELHI
Issue cover-dated June 14, 2003
The Brainfever Bird,
by I. Allan Sealy
At the beginning of The Brainfever Bird, a Russian specialist
in biological warfare arrives in Delhi to sell a briefcase full
of deadly secrets. On the way to his hotel, unknown robbers
ambush the scientist's taxi and steal his terrible creations.
Once this might have been the setup for a juicy thriller. But
with the region's safest cities still reeling under quarantine
conditions, and the specter of anthrax and smallpox never quite
forgotten, this is hardly territory for escapism. These are
interesting times.
Suitably, I Allan Sealy, the Indian author of The Brainfever
Bird, infuses the conventional scenario with the philosophical
seriousness, the moral dilemma, that separates literature from
pulp fiction. Lev Repin, Sealy's protagonist, is at once villain
and hero. His career scuttled by the end of the Cold War, Repin's
pride compels him to resort to selling his disastrous secrets.
In Russia, he was reduced to working as a chauffeur.
The destruction of his world leaves him with little guilt about
the threat his treasures represent to the one that replaced
it. "You do some plague, some anthrax. Then maybe some
virus. Smallpox, Ebola, Marburg," he explains callously.
Yet he remains tormented by nightmares of his colleague, Meschersky,
who inadvertently infected himself with the virus Kurile-D,
"the living face of death". Even his ruminations about
his past are filled with the metaphors of disease. "Youth
is a country," he reflects. "I used to live there.
The inhabitants are determined to emigrate, exiles long to return.
But the borders are sealed, as if the plague had broken out
there and the United Nations had sent highly paid soldiers to
patrol the passes."
Lepin and Meschersky are characters inspired by the real-life
players Ken Alibek and Nikolai Ustinov in author Richard Preston's
1998 New Yorker article "The Bioweaponeers". Alibek
has a Doctor of Sciences degree in anthrax and was a deputy
chief of research and production for the Soviet biological-weapons
program known as Biopreparat. He defected to the United States
in 1992 and is quoted in the article as saying that the diaspora
of biologists who came out of Russia after the breakup of the
Soviet Union could have ended up anywhere: in Iraq, Syria, Libya,
China, Iran, perhaps Israel, perhaps India. In the article Alibek
also talked about the terrifying death of his colleague Nikolai
Ustinov, who was accidentally infected with the Marburg virus.
Taking off from this event, Sealy, with his vivid metaphors
and distinctive prose style, spins a grim, modern tale reflecting
the zeitgeist.
Repin strives to pinpoint the moment he went wrong, recasting
his education as a descent into death and decay. "Sometimes
he returns in his mind to those jars of soused organs, diseased
tissue on display: the riddled liver of a serf who wrestled
for Tsar Nicholas; a Decembrist brain withered in dementia to
a coral; a pair of eyes that saw defeat at Mukden reddened to
maraschino cherries. A lung in cross-section with asbestos deposits
rich as marrowfat peas ... As if it was there, by the jars,
that they took him up, into militant biology."
While Repin's thoughts on economic and moral decline drive
the novel, the setting, a fetid, pulsating Old Delhi, provides
the perfect landscape. Here is a place that is constantly reinventing
itself, even as it carries with it the burden of history. Sealy
has immortalized the walled city of masseurs, Unani practitioners,
wrestling matches, Karim's kebabs, puppet shows and sidewalk
book sales in a way no one has ever done in English.
In the midst of Repin's quest to get to the Defense Ministry,
a plague breaks out in the walled city of Old Delhi. The epidemic
subsides, having taken its toll, but mysteriously, the needle
of suspicion, as it were, points to Repin. Urchins on the even
call him "plague-master". Lepin is now being followed
by a masseur who he suspects is more than just that and he narrowly
avoids being castrated by an adolescent who lost his brother
to the plague. While watching a puppet show, Repin is called
aside and told his life is in danger and that he should go home.
On the way, a man on a scooter chucks a jar full of acid on
Repin's face, disfiguring him. He's taken to hospital, from
where he suddenly disappears.
Unlike his deceptively calm 1998 Booker Prize short-listed
novel The Everest Hotel, Sealy's new book crackles at a furious
pace. In the novel, United Nations weapons inspectors have been
cleverly put off the scent of Repin's biological weapons, and
if that hits too close to home, the account of the plague (much
like severe acute respiratory syndrome) that sweeps Delhi is
pure novelistic foresight. The Brainfever Bird is a story about
the often scary world we now inhabit.
The Brainfever Bird, by I Allan Sealy, Picador 2003. ISBN:
0330412051. Price US$26, 320 pages.
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