For a novel so steeped in old-school ideas about art and friendship, Annie Zaidi’s The Comeback is quite sharp when it comes to depicting a decidedly contemporary phenomenon—the passive-aggressive Instagram spiral. When you really, really want one particular person to listen these days, you scream your lungs out in front of millions. I have done it myself and, to paraphrase poet Allen Ginsberg, I have seen the best minds of my generation naked and hysterical in their worship of the online blood-God.
Rising Bollywood star John K, the narrator-protagonist of The Comeback, has just found out that his estranged friend Asghar has returned to their shared first love: theatre. Desperate to get into Asghar’s good books and his troupe again, John starts shooting increasingly elaborate Instagram videos of himself performing classic stage monologues—the Brutus speech from Julius Caesar on a hilltop, Portia’s “quality of mercy” speech next to the Statue of Liberty, and so on. This sequence rings especially true because this is precisely how millennials, a generation raised on virtual “connections”, would approach conflict resolution in real time.
The Comeback begins with the event that tears John K and Asghar asunder—flush from the success of his first major film, John participates in an ill-advised “tell-all” interview with a journalist. During the interview, he blurts out that in college, he helped Asghar cheat on an economics exam. After the story is published, Asghar loses his bank job and returns to his native Baansa (in Uttar Pradesh) to resurrect his old theatre troupe, which in turn puts his marriage under serious pressure. As John K—who is really Jaun Kazim underneath the freshly acquired Bollywood bluster—realises the scale and implications of his blunder, he looks back at his life and thinks, who else might I have wronged along the way?
Out of this central conflict, Zaidi gently unfurls several interlocked questions about art, friendship and the perpetually ugly business of making a living. Is “true” or “honest” art necessarily decoupled from the needs of the marketplace? Is the converse true, then, especially in a vastly inequitable country like India? What does “performance” even mean for a person pathologically incapable of being honest with themselves or their closest friends?
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Consider the story of John helping Asghar cheat during a college examination. Zaidi does a great job of describing how John talks his friend (who would rather study for his economics exam) into writing another college play for him—John makes him believe he’s different and special because of his grasp of literature and stagecraft. It’s classic abuser methodology, using an honest feeling (Asghar is super-talented, after all) to do dishonest work (nudging Asghar to act against his self-interest). “Anybody could write an economics exam but only Asghar could direct a fine play,” as John says.
One cannot overstate how devastating that last line is, sociologically speaking, especially for Indian millennials like Asghar and John. This is the Great Lie that a generation was told in the wake of India’s economy opening up to the world; that each of them was unique and special and deserved unique, special things in life, if only they could buckle down and grit their teeth through a nebulous process of “self-discovery”.
This is also why every 30-something with a DSLR (or the oxymoronic “adult colouring book”) loves to pontificate about art, while bristling at those who advise studying the craft first. Art is unique and special whereas craft is what the neighbourhood carpenter does and we can’t respect that, surely? Unless said carpenter can make wine from water, of course.
As the novel moves on, John realises that amidst his pretensions about art and transparent sense of ambition, he had lost sight of his craft. I loved the passages where John slowly realises how acting is a job like any other in the world, where you have to keep turning up day after day, plugging away at seemingly mundane tasks until a larger goal is accomplished. In other words, John learns the true meaning of “making a living”.
The novel’s engine room might be all about male bonding and the male tendency to avoid confrontation in friendships but it is The Comeback’s women who will leave the reader with a smile, through the sheer strength and robustness of their characterisation.
Asghar’s mother Shakeela, renowned as the “60 percent Ma’am”, is a famed tutor who promises to drag dullards across the pass-mark threshold. John’s ex-wife Sejal continues to be the closest thing to a confidante he has in his isolation. Asghar’s formidable wife Zubi rebrands nankhatai as “Awadhi cookies” with interesting results.
The Comeback gives all these characters—and its anti-heroic leading man—well-defined arcs that wrap up satisfactorily in the end, without delving into wish fulfilment territory. This is an accomplished, compulsively readable short novel that may force you to take a good look at your own dormant friendships.
Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based writer.
