Karan Mahajan’s ‘The Complex’

Karan Mahajan’s The Complex was disappointing. It started with a bang. Gita, visiting her husband’s family home in Delhi, is raped by her husband’s uncle during a wedding. The narrative then shifts to her guilt, rage and the alienation that American cities are so good at generating. She dabbles in love outside her marriage, only for it to collapse in a heap.

One of the strange things about people who travel so much is that even they forget that they are the same people no matter where they go, that immigration does not lead to rebirth. It simple multiplies disappointments, give you a new start with the same lousy material.

Until this point, I was hooked.

Then the story shifts to Delhi in the early 1980s. The uncle has a fling with Gita’s other sister-in-law. The Licence Raj, the anti-Sikh riots, the Mandal protests, the Ram Janmabhoomi movement and all the other tropes of that decade are thrown into the cauldron, to little avail.

Like his previous work, The Association of Small Bombs, this too was mediocre.