SANJAY NIGAMS first novel The Snake Charmer was published in ...
Sonalal, the Delhi snake charmer at the center of The Snake Charmer, has one true friend in the world-his aging but still agile cobra, Raju, a genius of herpetological dance. But Sonalal makes two mistakes that change his life. The first, a minor one, is a discordant note he blows in an otherwise brilliant improvisation, a note that enrages the defanged cobra and leads him to bite the charmer. Sonalal, in reciprocal rage, bites the snake in two. His companion, his livelihood-his "eldest son"-is gone.
Perhaps I shouldn't describe this pivotal and horrifying moment, but it happens early, on page nine of the novel, and is central to everything that follows. For Sonalal is a small man with one grand idea: that of being the foremost snake charmer in India, something he believes he had already achieved with Raju, though unrecognized beyond himself. And he believes that his final improvisation, despite that single discord, was the pinnacle of his career, a height he may never reach again.
Except...Sonalal may be a great man with too small an expectation of his life, an artist of the finest luster beset by the limitations of poverty, the nattering of his henpecking wife, Sarita, and the inability of the modern world to see the art embodied in a grand tradition now reduced to a tourist attraction.
Sonalal himself vacillates between these views, and the reader has no objective way to judge his worth. Everything in his life turns on circumstance, the most obvious roads of advancement and retreat doubling back on themselves, sometimes emphasizing, as often denying the idea of destiny with their ambiguous signposts.
His bizarre murder of Raju brings Sonalal the national celebrity that his art could not. It delivers transitory wealth and a studied peace with Sarita but no lasting satisfaction. Yet as his fame leaks away with time, its absence opens other possibilities-all unlikely to be realized. He visits charlatans of pseudo-science and returns from them to make garbled, hilarious pronouncements to his natural sons, whom he too long neglected for his more beloved son, Raju. In these moments is he a prime fool or victim of a strangled, inverted wisdom?
Legend tells that the mate of a slaughtered cobra will seek inescapable revenge. Sonalal believes and fears this inevitability. But when the inevitable does not materialize, its failure only inflates his sense of guilt and devastation. So Sonalal seeks out the mate to receive his just punishment. But even that cannot proceed as destined.
Sarita, who seems at first simply a harridan, gradually reveals an impacted love for Sonalal. Her simmering anger is directed not so much against his person as against his inability to uncover the unnamable aspect of him that she values. And through all the unenlightening switchbacks of his life, Sonalal returns, like a blundering moth, to the sweet flame of Reena, a prostitute who treasures the core of decency in him that he fears may not exist.
The style and plotting of The Snake Charmer are distinctly different from those of an American or English novel. You might think you were visiting the heart of Eastern philosophy: There are no answers in life, only questions that beget ever more convoluted questions. So it's surprising to find that Nigam, though born in India, came to the U.S. as an infant, and that his fiction is a sideline to a career in medical research. His knowledge of Delhi comes from continuing visits to his grandparents. His knowledge of the agony and absurd humor of the human condition, though, is distinctly his own.