Mr. Smith Goes to Delhi

If you seek the face of India — or perhaps a nice shirt, sari, necklace, stuffed paratha, air conditioner, television set or water pump — look no farther than Chandni Chowk. That centuries-old market near old Delhi’s famed Red Fort is a crumbling warren of shops, food stalls, shrines, temples and mosques. Indians of varying ethnic and religious hues work and worship alongside each other in grudging harmony, sharing a common language: money.

So it is perhaps not surprising that Sujit Saraf chose Chandni Chowk as the main setting for his ambitious 750-page novel of politics, commerce and manners in modern India. The Peacock Throne does for Delhi and democracy what Vikram Chandra’s recent 900-page Sacred Games does for Mumbai (formerly Bombay) and organized crime. Or what 19th century European novelists did when economic and intellectual winds howled: produce teeming, sprawling, barn-burning novels that try to describe everything in sight. The surprise is that Saraf is not, strictly speaking, a novelist. He works full-time as a space scientist for a U.S. defense contractor. Writing is a sideline.

There is nothing offhand about The Peacock Throne, named after the Red Fort seat from which the 17th century Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan held sway over all Hindustan. Saraf casts a scientist’s eye on the country of his birth and finds it still preoccupied with holding sway. He starts with Indira Gandhi’s 1984 assassination by Sikh bodyguards and the spasm of anti-Sikh violence that ensued. Kartar Singh, a Sikh who runs a Chandni Chowk appliance store, narrowly escapes death in the rioting — and leverages that experience to gain influence in a Hindu nationalist party. “He has a limp and a charred signboard — wounds that even a Member of Parliament would covet,” a rival notes wryly. “It is wonderful what a riot can do for a man.”

The author directs similar scrutiny at the failings of ngos (“a business that never turns a profit”), the rise of caste-based parties “and their belligerent, cocky, supremely confident demagogues,” and the hypocritical worship of the common man. “We want Oxbridge Indians in our Parliament,” a cynical journalist opines. “Who invited the common man — safely eulogized in speeches but otherwise locked away in ugly towns and uglier villages — to speak?”

One such man does pipe up: a half-blind tea seller named Gopal Pandey. Like Zelig in a dhoti, he has a walk-on part in every major upheaval of the past two decades. Eventually, Kartar Singh’s party tries to capitalize on Gopal’s iconic ordinariness by running him for Parliament. “Symbols,” a jealous opponent observes, “are all some people have to eat and drink.”

Saraf should know. Born in Bihar of a successful merchant family, he was the very embodiment of India’s technology-fueled future, studying and later teaching science at Delhi’s prestigious Indian Institute of Technology. He also spent time at Berkeley, where he met the American who is now his wife and the mother of their infant daughter. “I have an uncle who owns shops in Chandni Chowk,” says Saraf, 37, from his home in San Jose, California. “When I was in high school, I lived above one of them. I actually saw some of the incidents in the book.”

Likewise, Pandey is no mere invention. “In the 1990s, I read a newspaper article about a tailor in Calcutta who stood for every election,” Saraf recalls. “He always lost but considered it his duty to run. I wondered, What if he won? There are a number of films, like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, in which a golden-hearted fool has an awkward brush with the levers of government. Those films usually end with a warm and fuzzy feeling. Obviously, I do not hold Indian democracy to such high standards.”

Saraf’s own standards are astronautical. He spends his days designing satellite controls for space missions at Lockheed Martin. Evenings, he runs Naatak, a theater company he co-founded in 1995 to produce plays and movies, some of which he writes and acts in, for Silicon Valley’s large South Asian population. A first novel published in India sank like a samosa, but The Peacock Throne is on several hot-new-books lists in the U.K. A French edition will appear next year, and a U.S. sale is imminent. “I’m now working on a fictionalized biography of my great-grandfather, a merchant from Bihar who journeyed to East Bengal and accumulated a large family and great wealth,” says the indefatigable Saraf. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that the journey will be long and eventful.