If You Are Afraid of Heights

A haunting novel which takes the reader to new heights on the back of a crow, Jha's latest novel tells three mysterious and unsettling stories from three points of view, all with overlapping imagery. Neither realistic nor magical, Jha creates a whole new realm here, the world that exists between dream and nightmare, and between imagination and memory, which all of us inhabit for most of our everyday lives. Motifs (a crow, a red dress, a brown dog, a house with a balcony that looks like a frown) appear and reappear throughout the three different sections, with each part recreating the inner world of a different character. In the first section, Amir, a young man who has been injured by a tram, is nursed back to health by Rima, a young woman who brings him back to her apartment, gets him a doctor, and makes sure that all his needs are met so that he can recuperate in peace. In the second section, Mala, a young newspaper reporter, has gone to a distant village to investigate the death of a child, who has drowned in a canal after being raped. The final section returns to the city where a neighborhood has suffered a rash of suicides. A young child is worried that her parents might kill themselves and confides in a friend, who promises to follow her father and mother. Two italicized prologues and a brief conclusion summarize the novel thematically, while the first person narratives illustrate the sensual responses of Amir, Mala, and the child to what is going on around them and provide insights into their emotional states. The novel requires the reader to form hypotheses about what is happening and how the characters connect, with the author confirming the connections and the meaning of the novel in the conclusion, which draws all the visual details and motifs together. Jha emphasizes the process by which we all bring order and "sense" to our lives, how we live our dreams, and how we deal with our fears and our memories. The reader must be committed to letting this impressionistic novel unwind, accepting the mysteries that exist, as they do in our own lives, without worrying about the characters or the direction of the "plot." The author fills in any blanks at the end. Unique in its approach and fascinating in its construction, this novel captures the essence of its characters' lives and connects directly with the reader's own inner life. In this, it achieves a universality rare in fiction. Mary Whipple

In the first prologue of two, Jha hints at the mysterious nature of the tales to come, a reminder that things are always more complicated than they appear and infinite layers reside between vision and reality. To get the full impact of this novel, one must suspend belief and heed the distant chords of memory. In a skillful blending of three interconnected stories of contemporary India, Jha's characters are beautifully nuanced: the man and woman who fall in love after he is involved in an accident, the female reporter in search of truth about the brutal murder of a young girl in a red dress; and finally, a young girl in a red dress, speaking from her own unique perspective. With elegant language that is both visual and visceral ("He tastes the taste of broken sleep"), the author is the pied piper of imagination, drawing concentric circles, attaching the characters within a fragile web of familiarity. This is a complex novel, written by a man who is not afraid to delve into the deepest recesses of the human heart, past daily facades, into the places where dreams dwell and fears bloom like dark flowers. Wealth alone provides safety from the world at large, while poverty waits patiently to strike the unsuspecting; survival is played out against a background of nature's excesses, a paucity of luxury and the infinite tedium of daily struggles. Jha peers into the teeming throng of humanity with an omniscient eye, carefully selecting his protagonists, intersecting the details of their lives, then merging into the unknowable. Memory mixes flawlessly with reality in this cautionary fable, where innocence is captured in the form of a young girl in a red dress, crying softly, poised on a precipice of poverty, fear and fate. Perhaps it is the incessant rain that so perfectly captures these characters, distorting their desires, reflecting them back to the world. The narrative is strangely comforting, a journey through life's corridors, sometimes nightmarish, often familiar with yearning and irrepressible shards of hope. Luan Gaines/2004.