A Monkey in Manhattan

A Monkey in Manhattan is a literary fiction thriller set in 1940s England, India and an uninhabited island, somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. The novel explores the social and psychological consequences of people's behaviour in groups of unequal power, when stranded and exposed to a survival of the fittest.

One of the main protagonists, Lakshman Naik, is a member of the aboriginal Bhumia tribe about whose existence, immersed as it is, in survival and work, belief and ritual, festival and marriage, all description spells out simplicity. Lakshman is one of the sons of the red soil who lives amongst the dense tangled thickets of the jungle and keeps its hours, waking up as he does after the rain to engage when other life, that provides his daily needs, springs into action. The blood of the earliest progenitors still runs, uninterrupted, through his veins through his shamanic custom of living in the ways of another animal: that of being under its skin. Lakshman and his people suffer greatly from being ruthlessly exploited, not only in striving to clear the debts detailed in the ledgers of the bahi-khata carrying money lenders but also from the taxes imposed by the rich landowner, the Maharaja Jeypore Samasthanam. We experience the injustice and anguish imposed on these poor, proud, peaceful farmers and witness the changes in Lakshman which lead him to becoming the folk-hero of Koraput in eastern India and a thorn in the side of the British Government authorities.

A Monkey in Manhattan details how its main characters, the members of an aristocratic family and their accompanying staff, come to find themselves stranded on an uninhabited island. In the course of their plight, various extremes of human behaviour come to the fore highlighting multifarious questions about faith, corporeal and immaterial spirituality, social rank and caste, social Darwinism and anthropocentrism, racial conflict and politics and the nature of love in all its forms. These issues are never dealt with exclusively but rather, they invariably infringe over one another, making the overall novel so much more tortuously tangled, especially throughout the course of its dark, tense, psychological climax. In fact, the narrative offers itself to alternative interpretations about the events on the island and the morality of the characters. There is no single conclusion to be derived, readers are invited to meet each new flickering idea and challenge the notions enshrined within it.

In addition to being a tense psychological thriller, A Monkey in Manhattan deals with relevant contemporary issues and involves very real incredible events and actual lives. If submitted simply as a historical piece of non-fiction, the true story of Lakshman Naik during the crucial years of the war and Indian independence would be sufficient merit for it to be told. As it is dressed it up in a surreal 'play within a play' narrative, it undoubtedly has appeal to a far greater audience which is the author's prime incentive.