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Book Name:Passion in the Time of Termites Publisher: Harper Collins India Price: Rs. 395 Pages: 310 Year:2001

Today insects have become all the rage. Ogden Nash might have done one of his four liners on the subject but since then there have been Archie and Mehitabel, followed by the animated Insects and Antz. Of course, while ants are industrious and laudable and cockroaches funnily loathsome, nothing matches the comic potential of a termite because it carries in its mandibles the promise of enduring and insidious damage. A plague of locusts is swept up for drama in Exodus and Farooqi summons them up as his plague on Purana Shehr, the Old City.

The action centres in Topi Muhalla, a poor middle class Muslim dominated area of Purana Shehr. And the two names in conjunction conjure up, to anyone familiar with Old Delhi or Calcutta, narrow winding lanes lined with dirty and dilapidated houses where everyone knows what is going on in the neighbourhood and nothing is a secret for very long. Of course the first thing one notices is the fact that the Indian title - the book was released in Canada as Salar Jung's Passion - is heavily derivative. A spoof if you will because Love and Passion are two different things, as are the respective seriousnesses of Cholera and Termites.

Musharraf Farooqi's dramatis personae are literally crawling out of the woodwork. Which is good for a beginning, this book promises to be funny with a difference. Even the reminiscent of Marquez one-sentence stories are termite ridden - a girl never combs or washes her hair until one day the lice in her hair drag her while she's sleeping to a pond and drown her. There are interesting titbits in the Latin American novelist style: like Dr Adbari's newspaper article on the legal and forensic defence of termites in 1713, when Franciscan friars of St Anthony's cloister in Brazil set up an ecclesiastical tribunal to sue termites for damages and lost. The author's note tells us that this startling bit of research is fact, not fiction. So far, so good - but then the defects, like the termites, also start crawling out of the woodwork. The style is very strangely stilted, consisting of words long enough to require a dictionary because they are archaic enough to fall into the word trivia category. 'Fetor' for 'stench', a cat lacerating someone's arm instead of plain scratching it - these are unnecessary.

Some of the descriptions are fairly apt ("It was the kind of heat that made people look up to see when the birds might drop an egg on their head"), dialogue ("You think I am deaf and blind like your mother's cunt?"), and similes - "Like love, musk and homicide, Lunda (secondhand) clothes too were exposed in time". Though these again suffer from the stilted style and from characters that are too close to caricature to be believable. After all, in a spoof on Marquez we should at least have real people dealing with a termite disaster.

There are some charmingly irrelevant sub-texts in the story, as there should be in a book that attempts to tilt at windmills, like the meat market where every butcher has secret fantasies of carving up his buxom clients and weighing them on the scales. Jokes about the stray dogs vanishing into the abattoir never to be seen again abound. There is a whole sub text about a colony of cats that are "riotous and capricious as the harem of a sterile sultan". Their leader the old tom Kotwal has a strange fixation on nuptial celebrations, and his loud caterwaulings "make brides turn frigid and grooms lose all procreational intent"

Apart from the termites in the homes, the alleys of Topee Mohalla are "carpeted with dead lizards, ants, cockroaches, centipedes, beetles and toads". Wherever one steps, "ants flatten under chappals making small squishy sounds" - though this is exaggeration, ants do not squish cockroaches crunch, certainly. The children's ears need protecting from centipedes that crawl out from under the money plant pots. There is also the earthworm conspiracy that is, quite literally, unearthed. It is as if all the insects in the world got together and conspired against the inhabitants of the town in one fell swoop. Or perhaps Farooqi would like us to believe so, piling insect outrage on insect outrage. Too much? Possibly - fetor, stench, faeces all heaped unnecessarily up.

The termites in Purana Shehr are useful as a kind of deus ex machina - they wreak havoc on houses, books, relationships, the water supply, cats, groceries, and people's minds. They also precipitate sacrifices: "Young brides were not beaten up or taunted if their dowry trunks were found infested with termites." While the city crumbles into bite sized pieces, Mirzban meditates: "If Time was the germ of Eternity, the Termite was the germ of Nature. And what was Nature but God?" He asks for a sign from the heavens, and providentially a naked man jumps out of a tree in front of him. Mirzaban follows him, convinced that he has been sent by God to save the city. Only he turns out to have escaped from the local madhouse, where the window bars have been loosened by termites.

Mirzban's father-in-law Salar, who has one foot in the grave, arrives to visit and decides to marry in his old age. He discovers that eating termite queens has great aphrodisiac properties and is ready to venture into matrimony full steam ahead until the termites eat through his love letters. By the time Salar dies, a corpse on its way to the graveyard has already fallen after the handles of the bier hollowed by termites snap during the funeral procession

The subplots are longwinded with characters borrowed out of Urdu literature who have a hrad time fitting in in their chapters: Haji Tol Faal Wallah's parrot who picks up envelopes to tell the future, a shave and alum massage at the barber's, a session at Chhalawa's teashop, the Muharram mourner's procession, five wrestler brothers who, for all their girth and muscle, add nothing of substance to the novel. This lack of focus makes the reader feel like a tourist wandering aimlessly through a strange town and wondering why he got there in the first place.

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