The Comeback is the story of Jaun Kazim and Asghar Abbasi who have been best friends since their college days in Baansa, a small town in north India
When two close friends fall out, it can be a shattering experience for both. Novelist and playwright Annie Zaidi turns to this trope in her latest, The Comeback, and sets the novel in a milieu that she knows intimately — the world of the theatre. The result is a slim novel that is part parable and part a fairy tale.
The Comeback is the story of Jaun Kazim and Asghar Abbasi who have been best friends since their college days in Baansa, a small town in north India. They shared a common passion for the stage, but while Jaun went on to turn his passion into a career, migrating to Mumbai and trying to make it as an actor, Asghar ascended the middle class paradise of a bank job and a regular pay cheque. Still, they remained the fast friends they always were.
That friendship implodes when Jaun, or John, as he likes to be called these days, gets a big break in Bollywood. In the excitement of his achievement, he tells an interviewer about his youthful hijinks in Baansa, where, among other things, he helped his friend Asghar cheat in his graduation exam. The result of this interview is catastrophic. Asghar loses his job, because his academic credentials are suddenly blown to pieces. Furious with Jaun, he stops speaking to him.
Asghar moves back to his mother’s home in Baansa and decides to rebuild his life from there. In his late thirties now, and with his marriage under severe strain because of his jobless state, he enrols into a BA degree course so he can earn a graduate degree legitimately this time. What’s more, he returns to his first love, the stage. He cobbles together a cast and directs a production of his own Hindi adaptation of Dr Faustus.
Meanwhile, cut out from Asghar’s life, Jaun pines like a lovelorn maiden. He is even more stricken when Asghar’s play turns out to be a smash hit. His own big break has not amounted to much, and his movie career is in the doldrums once again. He yearns to work with Asghar and be back on the stage instead of doing unfulfilling roles in television or the odd part in films. He recognises his own flaws now — his selfishness, his naked ambition, his inconstancy in love — and begins to aspire to a better version of himself.
The Comeback serves up plenty of feel-good wish-fulfilment. Jaun turns over a redemptive leaf. And Asghar’s spectacular overnight success as a theatre director rooted in the boondocks is the stuff of dreams. Indeed, it is he, rather than the flawed Jaun, the first person narrator of the novel, who is the real hero of the book. Silently, stoically, steadfastly, Asghar does what he needs to, and, hey presto, this time the Fates smile on him. The moral of the story? Hard work and good intent pays — bad behaviour does not.
The reviewer is a journalist and author
The Comeback
Annie Zaidi
Aleph
pp. 192; Rs 599
