Delhi, the near future: Bibi, a low-ranking employee of a global consulting firm, is tasked with finding a man long thought to be dead but who now appears to be the source of a vast collection of documents.
We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Light at the End of the World by Siddhartha Deb, a kaleidoscopic, genre-bending novel connecting India’s tumultuous 19th and 20th centuries to its distant past and its potentially apocalyptic future—out today from Soho Press.
Delhi, the near future: Bibi, a low-ranking employee of a global consulting firm, is tasked with finding a man long thought to be dead but who now appears to be the source of a vast collection of documents. The trove purports to reveal the secrets of the Indian government, including detention centers, mutated creatures, engineered viruses, experimental weapons, and alien wrecks discovered in remote mountain areas.
Bhopal, 1984: an assassin tracks his prey through an Indian city that will shortly be the site of the worst industrial disaster in the history of the world.
Calcutta, 1947: a veterinary student’s life and work connect him to an ancient Vedic aircraft that might stave off genocide.
And in 1859, a British soldier rides with his detachment to the Himalayas in search of the last surviving leader of an anti-colonial rebellion.
“The first sighting of that astonishing, amazing, misunderstood creature that came to be known as the New Delhi Monkey Man occurred sometime in the month of May, at the beginning of the new century. The name, in the way these things often tend to be in India, was a misnomer. For in spite of the use of ‘New Delhi’ to describe it, New Delhi Monkey Man made his presence felt mostly across the dying Yamuna River, in that Trans-Yamuna zone of housing society apartment blocks, slums, and factories that New Delhi likes to pretend doesn’t exist.
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The Light at the End of the World
“Yet the name caught on, in Trans-Yamuna Delhi, in New Delhi, in the world at large. In Brooklyn, New York, cultural appropriation capital of the universe, a music band gave itself the name New Delhi Monkey Man. It’s impossible that Trans-Yamuna Monkey Man or Noida Monkey Man or Uttar Pradesh Monkey Man would have worked quite so well.
“But what was New Delhi Monkey Man? Was he a monkey? Was he a man? Was he even a he? The Delhi Police, that selfless organization whose reassuring slogan at the time read, ‘For You, With You, Always,’ at first said that New Delhi Monkey Man was nothing more than a man in a monkey mask going around frightening people. Concerned citizens were asked to call a special hotline if they saw New Delhi Monkey Man and wait for a van to be dispatched. Until said concerned citizens spotted said dispatched police van, easily identifiable by the large slogan on its side, ‘For You, With You, Always,’ they were asked to remain indoors and not attempt to apprehend New Delhi Monkey Man on their own.
“Still, what if New Delhi Monkey Man was not just a gangster with a monkey mask or a rowdy sheeter in a monkey costume? What if his tail was not made out of stuffed cloth like a Rajasthani puppet? What if it was a real tail, not something frozen in a stiff curve but a flexible thing, as alive with intent as the tail of Hanuman setting the island of Lanka on fire, a sinuous tail capable of grasping and snatching and allowing New Delhi Monkey Man to swing from balcony to balcony with the greatest of ease?
“Yes, what if New Delhi Monkey Man was Hanuman himself come to wreak havoc on a fallen, debased people who had deviated from the true faith of their forefathers? When Mrs. Chawla, on observing New Delhi Monkey Man grinning at her with yellowed, third-world teeth from among the clothes strung out to dry in her balcony, recited loudly from the Hanuman Chalisa, ‘Jai Jai Guru Hanuman,’ did New Delhi Monkey Man smile and bless her, or did he become enraged and attack her? Neighbors of different political persuasions provided different endings to Mrs. Chawla’s story.
“And so, what if New Delhi Monkey Man was not Hanuman at all, but a kind of anti-Hanuman? What if he was a liberated Hanuman, a monkey tired of being a servant and operating as a prison for humans posing as gods, with a heart-shaped cell in his body that contained small versions of Ram and Sita, a monkey who no longer wanted to serve as a commando or an assassin in a genocidal war? What if New Delhi Monkey Man was a clone of some kind, a man-monkey hybrid escaped from a top-secret joint venture facility run by the Defence Research and Development Organization and the Ombani Labs in some remote border area? What if New Delhi Monkey Man was a mutant creature produced by the toxic gas cloud of Bhopal in 1984? What if New Delhi Monkey Man was an extraterrestrial creature, an alien accidentally marooned on this planet? What if New Delhi Monkey Man was a strange new mutation, an outcome of Artificial Intelligence stirring into consciousness in the aftermath of Y2K? What if New Delhi Monkey Man had time traveled from the past, coming at us from the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857 or from the killing fields of Partition in 1947? What if, while traveling through time, New Delhi Monkey Man came to the new millennium not from the past but from our future?
“As observations of New Delhi Monkey Man proliferated, there were suggestions that he had clockwork springs in his shoes. These, operated by a row of glowing red buttons on his chest, allowed him to leap from rooftop to rooftop. We would also like to point out that ‘Monkey Man’ was the westernized version of the name, a clever, polite, convenient media translation of the kind applied once to the words of a famous Indian leader when he described Muslims as “kutte ke bachhe” and found it rendered as the Hallmark-sanitized “puppies.” If one were to reverse the translation, and go from English to Hindi, New Delhi Monkey Man would, in the exquisitely racist, casteist, and classist way of Indians, become Black Monkey or Kala Bandar.
“But what did Kala Bandar or New Delhi Monkey Man look like? More reports came in, saying that he was four feet tall, covered in thick black fur and wore a motorcycle helmet. Others said he had metal claws, glowing red eyes and three buttons on his chest that alternately flickered red and blue. There were accounts claiming that New Delhi Monkey Man was not four feet tall but double the height at eight feet and fantastically muscled. A sociologist at JNU suggested that New Delhi Monkey Man was a case of the return of the repressed, an eruption of the uncanny, an embodiment of all those marginalized people—Muslims, Dalits, tribals, Adivasis, feminists, leftists, environmentalists, Kashmiris, Maoist guerrillas, homosexuals, rationalists, poets, poor farmers, poet farmers, nomadic sheepherders, migrant workers, auto-rickshaw drivers, construction laborers, waitresses, maid servants, child servants, child beggars—feared by urban, upwardly mobile India.
“The news channels scoffed at this interpretation and ran clips of a man interviewed outside Hastinapur Moderne Apartments in Patparganj who, while declining to give his name to the reporter, said that New Delhi Monkey Man was neither a man nor a monkey but a robot assassin dispatched by an enemy foreign power on a secret, nefarious mission. The Delhi Police, responding to this last statement at a press conference, announced that New Delhi Monkey Man was not a robot assassin or a monkey but a man in a monkey mask who had been sent by the nefarious Inter-Services Intelligence agency of Pakistan to terrorize the peace-loving citizens of India and to test the resolve of the Delhi Police. It added that the Delhi Police had never failed a test of its resolve and that the proper response to bricks was stones.
“More appearances were reported, accompanied by accounts of attacks. The injuries were minor in nature, including scrapes, bruises and the occasional fracture, the majority of these occurring when victims fell down stairwells while trying to escape New Delhi Monkey Man. The socioeconomic status of the victims was narrow in range. The rich and the very rich were excluded, by virtue of the high walls of their villas and their domicile in areas other than Trans-Yamuna Delhi. That left as potential victims only street dwellers sleeping in the open and conservative, middle-class, dues-paying members of housing societies.
“The Delhi Police suggested that New Delhi Monkey Man was not a man or a monkey but a kind of collective hallucination produced by the conjunction of a massive heat wave, frequent power outages and a well-known monkey infestation that for long had been affecting places as far apart as the laboratories of the Indian Institute of Technology in South Delhi, the offices of the Home Ministry in North Block, in the heart of the city, and the canteen of The Daily Telegram newspaper building, to the north. It asked people to refrain from sleeping in the open, although it did not have an answer to where street dwellers should sleep if not in the open.
“Perhaps in response to the Delhi Police statement, the zone of New Delhi Monkey Man’s attacks expanded. He seemed to leap over the oxygen-depleted, effluent-laced, corpse-laden Yamuna River into the city proper, appearing at a concert of derivative rock music at the Indian Institute of Technology, where he attacked the drummer of a band playing a cover version of Bryan Adams’s ‘Summer of ’69.’ There was outrage in the media. Not even the city proper was safe, not even the flower of Indian youth. The Delhi Police responded that New Delhi Monkey Man had not been sighted at IIT Delhi and that the assault on the drummer was carried out by a thug hired by a fellow musician who was the drummer’s rival in love.
“A month after this string of incidents, the monsoons arrived. The power outages reduced in frequency and the heat wave broke, giving way to a clammy, sticky season that promised to last into autumn. New Delhi Monkey Man disappeared as abruptly as he had emerged. Plastic bags choked the gutters of Delhi and drivers of two-wheelers massed under overbridges to protect themselves from the rain, but no New Delhi Monkey Man was seen leaping from rooftop to rooftop under skies gray with monsoon clouds and industrial pollution. Instead, he was reported leaving the city, seemingly exhausted by its ruthless ambition and its manufactured lies, as if, at the end of the day, New Delhi Monkey Man was just one more provincial who grew tired of attempting to make it in this heartless city.
“Conflicting versions of where he went and how were offered. In one account, he was seen on an Aeroflot flight going from Delhi to Moscow where he had to be restrained with adhesive tape after biting passengers and attacking members of the cabin crew. Another report put him, somewhat more modestly, in a second-class compartment on a train bound for Tinsukia in Assam.
“No sightings of New Delhi Monkey Man were reported from Moscow or from Assam, although shortly after, there were reports of a Bear Man rampaging through the villages of Assam. This creature made himself invisible right as he attacked, his viciously bearish features discernible momentarily, just prior to the assault. A spokesman from the Indian Army said that the Bear Man was a plot hatched by China, meant to distract focus from the systemic infiltration of India by Bangladeshi Muslims and intended to test the resolve and preparedness of Indian forces along the nation’s northeastern frontier. The spokesman added that this was a test of the kind that the Indian Army had always passed with force and vigor and that the proper response to artillery fire was surface-to-air missiles.
“Of New Delhi Monkey Man himself, however, nothing more was heard or seen. He had come out of nowhere, staring through the window of your flat high in the sky, and then he vanished into nowhere. His buttons, his wires, his motorcycle helmet and his thick black fur were no longer even details in a memory or a dream. Erased without a sign, forgotten without a trace, silenced without an echo. And that is where my part in his story, and your part in my story, begins.”
Excerpt from The Light at the End of the World © 2023 by Siddhartha Deb, published by Soho Press.
