Introduction:
Welcome to a fantasy world of two solipsistic brothers journeying through a maze of interconnected apparitions: newspaper-chomping "probably unholy cows" shielding a protected childhood from the horrors of reality, Chowmein-munching enemies- Mao-tse-Tung, Chou-en-Lai and Nehru- playing hide-and-seek over Ladakh, Cleopatra-abandoning Elizabeth Taylor convalescing from a plethora of real-life husbands and reel-life suitors in suburban Uttar Pradesh, monkey-toting Gorbachev and goldfish-obsessed Raisa discovering Europe and love in Delhi's Lodi Gardens, and Piece de' Resistance, one of the brothers resembling the grand maestro Beethoven when he stopped looking like Zeus and Jehova. Sounds like a cornucopia of gibberish? Not if the reader sinks into the author's skin and enjoys a tumultuous and incredibly hilarious ride through much of the near-contemporary world, all the while being reminded of "a genetic compulsion to feel Indian" in these cerebral peregrinations across national boundaries. As shall be elucidated in the review, these seemingly lunatic visions of mental anarchy reflect a social realism and keen perception of the changing face of modern India and the world. Rukun Advani's only novel (Faber and Faber, 1994) is a comic (re?)Discovery of India by siblings endowed with "uncommon Anglicisation which sensitised us to the beauties of the west". In epistemological terms, it is also an effort at reversing Edward Said's Orientalism, the Occident being viewed through brown eyes and made to genuflect before the mirthful desi imagination.

Although vaguely enjoined in the fanciful brothers' visage, each of the strange occurrences in the novel, neatly set apart by separate chapters and adventures, can be discussed quasi-independently for the purpose of review convenience. The loose ends shall be tied up in the peroration.

1. Nehru's Children
A little before Nehru died broken-hearted from Chinese betrayal of the 'bhai-bhai' refrain in 1962, a cow walks into the colourfully merry lives of two schoolboy brothers in a small-town of UP. The Zeus impersonation christens it after their humungous neighbour and declares, "Misiz Gupta is my favrit animal". Misiz Gupta gobbles up every scrap the brothers feed it- Readers Digest, The Hindu, "Communist propaganda couplets", and (hold your breath) the façade of Beethoven's 'Emperor' Concerto. The hungry impassive cow proffers "conceptual salvation" and jocular relief to help the family overcome the Chinese invasion and the fear of Chinky bayonets that the newspapers announced with ominous regularity. When Chacha Nehru finally heads for a heavenly abode, the wondrous cow has sufficiently blanketed the children from the remorse that every Indian felt. As the shadow of a departed great soul hung like a mist over the universe, "it had the omniscience of a cow" to the twosome, an almost forgettable and dream-like significance. The sole importance of Nehru's departure is that it robs the author of a memorable century in mohalla cricket!

2. Murder in May
The following summer, the duo is hurled into a temperature-soaring revengeful Indian summer- another test of their immunity from reality. Parents fret and fume incessantly against power-cuts, flies, heat-strokes and droughts reported in dailies, with a curse that is all too familiar to every Indian: "This damn country, I tell you, it's going to the dogs". Be it 1963 or 2001, it's the same fulmination, reminding us that problems of civic comfort and health did not invent themselves recently. They have a history too. More than the filial grumbles, the shocking rage of the summer comes home when a reticent dwarf tailor, whom the author titles 'Nasterji' in an attempt at raising his esteem from the ubiquitous baune/chhote, emerges out of his store opposite the boys' home for the first time ever to contemplate a dead bear-man. The heat does in a familiar figure of the locality, the trick-showing bear-owning madariwala. Suddenly, "the sun's conquests…had come ironically alive" for the brats. The aridity of the radio and newspaper is shattered by the moving spectacle of an unmoving amusement-peddler and a ranting pet. A typical paunchy and arrogant policeman arrives at the scene and shoots the uncomprehending bear much to the delight of a rowdy crowd, but leaves a distinct impression of "casual brutality with the authority of uniforms" in the brothers. Oh yes, our law enforcers did not become corrupt overnight. Look at a specimen in 1963.

3. The Othello Complex
Growing up in a town infested with Anglo-Indians, the brothers fancy a Piano player, Felicia Blumenthal, who claimed her genealogy back to the musician, Liszt. Her nimble fingers, exotic whiteness and "world of music and softness that we craved" draw them into a foolishly romantic urge bordering on the voyeuristic for she "who had Europe in her bones". A scion deservedly attracts another. The thorn in the brothers' flesh is a descendant of the shikari Jim Corbett, Laurence Corbett, who doubles up his courting of Felicia with punitive exercises for the kids as their school PT master. The author so despises this immensely handsome and authoritative rival that he conjures up an elaborate dream where Laurence plays ass to author's man-eater nabbing hunter and finally gets mowed down by a tiger since the shikari forgot to bring bait along for the game! So much for the fantasy, but in real life, there are only hard kicks and jolts in such an unequal contest for love. It puzzles the brothers how the biological pull of a masculine He Man of a drill-master ensnares the Beethoven-breathing Felicia, but it does. Welcome to adolescence. The so-called 'Othello Complex', lady infatuated with music to the extent that she would marry anyone who had a patient ear for her evening Piano numbers, comes crashing down to leave the author admitting, "It was the first time Reality kicked me as hard as that".

4. Death by Music
Brothers are caught in a Hobson's Choice between suicide and desire for the unattainable Elizabeth Taylor. Only the 'Emperor' Concerto serves as a diversion to a burning ambition to somehow secure Liz in person. But lo behold! Liz walks out of the Delite Talkies of their town leaving Mark Antony and Octavius Caesar forlorn on the screen. Now, the other two, author and brother, have the gift of singularly seeing her. The rest of the public seems deaf when she whispers "Gee thanks, honey" for letting her stay with them in their house. Cleopatra first plans to stay at Jim Corbett Hotel, but then how can she register there when the staff doesn't see her in flesh and blood? The privileged lot take her home, where there are red gulmohars and yellow amaltas flowers to help resuscitate the Hollywood legend from "men, men, men, day and night". But Liz is searching for something mysterious. After showing her all the local historical sights, she observes through divination a grave of a forgotten woman who died during the 1857 revolt. It's the epitaph of a certain 'Eliza Taylor 1827-1857 Who with Melody and Music Lit…' somebody's life in some aeon. Liz vanishes on knowing of her past life and the duo atones years later for a misguided youth when they lusted after white women while their roots and musical lure lay right there, on a gravestone they passed by everyday to school. From then on, "we went native and adored Shabana Azmi"!

5. The Secret Life of Mikhail Gorbachev
When Zeus-turned-Beethoven has his third emotional crisis with women, the author calls up Moscow to contact the healer, Gorbachev, who used to be amazingly resourceful in calming down rabid warmongers like Reagan. But times had changed. Walls were crumbling, one in Berlin, and the other in Gorby's own uncontrollable empire. In such a crisis-ridden atmosphere, even Gorby's favourite monkeys- Lenin and Trotsky- who had miraculously cured Raisa's "cosmic gloom" one day in the Lodi Gardens, are now ageing and uncertainly perched on the healer's shoulders. Here's an Orwellian mimic, a burlesque of 1984. Gorby calms down Beethoven's nerves with a unique quality that Nehru once possessed: "making politics sound as though it had something to do with human beings". Lenin grabs peanuts in Zeus' Defence Colony flat, dresses like Al Capone and reads Kissinger's Memoirs from the bookshelf, Trotsky grins 'Reaganomically', and the three manage to bring cheer back to the tenebrous brother.

6. S/he or a Postmodern Chapter on Gender and Identity
Zeus is now a failed historian obsessed with deconstruction, Derrida's ghost and the fashionable Gender Studies. The author, by happy coincidence, runs a private detective agency specialising in harassed wives and dowry deaths. The two professions imbricate as a certain Lavatri Alltheorie, pioneer of Gender Studies who de-constructs her own gender from a medium-sized Bengali gent to a proportionate lady, lands up in the latter's office as a customer. Private Eye has to detect the author of anonymous defamatory pamphlets muddying Alltheorie's noble profession of "socially constructed and gendered semiotic signs" that proved Tagore and 'Bonk'im' came before Bengali! The author traces the culprit to a Professor Gyandeo Bhaiyya Sabko ("give knowledge to everyone brother"), a professional rival of Lavatri as well as former paramour when she was a 'he'. Through another acquaintance, Pankaj Chopra 'Pancho' (after Hemingway's Old Man's whale), the author also manages to stay clear of the muddle of intellectual feminism that Lavatri's client-hood was threatening. "If they deconstructed all the words that made me up would I be anyone at all?", he asks every potential victim of the Gender bug.

7. Incident by the Pangong Lake
Zeus-Beethoven sits at the Pangong Lake in Ladakh, the gigantic cerulean water body that stemmed the invading Chinese when Nehru and his "dark god…who ruled the Defence Ministry" (who else but Krishna Menon?!) were snoring in 1962. Other than the 'Emperor Concerto', this is the perfect escapade for escapists like the two of them. The lake recalls in him childhood images of a rebellious classmate, Vincente de Rozio, whose father was in the Indian Army posted at the Pangong during the Chinese war. Looking into the crystal ball of the pellucid lake, he revamps the story of de Rozio- how he knew answers in the history class and hence displeased the irritable teacher, renamed Black Panther for a dictatorial moustache and mannerism; how he thwacked the master in disgust and ran away never to be retraced; and how he faded into the mist of history so congenitally tied up with the Pangong in Beethoven's mind. Unlike other Goans of Portuguese origins, de Rozio failed to reappear as "Robert the Sidekick" to JK the villain in every Bollywood movie or as Elvis imitating guitarist in a café playing 'Oh Bloody Oh Bloodah'. Pangong holds the answers and sure enough, Zeus traces de Rozio, fully grown up but blankly unspectacular in real life, a soldier posted at the lake like his father, barely measuring up to the imaginary heights his actions and disappearance had evoked in the brothers' world-view. But then, de Rozio might have more significance to Zeus than was apparent, for he adopts a Test-tube baby from Scotland from the same Sindhi doctor who once bought sperm from Zeus while he was on his European holiday!

8. A Passage Through India
Tying up the plethora of elves and bizarre occurrences is this last chapter, a direct affront to EM Forster. Brothers are now in 1993 India, shell-shocked at the demolition of the Babri Masjid (which un-Nehru like Congressmen discovered out of obscurity and unheard of fanatics brought down with tridents). They decide that in this era of walls crumbling and mosques giving in to a new breed of militant politics, it is better to visit the Taj Mahal before it too is vandalised, for "This is India. Only God is hundred percent sure" what survives and what goes under. The decision is at another level the single shot that can kill two birds- (a) Taj being the epitome of India will finally redeem the brothers from their European anchorings or whatever was left after the experiences in the last seven chapters. (b) Taj, even if they don't free themselves entirely of their wanderlust, "might prove a visual equivalent of the 'Emperor' Concerto"! But the usually punctual Agra Mail derails 12 miles from the promised tourist haven, worrying the author all the more because a rumoured dead cow halts the train on its tracks (I interpret this as a preliminary shock that peels the first cocoon off the duo's fantasy-onion). On belatedly reaching Agra, both are injured by stone missiles flung by communal rioters (post-Babri) and return home with the wool sheared off their eyes. The Taj holds no attraction after their violent exit from a protected self-indulgent "going-nowhere" life. For the first time, Taj appears not as music in marble but a potential disputed structure in a fratricidal political map of India, and for the first time, the brothers are muted to their wonderland, "immunised by a country", just as an impassive cow once ate Beethoven's façade when Nehru expired.

Concluding Thoughts:
Rukun Advani's Beethoven is at once a roller-coaster zigzagging through loads of jokes, countries and native humour, the concerned Indian's guide to his metamorphosing yet unchanging country, and a literary critic's manna. It is hoped that the author's sensational ouster from Oxford University Press and inauguration of his own publishing house last year will provoke more titles from his creative pen.