Everyday Gnosticism

Another day, another thinkpiece about conspiracy theories. This one is an extract from a book by John V Petrocelli, published at Lithub. Petrocelli begins with NBA player Kyrie Irving’s startling claims in a 2017 podcast:

This is not even a conspiracy theory. The Earth is flat. The Earth is flat. The Earth is flat… What I’ve been taught is that the Earth is round. But if you really think about it … There is no concrete information except for the information that they’re giving us. They’re particularly putting you in the direction of what to believe and what not to believe. The truth is right there, you just got to go searching for it.

Petrocelli seems to suggest that trying to argue Irving out of his beliefs won’t work:

If someone believes that it is more likely that thousands of scientists, worldwide, are colluding in a conspiracy to hide the true shape of the Earth, then explaining otherwise won’t get you very far. Despite the public criticism Kyrie received for his flat-Earth theory, he stood firm and remained unconvinced, saying in 2018, ‘I don’t know. I really don’t,’ and added that people should ‘do [their] own research for what [they] want to believe in’ because ‘our educational system is flawed.’ It is one thing to suggest people do their research and another thing to make claims about things one clearly knows nothing about—but something tells me Kyrie hasn’t really cared to look at genuine research evidence.

I’ve written about this stuff before. But since then, I have been reading Daemon Voices by the phenomenal Philip Pullman. Daemon Voices is a book of essays, collected over two decades, but with a striking consistency in their themes of faith, scepticism and the imagination.

Something I had not come across, until I read this collection, was Gnosticism. Pullman explains it like this:

To sum it up briefly and crudely, the Gnostic myth says that this world – the material universe we live in – was created not by a good God but by an evil Demiurge, who made it as a kind of prison for the sparks of divinity that had fallen, or been stolen, from the inconceivably distant true God who was their true source… It’s the duty of the Gnostics, the knowing ones, to try and escape from this world, out of the clutches of the Demiurge and his angelic archons, and find a way back to that original and unknown and far-off God.

As Pullman says, this idea puts believers at the very heart of its story. You are important and special, you are a spark of divinity in a fake world. Pullman saw – writing in 2002 – the shades of Gnostic myth in mainstream conspiracy – ‘at the popular end we have The X-Files and The Matrix and the Truman Show, which are all pure Gnosticism.’ Since then of course the Matrix ‘red pill’ concept has been adopted by the more malign reaches of conspiracy theorising – QAnon, anti vaxxers, incels, antisemites – but you can also see how good people like Kyrie Irving can drift toward the harmless moonbattery of flat earthers.

Pullman goes on to say this:

This notion that the world we know with our senses is a crude and imperfect copy of something much better somewhere else is one of the most striking and powerful inventions of the human mind. It’s also one of the most perverse and pernicious…. it encourages us to disbelieve the evidence of our senses, and allows us to suspect everything of being false. It leads to a state of mind that’s hostile to experience. It encourages us to see a toad lurking beneath every flower, and if we can’t see one, it’s because the toads now are extra cunning and have learned to become invisible. It’s a state of mind that leads to a hatred of the physical world.

And that is a terrible thing, because we are nowhere without ‘the physical world, this world, of food and drink and sex and music and laughter’.

I’m sure the Gnostic myth is very well known, but it was new to me, and I think it gives more insight than much science writing into susceptibility to conspiracism. For myths are more powerful than truths.

Bollywood Tragedy

Hospitality is hard work. The hours are long. The managers can be difficult. You live on tips and leftovers. You deal with complaining nitpicky customers by day and drunken unpredictable customers by night. 

Now imagine having to investigate a murder on top of all that. 

Kamil Rahman is living in somewhat reduced circumstances above the Tandoori Knights restaurant in Brick Lane. Prior to this Kamil was a budding homicide detective from a respected police family in Kolkata, but he has been forced to flee India after screwing up his first big murder case. His parents are ashamed of him, the Home Office is trying to deport him, and, it appears, a mysterious hitman wants him dead. 

Ajay Chowdhury is good at writing about hospitality work – the drudgery and stress of it, and also the camaraderie and laughter that seems to exist beside the drudgery. The Waiter opens with a big gig for the Tandoori Knights staff – they are catering a private party for wealthy businessman Rakesh Sharma. At this point you just have to relax and enjoy Chowdhury’s observations. Not long in London, Kamil expects Billionaire’s Row to be a ‘futuristic nirvana’, but finds instead ‘a deserted, shabby road with half the houses in total disrepair, hidden behind forbidding black hoardings and padlocked iron gates. It looked as though the billionaires had fled the country en masse after a people’s revolution.’ The venue itself is ‘a large double-fronted Georgian house, in the centre of which an overexcited architect had plonked a portico. At the entrance sprung four tall white columns topped by a triangular pediment displaying sculptures of Hindu gods and goddesses disporting themselves in various states of undress. Underneath was a large plaque with the words ‘Sharma Manor’. It was an unique Anglo-Greco-Bolly-weirdo style of architecture.’

Rakesh Sharma is a success story who has fought his way out of the Basanti slums. But he’s dead by the end of this night, and the cops arrest his beautiful young wife. Kamil has his doubts, though, and to restore some measure of his own pride he starts to run his own investigation between restaurant shifts. 

What follows is a workable detective story. Kamil tries to unravel the mystery as best he can with no official standing as an investigator. At the same time he’s remembering his first big shot in Kolkata, the murder of Bollywood star Asif Khan, and how that case fell apart. We’ve been here before of course, but again it’s Chowdhury’s gift of observation that makes the story work. He describes two cultures, London and Kolkata, sending up both worlds and shining a light on the places where they intersect. Kamil was a rising star in Kolkata but finds himself balked at every turn by a dysfunctional police bureaucracy. A key piece of evidence disappears into the tomb of the malkhana, and to find it, Kamil enters this dismal underlayer of the police station:

I peered at the paan stains and damp patches on the bare concrete walls of the malkhana. It was sweltering here, the slowly rotating fan above doing little more than distribute the humidity around the room. The police headquarters became grungier and more dilapidated the further down you came; the executive offices at the top, pristine, wood panelled and air conditioned; the holding cells at the very bottom in the sub-sub-basement suffocating, filthy, stinking and damp. 

And that is not the worst of it – Kamil remembers a morgue that had ‘Bodies lying everywhere in the refrigerated room, some stacked on top of each other, sometime more than one on a stretcher. Some looked as if they hadn’t been touched in months. When I’d joined the homicide division, Abba had drummed into me, ‘First rule of police work, get a good PM doctor. The bad ones miss things all the time and you will be on a monkey chase.”

Chowdhury also evokes a changing London. Tandoori Knights owner Saibal complains that ‘Brick Lane is different – all young people and tourists now, no regulars anymore. I have to worry about things like Trip Advisor reviews-sheviews and Instant-gram – complete nonsense. People going click-click at their plates all night long. Tweeting and twatting. Good food, good service is not enough. Now the food has to be beautiful so people can take pictures and put on the Google. How do you make a chapati look nice?’ 

The dialogue is funny, idiosyncratic and real – indeed The Waiter is best when Chowdhury just lets his characters talk. Saibal’s daughter Anjoli, irreverent and quick witted, is the perfect assistant and foil for the gloomy and rule-bound Kamil. 

This is Ajay Chowdhury’s first crime novel and hopefully there will be more Kamil Rahman books to come, for it’s a pleasure to spend time in his world.