Raj Kamal Jha’s latest book, The Patient in Bed Number Twelve: A Tale of Hurting and Healing for Our Times
Raj Kamal Jha, Chief Editor of The Indian Express, has released a “confession from parent to child, from child to parent,” sparked by a hate film recorded by three guys titled The Patient in Bed Number 12 (Penguin India). Jha wrote this sixth book. On December 15, the book will have its formal debut at Delhi Art Gallery on Janpath Road.
Based on the connection between a father and daughter dealing with long-standing family secrets, the book explores modern aspirations at the brink of violence and optimism. Throughout the book, the father reflects on the many people who come and go during his hospital stay, grappling with a profound, unsaid guilt that is supported by a subconscious bond with his daughter. As a result, the distance between them grows and narrows. “Jha’s gripping story explores the heartbreaking reality of modern-day India, where a widely shared hate film looms big and threatens to tear apart the very fabric of society. Readers are taken on an intensely emotional trip by Jha’s captivating narration and the connected lives of her father and daughter. The engrossing and captivating portrayal of the human condition found in The Patient in Bed Number 12 is highly recommended, according to Manasi Subramaniam, head editor of Penguin Press, Penguin Random House India.
Jha has been dubbed a “novelist of the newsroom” since he consistently incorporates elements from his journalism background into his fictional works. The work exhibits a clear impulse, as the thoughts of the titular patient oscillate between various classes and identities. At times, the perspectives of a security guard, a street photographer at India Gate, or patients swarming the hospital amid the pandemic and lockdown loom in the background are depicted. Jha’s writing “evokes, unforgettably and inimitably, the complex and singular fate of being Indian today,” claims writer and critic Pankaj Mishra. He once again masterfully reveals the enormous paradoxes, impossibilities, and tragic poignancies of our extraordinary circumstances in The Patient in Bed Number 12. The narrative is described as a “remarkably real report on our present moment” by author Amitava Kumar.
Raj Kamal Jha Jha has been dubbed a “novelist of the newsroom” since he consistently incorporates elements from his journalism background into his fictional works.
Regarding the narrative structure, author Amit Chaudhuri notes that Jha has “created an artefact out of ‘odds and ends’ in which nothing – epigraph, dedication, the first and last lines of chapters, photos through which you exit and enter the text – is redundant.” The narrative structure consists of fragmentary stories that connect “individual lives into a tapestry of hope and heartbreak,” frequently with the help of a rhetorically gifted and amiable nurse. The tales demonstrate to us once again the potential of the book as a form. The work has “seamlessly joined together distinct stories to form one narrative that is profound and absolutely heart-wrenching,” according to Jha’s literary agent David Godwin. Patient in Bed Number 12, a fantastic book by a brilliant author, deftly examines the components that made India what it is today.
For his 2019 book The City and the Sea, which was inspired by the 2012 New Delhi gangrape case, Jha was awarded the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize 2020 in addition to the Tata Literature Live! Book of the Year (Fiction) 2019. He is the author of five previous works, including She Will Build Him A City (2015), which was nominated for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, and The Blue Bedspread (1999), which was awarded the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book (Eurasia).
