Book review: Sociology of a call centre, rendered in fiction

Book: Bangalore Calling
Brinda S Narayan
Hachette
320 pages
Rs295

Most jobs require an individual to make compromises. But few demand the sort of self-effacement required of a call centre agent: upended sleeping and eating schedules, a working persona that calls for a false name and a put-on accent.

Brinda Narayan’s first book, Bangalore Calling, explores the extended world of a call centre through 15 linked short stories. Each of these stories, narrated in the third person, is from the point of view of a character working in the Callus call centre in Bangalore.

There are the agents of course: the lower middle class girl discovering the power and perils of a credit card; the son of respectable parents who escapes into drugs and rock music; the young man on crutches who comes from an insular family and has his world widened.

There are also trainers, managers and support staff whose lives are shaped in surprising ways: the meek son of a soldier who discovers a spine while his team battles an outsourced crisis; the pragmatic admin manager who can clear a slum to improve the view, but can’t later help feeling an unidentifiable pang.

Bangalore Calling is skilfully written and Narayan keeps the plot moving even as she illuminates the internal lives of characters. Minor incidents or an oddity from one story often come to the fore or are understood in a different light in another story, and this gives the book an organic sense of wholeness.

Narayan’s stand-in character is Yvette, an Anglo-Indian trainer who wishes she had grown up with a more Indian-sounding name. Her job is to coach agents about American culture and weed out MTI (Mother Tongue Influence) from their speech. Unlike a fellow trainer who feels it is a “great service to transform vernacular types,” Yvette wonders if she is creating “a population of half-breeds, counterfeits and shams, who belong neither here nor there.” Yvette eventually leaves the call centre to become a sociologist.

It is the middle class who populate most of Narayan’s book, and she portrays with empathy and imagination the opportunities and disruptions that call centres bring into their lives.

Others might have cause for complaint. Rani, a girl from a slum infested with rats and even leeches, begins work as a toilet cleaner in Callus and quickly begins to steal from women’s handbags. When there are reports of a persistent stench in the toilet, it is traced to Rani, who can manage only one bath a week. Narayan’s point about the collision of different worlds is taken, but it is undermined by Rani appearing to exist solely to prove this point — she is given no moral agency and is saddled with a determinedly wretched life.

Bangalore Calling is, in a sense, sociology as fiction. This can show at times when a plot element or dialogue feels contrived in aid of some larger idea, but on the whole the fiction is well-written, enjoyable and accessible. Almost all of Narayan’s characters lack self-awareness, flounder morally, and, whether they know it or not, are bewildered by the cultural upheaval around them.

Narayan seems to be calling for a less gung-ho acceptance of globalised life: if the world appears flat, it is because it is being held down at great human cost. (It is probably not a coincidence that Callus lends itself to being pronounced as ‘callous’.) Yvette observes about Bangalore: “on the one hand, a booming ‘knowledge economy’, on the other, paltry resources for other kinds of knowledge.” Bangalore Calling is a happy addition to that paltry pile.

Srinath Perur writes short fiction and on books, travel and science