Toke by Jugal Mody

Previously published in Dawn Books & Authors

The premise of debut Indian writer Jugal Mody’s Toke is simple. Lord Vishnu is not feeling up to saving the world - he does not feel like regenerating just yet, not today in any case. So he hands the job over to a trio of young men who tend to indulge in smoking marijuana a little too frequently and in rather large quantities. Two of them are never not smoking it, in fact. Having a vision of Lord Vishnu does not throw them off track in the least (keeping in mind their track isn’t exactly the straight and narrow) and it takes their friend Nikhil to convince them the task is more than just the result of a little too much weed in their systems. Saving the world is not to be confused with a hallucination, regardless of how many visions of Lord Vishnu may appear. Of the three accidental protagonists, Nikhil is the only one who sees the bigger picture. Danny and Aman, meanwhile, bumble along, though Mody is quikc to point out they ‘are not really that dumb. They practiced real hard to be like this. And of course, in the process smoked a ton of pot’. 

Toke clearly written in the grand tradition of ‘stoner’ culture and comedy which of course is based entirely on the frequent and unabashed recreational use of marijuana by at least the lead characters. Characters like Cheech & Chong, Harold & Kumar, as well as those in the Friday films and more recently in mainstream hits like Pineapple Express are all perfect examples of this form of comedy. Toke is clearly a great homage to this culture. It is so blatantly, openly, lovingly referential that it can not be called derivative in the least. Toke references pop culture tropes constantly - from stoner comedies to a Douglas Adams style panic button and references to dolphins leaving the planet, to hip hop videos and the action in Japanese anime and all the way to The Blues Brothers - ‘John Belushi believes they’re on a mission from god! And nothing ever happens to them!’

Nikhil is the perfect protagonist for such a novel - partly because when he is asked to save the world, he really doesn’t have much else going on. He’s perfectly average - a software engineer in constant trouble with his manager with a numbing crush on a co-worker, living with his family: he’s everyman. He’s your average Indian boy - half the interest in Nikhil comes from the fact that he is not anyone or anything special to start off with - so will an average boy evolve into a worthy protagonist when given such a weighty task? He’s not a hero born but a hero made, and that’s what makes him entirely accessible to the reader. 

This matter of the world as we know it ending - in Toke, Mody isn’t about to start getting serious about a looming apocalypse. In this case its a brain-controlling maggot that causes the trouble by converting all of humanity into perfect, cookie cutter versions of themselves. Gone is all the madness, chaos, choice and sheer life that the earth teems with; replaced by maggot-controlled zombie human vehicles that simply follow someone else’s grand masterplan. Mody’s zombies aren’t walking around with putrid degenerating flesh, limbs at awkward angles, gait stiff and mouths gaping wide for the biggest chunk of live flesh possible - Mody’s zombies are ‘humans running around circuits like electrons’ in a ‘giant organic supercomputer’ so that the world takes on the shape of a ‘psychedelic electronic video. Perfectly timed’. It makes perfect sense for Mody to have chosen order as a sign of the coming apocalypse - for a writer who clearly revels in the chaos and sheer joy of life with open possibilities, Bombay becoming ‘like the insides of a massive clock’, with humans as mere cogs and wheels is obviously a sign of complete ruin for the human race. 

This is a fun, funny, entertaining book - Mody may be a debut novelist but he has fortunately escaped the tendency of first time South Asian novelists to take themselves too seriously. Toke is a book written by someone who has disregarded the current standard of South Asian literary tropes entirely. Some readers may even find fault with the most of references to popular culture being western. Of course, this would be an entirely moot point considering just how global popular culture has become - regardless of where certain tropes originate from. Mody’s references are fed by a love for film, music, television, computers and most importantly, the internet. Whether it is 8-bit gaming technology or a ghetto-fabulous version of Lord Shiva appearing with back-up dancers, Toke is an incredibly aware, plugged-in novel. It is a book that wants to have fun, and wants its readers to do the same. Take it seriously, or expect it to take a moral high ground or ‘literary’ stance and you’d just as well sell its soul.