Bookmarked Musings: Raj Kamal Jha’s The Patient in Bed Number 12 by Ramlal Agarwal
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In this essay, Ramlal Agarwal analyses Raj Kamal Jha’s latest work The Patient in Bed Number 12 (Penguin India, 2023)
Raj Kamal Jha is an IIT student and holds a master’s from the University of Southern California. He is the chief editor at The Indian Express, the largest newspaper in India. He appeared on the literary scene in 1996 with his debut novel, The Blue Bedspread, and has so far written six novels. His latest, The Patient in Bed Number 12, is about social, economic, and cultural issues of the recent past that have smeared our lives—in the form of a series of stories.
Most of them deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, large-scale turbulence and loss of lives, lockdown, and unemployment, staggering migration of workers, the travails and tragedies of workers heading home on foot, isolation camps, and the psychological turmoil of patients languishing in hospitals. Besides, there are stories that deal with another equally dangerous virus of communal violence and mass lynchings. Jha tells them very clinically, cryptically, and economically. Moreover, he hides the identities of most of his characters.
