Ib's Endless Search for Satisfaction by Roshan Ali

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I believe we all come to a point in life when we begin questioning the purpose of either our lives or of the existence itself. The search takes us on a journey to discover the answers we are looking for. While our quest may sometimes be restricted to substantiating what we already know, sometimes we do come across ideas or thoughts that change our perspectives. Sometimes, it presents before us a mirror, which shakes us fiercely to acknowledge the prosaic reality we may otherwise tend to evade.

For me, reading has come as a means of finding a way to live’s inexplicability. And so when I stumble upon works which also tend to be doing the same, I am completely taken in. Roshan Ali’s Ib’s Endless Search for Satisfaction is a pursuit too. It is a story of a man who trudges along in life in search of that which might fill his parched soul.

“I am an empty man in an empty city, and every time I begin to fill up, the city sucks it all out again. An empty city is the subject - the subject of everything - and I am the object. What is it about cities that empties me like this? Maybe it’s the density, the fullness, stuffed with people of such lofty stuffing that the natural technique of nature to empty the filled and to fill the empty is reversed by this overdose of man and his mischief; and thus a thin man like me gets the stuffing sucked out of him, till he is hollow and restless. So it is necessary for any objects that move about a city to have these lofty notions of man and society, to contribute, to fit in and thus avoid the mad dissatisfaction of being hollow.”

Ib lives with his parents. His father suffers from schizophrenia while his mother struggles to take care of her husband. He loves his father and his mother but the constant strain of the anxiety that he feels is too much for him. He was only a child when his father “went nuts” so he never really had a father to look up to. His mother, trying to remain sane amidst the chaos, loses sight of life eventually. Ib makes imaginary friends while growing, terrified perhaps to have any real friends because he has no idea how to deal with real people. The banality of everyday existence brings Ib to an intersection that pushes him to drift any which way life takes him. He drops out of college and then leaves his home to be by himself. He picks up a job only to face his stern maternal grandfather who had him admitted to a college. The job helps him meet his ends and just that. He is not ambitious. Once he follows a saint to Himalayas out of curiosity, only to find that his appearance is a sham he uses, to make people come to their senses. However, Ib is not perturbed by that. He has a chance encounter with a girl whose presence stirs him intimately but then her sudden death closes the door to any inclination he might have felt towards life.

This story is about a man who cannot bring himself to terms with his life. From being a child, growing up in the absence of love and care, he becomes a person who doesn’t find meaning in things deemed important by everybody else around. The mental trauma he goes through, growing up in a home with a schizophrenic father, seeps to every other aspect of his life and he finds himself unable to engage in anything that might socially be termed as desirable. Emptiness abounds in his life; spreading slowly and engulfing everything that might have given it a meaning.

This book has been criticised by a few for a storyline that lacks purpose. In my view, the writer aims just that. In writing a work which doesn’t seem to serve any purpose, he points to the gravity of our minuscule understanding of mental trauma, to the struggle which a family and its members might go through, to the effect it might leave on people from such family, to the Endless Search for Satisfaction by those who are lost, who in the absence of a strong support system, are perpetually in danger of being marginalised by a society which feeds only on lofty notions of humanity and meaningfulness.

Yes, nothing happens in this book but this is because the lives of those suffering turn into nothingness too.

Are we listening enough?





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