The Valley of Masks

by Tarun J. Tejpal

English 392 pages 1 edition

‘A superb allegory of how totalitarianism emerges from the pursuit of ideals taken to their logical extremes. The creative accomplishment is extraordinary. This novel is a singular triumph, a universal fable.’—Shashi Tharoor ‘This brilliant, superbly imaginative but terribly disturbing novel transcends borders, cultures, reading habits and literary fashions. As a story of the inhumanity of any human search for absolute perfection, it probably has no parallel in our literature. As a fable, it has a moral that will return to haunt you.’—Ashis Nandy ‘This is my story. And the story of my people.’ On what will possibly be the last night of his life, a man sits alone in a dingy apartment hidden in a side street of an unnamed city, trying to record his story before daybreak. By dawn, he knows, he will be dead. Once, he was known only by a number: X470. He was a Wafadar, part of a secret order raised to protect a hidden commune of the ‘pure’ in the high mountains—an experiment in absolute equality where faces are masked, names erased and desire itself is trained out of the body. The Wafadars are its enforcers: disciplined, lethal, incorruptible. The commune looks up to Aum, its long-dead founder and prophet. It worships perfection. It worships unity. To question—to even doubt—is to betray. Now a Dagadar—a traitor—X470 is hunted by the brotherhood he once served. As the hours run out, he recounts the making of a man without an identity, and the events leading up to the moment he chose to claim it. The Valley of Masks is a chilling, hypnotic parable about what happens when perfection matters more than people, about the tyranny that replaces utopia when an idea becomes more sacred than those who live and die for it.