In addition, there are the usual asides, departures, stories within stories, letters, diary extracts and long speculative internal monologues that characterize Rao’s narrative technique. A certain degree of novelty is offered in two or three characters whose role in the lot is minimal, but who are very important—Abd’l Krim, the exiled Algerian leader, and Ratilal, the French Jain diamond merchant. Rao had said in an interview that the book is a tribute and acknowledgment of the great suffering of the Jews on behalf of humankind; this is elaborated at length in the story of Michel. But the suffering of Michel does not make the world any more real for Siva; his solution to the world’s problems still lies in self-extinction—not suicide, but an undoing of the self.

Chessmaster is an ambiguous book in which neither zero nor infinity wins. It accommodates not just the Brahmin and the rabbi, but the Jain and the revolutionary—though the violent ways of the latter are viewed unfavourably through Gandhian eyes. Chessmaster moves beyond these positions to a kind of indeterminacy. Siva, Rao’s spokesman, is no longer always right. Nor does he pretend to be in full control of his metaphysical project. There is always the more powerful presence of the “Chessmaster” behind the movements of the characters in the book. Of course, any notion of a personalized chessmaster or prime mover is just another version of the God that Siva, the rationalist mathematician, would deny till he realizes that it is the Guru in human form who is the real agent of transformation rather than some abstract or distant God. But this is one of the apparent contradictions of the book, which will only be resolved in the later volumes of the trilogy, only when Siva encounters the Guru.

Chessmaster is almost a rewriting to The Serpent and the Rope. In the earlier novel, Rama tells Savithri:

Zero makes all numbers, so zero begins everything. All numbers are possible when they are in and of zero. Similarly all philosophies are possible in and around Vedanta. But you can no more improve on Vedanta that improve on zero. The zero, you see, the sunya, is impersonal; whereas one, two, three and so on are all dualistic.

(226)

Chessmaster picks up this opposition, between zero and infinity, the impersonal and the personal, the monistic and the dualistic:

Either you accept the world, and build a human empire, accepting death and, therefore, the pyramids (whether you called it a mausoleum for Mao or for Tutankhamen), or you transcend the world and as such death itself, and find the Truth of Sankara’s ‘Sivoham, Sivoham.’6

(145)