Once Upon a Time: Ashok Srinivasan: book review

Once Upon a Time: Ashok Srinivasan
 Review by Divya Dubey

[Published by Hindustan Times, Sep 2, 2016: http://www.hindustantimes.com/books/review-of-once-upon-a-time-award-winning-writer-ashok-srinivasan-s-first-novel/story-waXxjAab4guh6mIA8fJQeM.html ]

Ashok Srinivasan’s short story collection, Book of Common Signs, won The Hindu Prize 2014. It was also long-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Hence expectations from his debut novel, Once Upon a Time, were quite high. However, the novel turned out to be a royal disappointment.

The protagonist, Brinda Murty’s story is ostensibly modelled on the story of the crucifixion of Christ, though parallels within the novel are almost non-existent when it comes to Christ’s back story or his massive following. As a concept, sure, it sounds intriguing and full of possibilities. However, the author fails to portray a three-dimensional character the reader can root for. Problems with the novel begin right from flawed portraits early on. The novel neither falls into the category of those by Devdutt Pattanaik or Ashok Banker, nor those by the likes of Saramago. Elsewhere Srinivasan has been compared with authors such as Franz Kafka, Bruno Schulz and Haruki Murakami, but the work under review is a far cry from such.

‘Once upon a time, long, long, ago in a land far, far away there lived a doll called Brinda … that is how all my father’s bedtime stories to me invariably began,’ says Brinda Murty in the opening lines of the book, as a first-person narrator. However, as she progresses, the words turn into the most insipid documentary delivered in a detached, clinical voice.  Brinda never manages to establish an emotional connect with the reader.

She is the daughter in an affluent family in Tamil Nadu and has certain superpowers she herself is unaware of. For instance, she can clearly recall places and incidents that happened much before she was born, including her elder sister Sarla’s death. This thread would have drawn the reader into the tale instantly had it been developed well. Unfortunately, that does not happen. The reader keeps waiting and waiting, but this strand is lost amongst the various other unwarranted digressions in the narrative.

At some point Brinda’s family moves to Bangalore in her great-grandfather’s home called ‘Star Home’ – a kind of boarding house for other relatives, storytellers and artists and even strangers and foreigners. New characters are constantly introduced – some directly, others randomly, but none of them ever really finds a voice in the novel – whether it is her actor-father or painter-mother, or for that matter her poet-brother, Janak, or lover, Gautam, later in the book. They are all more or less mute cardboard characters. On the very few occasions when they do speak, their language sounds stilted, contrived and hinged on clichés.  For example, as children, when Janak shakes his sister off because he cannot ‘stand being touched’ and she asks him how he would ever have children, his response is, ‘The married life is not for me; nor the sweet corruption of saintliness. As you can see, I am drunk as a skunk. What I want is the sodden life of an evil-minded hermit. End of story.’

In fact the most important events in the books are arbitrary. There are no convincing cause-and-effect relationships established.  Brinda’s father moves away from the family, but we never know why. The mother lives in her own world, but we do not know why. Brinda finds she possesses strange healing skills, but she never wonders why. Nor does anybody else. Her brother Janak takes to drinking and ends up in an asylum. Again, one never finds out why.  She never manages to form a bond with her lover. The reader fails to understand why. She is taken prisoner by the state for her special powers. Once again the reader fails to understand why. The end is the most bizarre of all.

When Brinda moves to college in Bombay, she is swallowed up by a completely different culture until unimaginable horrors descend upon her, but the reader is still left struggling to make sense of cause and effect, seeking answers to the question why, which never ever emerge convincingly.  Even after suffering rape and molestation her voice and tone remain neutral: ‘The next man turned me on my stomach and raised my hips and took me from behind […] This went on until old Mucosa or his double was into me when from sheer exhaustion I must have blacked out.’

Barely a paragraph later, it is life as usual for her: ‘One Sunday, just as I was returning from home from a shopping spree [italics mine] one of the urchins playing hopscotch on the street […] handed me a grimy, unsealed envelope….’

Ashok Srinivasan

How can you expect the reader to take such a protagonist or her morbid experiences seriously? For a woman, who has been through such devastating experiences, would have a sea of emotions within her that must be communicated to the reader. This major fault shows a clear lack of skill and sensitivity  on part of the author, the inability to enter the complex mind of a woman, especially a woman scarred by the most horrendous experiences in her youth, or the impossibility of articulating or expressing them, leave alone dealing with them.

Every action, every event, every diversion from beginning to end is arbitrary and therefore the entire novel lacks credence or appeal. The book offers too little, demands too much. That is why it remains – throughout – a pretty superficial and, in every sense, unimpressive piece of work. 
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Necropolis by Avtar Singh: book review

Necropolis by Avtar Singh
-- reviewed by Divya Dubey (publisher, Earthen Lamp Journal)

(Published by Hindustan Times)

The first thing that strikes the reader about Avtar Singh’s novel, Necropolis, is its title – an instant reminder of Jeet Thayil’s highly commended work, Narcopolis, though Thayil’s is an interesting play on the original word. The attempt at similitude is hard to miss. Thayil’s ‘polis’ is the city of Bombay ‘which obliterated its own history by changing its name and surgically altering its face’ and ‘is the hero or heroin of this story’. In Singh’s novel it is Delhi and its criminal underbelly that takes centre stage.

‘This city…,’ says DCP Sajan Dayal, ‘It’s a giant necropolis. Entire developments raised on what used to be graveyards. Old villages gone, fields buried, their soil used for cement.’
But implications of a graveyard-city go further:

‘Djinns are still invoked in Firoz Shah Kotla and in other places […] There are shops in Dariba that have been empty for generations because the jewellers believed they’re cursed. There are mad women on the Ridge and tree spirits in Mehrauli, and during the Uprising, armies dressed in green silk with their swords naked to the air were seen and then disappeared. In daylight.’ [sic]
However, having raised the reader’s expectations through the title, characteristic atmospherics and the introduction of a bewildering Angulimaal in a classic old-Delhi setting, Singh’s narrative falls miles short of meeting them.

In the first chapter the dead body of a twenty-year-old man is discovered next to an old village in Delhi. There is a ‘necklace of fingers’ around his neck. Two gangs of youngsters at war – the Vampires and the Lycans (inspired by Bram Stoker and, more recently, Stephanie Meyer) – form the backdrop of the action, using social networking sites, You Tube, streets and metro stations for their battleground. Their leader – a young man in a kaffiyeh appears mysteriously at the site every time a crime is committed.

DCP Dayal is at the helm of the case, along with his junior colleague, Kapoor, and the smart young IPS officer, Smita Dhingra.

Juxtaposed against Smita is the enigmatic and elusive Razia  of indeterminate age, descended from a string of Razias in the family – a femme fatal figure who wields power over the DCP as much as over ‘Delhi’s own Angulimaal’ whose nemesis she proves to be. Her home is almost a historical monument, being hundreds of years old; her ancestors are said to have been traitors to the cause of the 1857 revolt, and she herself appears and disappears at will – sometimes a clubber, sometimes a socialite, sometimes a minister’s adjunct, occasionally an admirer of Ghalib’s poetry. Except that she fails to create the same impact as Fowler’s Sarah Woodruff or Capote’s Holly Golightly. Rather, she comes across as an insipid two-dimensional character – more aggravating than impressive, lacking equally psychological and emotional depth. Most of the scenes featuring her sudden materialization and attempts at coquetry seem contrived and lacklustre.

Characters such as Dayal, Kapoor and Smita are well drawn. Singh also brings several recent real-life issues in Delhi to the fore, the effort amply facilitated by his journalistic background. For instance, the various cases the three police officers investigate include, besides a psycho collecting human digits, a rape case (the question of north-eastern women living in the capital), the murder of an African drug dealer and his girlfriend (matters of racism), and the kidnapping of a three-year-old from an extremely affluent family (intimidation or perhaps a political gambit).
Singh’s engagement with these issues though, remains surface-level. This novel is not an ode to Delhi; it is in fact an exposé.

As DCP Dayal tells Smita while tracking down a criminal:
‘Delhi has always been a fertile ground for societies of all sorts […] They band together with men and women they think they have something in common with […] Agglomerations of men and a few women who perceive their pasts and futures in the same terms. Invitation only, closed to the rest of the world, their workings inscrutable. They’re secret societies, Smita. But nobody says so, because everybody wants in.’

Avtar Singh

While they manage to capture rapists and hunt down murderers, the kidnapping case is forced to close before the architect of the crime has been caught. It upsets the idealist in Smita, but the two senior policemen acknowledge that one of the restraining factors of being in their job is that there are certain crimes the corridors of power would rather not have them solve.
It is interesting that this novel has appeared amongst a slew of Delhi-centric books this year, including Rana Dasgupta’s Capital.

A cross between genre fiction and a literary work, this novel manages complete justice to neither. The different cases lack proper substance, depth and intensity crucial for an interesting piece of fiction; plots are sketchy, climaxes flop. The author’s knowledge of Delhi’s history combined with his awareness of its contemporary scene could have translated into a work of far greater value than it actually does. At times turgid prose fraught with convoluted constructions can be rather tedious, though certain metaphors do stand out.

Overall, it elicits a lukewarm response from the reader. 

Swimmer Among the Stars: Kanishk Tharoor: book review

Swimmer Among the Stars by Kanishk Tharoor
Reviewed by Divya Dubey

[Published by Hindustan Times: March 26, 2016: http://www.hindustantimes.com/books/kanishk-tharoor-of-storytellers-and-storytelling/story-CPAmqernuwRqQHXy8i4csI.html ]

Kanishk Tharoor

Tongue in cheek, debutant author Kanishk Tharoor begins with the idea of Exotic India in the opening lines of the first story, ‘Elephant at Sea’, in his collection of short stories. Apparently inspired by an incident he heard about in his childhood, the story is centred on the wish of a Moroccan princess to own an Indian elephant. The Indian government – living up to its reputation – takes six years to process her application. Consequently, by the time the elephant is en route to Morocco, the princess is studying Sociology in Paris, and the rest of Morocco is clueless about what must be done with the creature when it arrives.  Foremost among them is the Second Secretary to the Indian embassy to Morocco. The situation is exacerbated by the presence of a dedicated mahout accompanying the pachyderm. Instead of being excited at the prospect of travelling home on a plane, the fellow spends his time making ‘ridiculous demands for an elephant nobody actually wants’.

Given his lineage, expectations from Kanishk Tharoor are naturally high.  Already his name is wedged between ‘ancient and modern masters of fabulist surrealist and magical short stories’ by the book jacket, which mentions veterans such as Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges and Angela Carter. A lay reader might take that with a smidgen of salt. Tharoor, however, does not disappoint. In fact, one could perhaps add Geoffrey Chaucer to the list. The author’s distinctive voice shows a storyteller who has spent years perfecting his craft. The refrain or half-refrain in some of the stories (‘Seven days before the Khan’s army razed the city…’) at times hark back to the charm and lyricism found in Arabian Nights or in the likes of Sir Thomas Malory’s La Morte D’Arthur.

The collection straddles a huge expanse both in terms of space and time. For instance, ‘The Teahouse’ or ‘The Mirrors of Iskandar’ transport us to another era in history (though the latter can be a little underwhelming sometimes); stories such as ‘A Lesson in Objects’, ‘The Fall of an Eyelash’ or ‘The Loss of Muzaffar’ are written in the realistic tradition and focus on personal or cultural struggles in Time Present, while some such as ‘A United Nations in Space’ are futuristic in outlook. Well-known writer Amitav Ghosh considers it ‘serendipitous’ that he came across this collection when he was preoccupied with the idea of the Anthropocene (geological epoch when human activities began to impact the earth’s atmosphere). Referring to the collection he points out that the stories skillfully break several literary conventions in that sense.

The title story, ‘Swimmer Among the Stars’ has for its protagonist the last speaker of a language at whose doorstep ethnographers appear with digital recorders. The narrator says, ‘It simply confirms reality to the last speaker, that the old world of her mind is cut adrift from humans and can only be pulped into a computer.’ Later when she begins to regale her audience with songs in her language, she is grateful to them to have allowed her to ‘feel old’ in her language. There is no one to whom she can bequeath this inheritance: ‘She is proud that nether of her children are vulnerable to false nostalgia […] She would not have them bound to her relic. She would never wish that loneliness upon them.’

The themes of estrangement, loss and loneliness run across all the stories. The author is also obsessed with ideas of speech and language and the inadequacy of words. Storytellers and storytelling form a significant thread in the narrative. ‘Portrait with Coal Fire’, for instance, is about a poor miner’s interaction with a magazine reporter/storyteller over Skype, where he fails to comprehend why the writer cannot publish his family’s picture in another issue of the magazine; in ‘The Astrolabe’, a ship’s captain finds himself on an island, in a situation reminiscent of Sindbad or Gulliver, where no one speaks Arabic or Greek, Castilian or Majorcan, and he begins to think of the islanders as ‘tongue-less cannibals’. In ‘The Teahouse’ again, as the city waits to be erased by the Khan’s army, the narrator says, ‘Only the booksellers were out in force, possessed of that blind faith in the text. There will always be books to sell. There will always be people to read.’ In ‘The Mirrors of Iskandar’ Iskandar’s retinue tells stories ‘to escape domestic tedium’ during their waiting period.

In spite of the humour on the surface, most of the stories are deeply philosophical and tinged with a sense of helplessness and melancholy.  The essence of the book is evident in the words the mahout speaks into the elephant’s ears in the first story: ‘Sleep well, my beauty […] If you dream, don’t dream of home and don’t dream of me. Dream of the sea. You and I are now so alone in this world….’

With brilliantly portrayed characters such as the mahout, Muzaffar, the miner and the stranded sailors amongst others, it is a compelling debut collection that simply must not be missed. 

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The Honest Season: Kota Neelima: book review

The Honest Season: Kota Neelima
Review by Divya Dubey

[Published by Hindustan Times: May 21, 2016:  http://www.hindustantimes.com/books/an-engrossing-political-thriller/story-tiV1KB8nCapvydpAbvA3RN.html ]

This is the third book by the author and journalist, Kota Neelima, who has covered politics in Delhi for over two decades. The earlier novels include Shoes of the Dead and Death of a Moneylender. In The Honest Season too she draws a realistic political set-up with its soft underbelly. She creates a strong woman protagonist, Mira Mouli, also a journalist, but with a special super-power: to intuitively ‘know’ the future, besides people’s thoughts and motivations, so that as a ‘know-journalist’ she becomes indispensable to Bidur Munshi’s newspaper that has been struggling to survive for a while. And yet, behind the facade she is a grown-up orphan carrying a heavy baggage from her past.

Mira’s life is suddenly thrown out of gear one day when a tape arrives from Sikander Bansi at the newspaper office, addressed to her. Although he is the son of Mahesh Bansi, the president of the People’s Party and one of the most powerful men in the country, Sikander has always been known to flout his father’s wishes, rules and traditions. He is an MP himself, but ‘He never made political statements, demands or suggestions in the press, and was only rarely ever photographed.’ And now he has chosen to do a disappearing act, which is unsettling for his father, especially since Sikander has decided to make a game out of it. Every week he sends a controversial tape secretly recorded by him within the premises of the parliament, to Munshi’s newspaper. The tapes reveal underhand dealings of several well-known political figures and offer incriminating evidence against them. At the end of every recording there is a clue for Mira Mouli. Sikander believes that she is the ideal person to figure them out and manage to reach his hideout, since both of them have much in common – their brains work alike. Until she does, he will keep sending such tapes and the newspaper must publish them.

As Mira struggles with the clues, she is helped by Salat Vasudev, another ‘know journalist’ at her office, whose appointment she partly resents. At the same time Nalan Malik, the Party’s general secretary, keeps making intermittent and unexpected appearances, ostensibly, to ensure her safety since, as more and more politicians are exposed, the number of enemies baying for her blood keeps burgeoning every week.

Kota Neelima

An engrossing political thriller, this novel moves at a good pace, entertaining and challenging the reader at the same time. It has its twists and turns, some predictable, some not, and it follows the standard pattern of a breezy thriller. Regrettably, most such mystery novels do sound alike. One rarely comes across a narrative voice that sounds distinct or different. This book too falls in the same category. At times the similarities between Sikander and Mira, the instinctive bonding, the yearning and the pain seem a little contrived.

The good part is that the author has succeeded in creating a realistic, likeable, strong protagonist that the reader cares about. However, the downside is that precisely because she is strong and likeable, the reader is left feeling dissatisfied and angry towards the end.

This is precisely the kind of novel that, despite being a prototype commercial thriller, begs literary critique. And it is not quite possible to do that without giving away many of the novel’s secrets. Yet, it is important to comment on the book’s ending. Even though the author has left it open ended (there could be several alternatives), every alternative comes across as equally defeatist.  Perhaps it would have done much better without the Epilogue, which overturns the entire impact. One wonders why Mira is offered the choice she is offered at the end and whether it is a choice at all. What is the author trying to say? Is it really that no matter how strong or gifted a woman may be (or even a superwoman for that matter), eventually she must fall in line and resign herself to her fate because it’s a man’s world? Or is it that strong women must fall victim to their death wish because that is the only option available to them?

Because, eventually, that is the message the reader receives. And the reader would have respected the protagonist much better had she been able to break out of this stereotyping of women. At least in 2016 women journalists have come so far that they can – and do – hold their own even in the toughest situations. Sans the Epilogue, the novel would have been far more appealing.
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Fragments of Riversong: Farah Ghuznavi: book review

Fragments of Riversong: Farah Ghuznavi
--reviewed by Divya Dubey (publisher, Earthen Lamp Journal)
Publisher: Daily Star Books
ISBN: 978-984-90271-9-5
Extent: 140 pp
Price: $ 10

(Published by India Currents magazine, USA)

Bangladesh being well known for a riverine topography and its significance to the life of its people, the title of Farah Ghuznavi’s collection of short stories, Fragments of Riversong, seems ideal.  It creates an instant visual impression in the mind of the reader. The stories echo the simplicity of fellow Bangladeshi writer Mahmud Rahman’s style in his own collection, Killing the Water (2010), to some extent but the writer’s emphatic feminist voice is audible right from the beginning.

Ghuznavi’s characters are predominantly women struggling to cope with their world at various stages of their lives – childhood, adolescence, womanhood, widowhood. Relationships within the family, patriarchy and prejudices, encounters with sexual predators, oppression, violence, cruelty and malice, poverty and discrimination – familiar issues in all South Asian countries – play a crucial role in the plots.  Stories such as ‘Getting There’, ‘Big Mother’, ‘Just One of the Gang’, ‘Escaping the Mirror’ and ‘Waiting for the Storm’ make the heaviest impact for different reasons.

‘Getting There’, the first story, throws Laila and her two young nieces, Aliya and Yasmin (her sister’s daughters) together during a journey from Chittagong to Dhaka by car after her sister’s accident. On the way Laila remembers random episodes from her childhood: the difference in personality between her sister and herself – the former as docile as the latter was rebellious; their father’s Draconian laws and his expectations of his daughters; the vicious destruction of young Laila’s sketchbook by him upon discovery:

 Laila’s defiance inflamed Baba further. If her initial disobedience had not been bad enough, her refusal to recant made matters worse – reinforcing his conviction that girls, whatever their age, should not travel the dangerously seductive route of making their own decisions.
The inevitable flare-up of a temper that was unused to resistance in any form ended in a literal conflagration….

It was this excruciating incident responsible for the permanent rupture in their relationship. Now, years later, driving back home with the girls who are practically strangers to her, Laila makes a significant – and pleasant – discovery that might alter the course of her life yet again.

‘Big Mother’ might have done well as a full-length novel, given its scope and the range of issues it raises through a family saga – from the spitefulness of a domineering childless woman, to a child’s exposure to sexual abuse and guilt, to the status of minorities in the country, to a secret marriage with someone from a different religion with an alien lifestyle, to coping with unexpected widowhood in secret, to hopes of liberation in a foreign land. The longer form would have provided the author greater space for manoeuvre.

At least two of the stories delve deep into the psyche of schoolgirls and the years that shape their later lives. Both ‘Just One of the Gang’ and ‘The Silver Lining’ might be altered versions of incidents from Ghuznavi’s own schooldays. The voice is too personal and potent – jelling well with her little anecdotes and experiences on Facebook – to suggest otherwise, even though the stories themselves establish their universality through their themes and character prototypes. Ideas of class consciousness are sometimes juxtaposed against instances of friendship across race and religion. The innocence and lack of affectation in the narrative endear the narrator to the reader.

‘Escaping the Mirror’ relates the story of the seven-year-old Dia from an affluent family, who falls victim to the unwelcome advances of Minhas, her parents’ trusted chauffeur, suffering the indignity quietly over several years. As in case of most families, her parents fail to detect the sinister happenings under their own roof:

Gradually, her behaviour began to change […] She was more reserved with others around her as well, only ever relaxing in the company of her parents and close friends. The changes were so incremental that nobody noticed; the warning signs were missed by the adults around her.

Farah Ghuznavi

Many years later at home, instigated by a ‘chance remark’ by her father about the ‘crazy’ Westerners, she blurts out the truth about her life and the reality of their own country. The passage about Dia’s discovery of the term for her childhood experiences, however, could have been shorter and less explanatory. This story also resonates with another significant story, ‘Two Four Six Eight’ from the Indian author Lavanya Sankaran’s collection, The Red Carpet (2007), which unveils another ugly facet of child sexual abuse – that is not only men who are always the culprits.

‘Waiting for the Storm’ – the account of a beleaguered wife reaching her saturation point in the company of her overbearing spouse – carries shades of Roald Dahl and Agatha Christie. The reader craves for more.

 The most surprising package is perhaps ‘The Assessment’—a futuristic sci-fi tale centred on the world of ‘artificial intelligents’ or AIs who come with a catch – ‘an underlying possibility for evolutionary adaptation that was not foreseen in the original design’. Pammie, the ‘humanoid robot’ Jai buys against his wife’s wishes, apparently to assist her with childcare, eventually succeeds in turning her redundant in more ways than one. The dystopian view rings even more ominous considering possible scenarios in Time Future.

Perhaps the weakest link in this concatenation of tales is ‘The Mosquito Net Confessions’ – a rather lengthy chronicle of a diffident Diya heading for a field trip ‘a month into her new job at the Grameen Bank’ with three Francophone Africans and a Bangladeshi-American for company, and her experiences that mould her into a different woman capable of weathering all storms. This story fails to capture the reader’s interest as much as the others.

 As an experienced development worker and social activist, Ghuznavi has been keenly involved in politics and social work, especially adult women’s right to education – operating in tandem with the British NGO Christian Aid, Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank, and the United Nations.  As she reveals on her website, her fiction was inspired by the various people she came across in the process – people ill-equipped to tell their own stories. Through this collection, therefore, she paints a vivid picture of the present-day Bangladesh and their most pressing concerns.
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Drowning Fish by Swati Chanda: book review

Drowning Fish by Swati Chanda

Reviewed by Divya Dubey 

Publisher: Hachette

Extent: 328 pp

Price: Rs 399

ISBN: 978-93-5009-890-5

(Published by Livemint: April 4, 2015: http://www.livemint.com/Leisure/LuxYcRtq4Ff82Ycyc5i7qL/Book-review-Drowning-Fish.html )

An essay on diasporic literature by Amit Shankar Saha illustrates that ‘despite peculiarities there is an inherent exilic state in all dislocated lives whether it be voluntary or involuntary migration’. Swati Chanda’s debut novel, Drowning Fish, brings this exilic state to the fore – through the story of Nayantara set in East Pakistan in the 1950s – the time of Independence and mass massacres; and next through the story of her granddaughter, Neelanjana, initially a student of English Literature on a scholarship at a university in the United States, who later takes up employment there as a modern expat teacher at various institutes.   

As exiles, experiences of grandmother and granddaughter are completely different. While Nayantara’s exile is forced due to war, that of her granddaughter is self-imposed and welcome.

Amidst a riot-ridden atmosphere Nayantara manages to migrate to Calcutta as a refugee with her two daughters, Sucharita and Niharika, leaving behind her beloved home, Narayanbari in Bangladesh, with her precious teak-wood furniture in it, which is later restored to her. This heavy teakwood Victorian furniture – the massive claw-footed armoire, the spinet, armoires with arabesque doors and intricate carvings – is the legacy Nayantara leaves behind for Neelanjana to claim when she comes of age. Meanwhile, it is left in the custody of Neelanjana’s aunt, Sucharita.  

Sucharita takes her job seriously, not only because Neelanjana is her favourite niece whom she looks upon as her own daughter, but also as a form of atonement for her past sins, her failure to protect and speak up for the girl as a vulnerable teenager brazenly molested by Nirmal Bondhu, her husband, under her very nose. Both aunt and niece share a tacit understanding and guard this secret for personal reasons.

As Neelanjana grows up she overcomes her fear and shame watching her aunt and uncle grow old and shrivelled, but her aunt’s sense of guilt and self-loathing keeps growing stronger – so much so that she eventually begins to lose her mind.    

On the other hand Neelanjana happily embraces the freedom, especially sexual liberty that life in the United States offers her. As she says to Phil, ‘I’m just exploring myself, being myself. Trying to figure things out for myself….’

She makes friends with two Indian boys, Kedar and Ratnam – the latter who makes the mistake of falling in love with her. Though aware of his feelings for her, Neelanjana finds it impossible to reciprocate his sentiments but they remain good friends.

In fact, at this juncture Neelanjana is not prepared for commitment at all. She is satisfied with her flings with Alex, Phil, Dakota and later even Tim, her student, before she receives a rude shock that changes the course of her life on foreign soil.

Ratnam, whom she had snubbed earlier as a lover now reenters her life, though it is out of necessity rather than choice and he knows it. Yet he makes the compromise willingly – and, eventually, pays for it.

Neelanjana does not share the diasporic angst of Jhumpa Lahiri’s characters. Throughout the novel her role vis-à-vis her ancestors and the history of Partition is that of an outsider-observer. She hears the narratives of exile from her parents and relatives, especially her aunt, Sucharita, but she herself has never been and can never be an integral part of that world. Even Jamshedpur, where she spent her life after her grandmother moved to Calcutta, loses its charm for her following her migration to the US.

Swati Chanda

 As Neelanjana becomes accustomed to her adopted country, every visit to India makes her feel more foreign. Finally, while waiting for her flight back to the US on such a visit she understands that she is ready to break away from her past – the stories about the Gangetic plains and the lush green East Bengal, the delta, the alluvial islands and all the geographical and natural delights, apart from tales of border crossings between different cities and refugee camps with their indigence and privation:

Neelanjana no longer wanted any part of it. She was going to free herself from her family’s narratives, the burden of their history. The tragedies of Partition. The trauma of exile. The loss of home The betrayals of family. The nostalgia for desh, her land. When she came here next, she would be sure about which was ‘home’ for her and which ‘back home’. 

By this time Neelanjana also realizes that the ‘idyll of rural East Bengal’ she grew up with had been erected from a position of privilege.

However, it is only after the incident with Tim and Ratnam’s reentry into her own life that she grasps the meaning of ‘drowning fish’ her father had mentioned to her – fish that cannot breathe, that suffocate and drown if there is a depletion in the oxygen level of the surrounding water, if the environment becomes too poisonous for them.

Neelanjana, though, emerges a survivor. Like Gone With the Wind’s Scarlet O’Hara, for Neelanjana too tomorrow is another day.

At times the novel tends to be too repetitive and overuse of the past perfect tense can hinder reading, but these ‘defects’ are rather minor given the merits of the story. 

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Bicycle Dreaming: Mridula Koshy: book review

Bicycle Dreaming: Mridula Koshy
Review by Divya Dubey

[Published by Hindustan times: Aug 20, 2016: http://www.hindustantimes.com/books/review-a-girl-dreams-of-owning-a-green-bicycle-in-mridula-koshy-s-new-novel/story-x5rfJf5Xfrl0Vqd7QKOykO.html]


After complex works such as If It is Sweet and Not Only the Things That Have Happened, Mridula Koshy returns to simple linear storytelling in Bicycle Dreaming. Rather surprising, since Koshy is a veteran at abstract writing and known to revel in it. Her stories, replete with heavy symbolism, tend to challenge the intellect and imagination of her readers. In this novel, however, she has chosen an easy confluence of form and subject that works pretty well. She told Tishani Doshi in a recent conversation (The Hindu), ‘I wanted to test the theory that I could tell a not-simple story simply.’ And this experiment seems to have succeeded.

Mridula Koshy

The book begins with the thirteenth birthday of Noor (or Nooren), the daughter of a kabaadiwala in Chirag Dilli, who dreams of owning a green bicycle and riding it like her father through the streets as India’s first ‘kabaadiwali’. She shares her hopes and fears with her best friend, Haseena, who, midway through the novel, falls out with her and is immediately swallowed up by her own problems. The girls reunite much later, almost towards the end of the book – and close to Noor’s fourteenth birthday. In the meanwhile Noor develops a crush on her classmate, Ajith, a bright spark in her class who belongs to a Dalit family and is well aware of its significance in a clearly stratified environment. Eventually it is he who teaches her to ride a bicycle. At home Noor is torn between her parents; her mother has a soft corner for her elder brother, Talib, who is an ambitious young man looking to better his prospects in the world, while Mohammad Saidullah, Noor’s father, is incapable of seeing eye-to-eye with him.

A few pages into the novel, one wonders if Koshy is guilty of the kind of writing many Indian writers writing in English are accused of – serving India’s filth and poverty to a mostly Western readership, on a platter (There are long graphic descriptions of muck and grime right at the beginning). But as one treads further, one realizes that the action is as much internal as it is external. We are looking at how heredity and a constantly changing environment impact the protagonist in the course of a year.
Right from the start Noor has been portrayed as a non-heroine, whose own thoughts and feelings find perspective first through Haseena and later through Ajith. And yet, like Erica Jong’s Isadora (Fear of Flying), Noor’s femininity and feminism find expression simultaneously and are often intertwined. Her choices are always her own. She is tentative, yet decisive; fearful yet proactive. She is the one who hounds Haseena until the ice between them is broken. In Haseena’s absence, she is the one who visits her siblings and sets the household straight. She follows Ajith around and realizes her feelings for him much before he begins to comprehend his own; she chooses to stay on with her father to cook and clean for him when her mother follows Talib to his new home; and it is Noor again who decides to visit her brother and her mother at his new house all by herself in the metro when fancy takes her. Often daunted by her own desires, she nevertheless goes right ahead. In many ways this book reminds one of one of Koshy’s earlier short stories, ‘The Large Girl’ with its brilliant portrayal of conflict within oneself and outside.

It is interesting that Koshy, at forty, hadn’t learnt to ride the bicycle. According to her, ‘To move my body at a speed that was not given to it seemed to me to be the freedom to be more than my body.’ The book apparently also owes to P Sainath’s essay ‘on women and bicycles in Everyone Loves a Good Drought’ and ‘Kaveri Gill’s Of Poverty and Plastic’. But most important were the picture book reading sessions Koshy conducted for some teenagers in ‘a weekly after-school club’, from where the idea of the novel actually emerged.

In spite of Mohammad Saidullah’s dying occupation and the humiliation he receives at the hands of corrupt officials, he knows that he is not the lowest of the low. There are people in society worse off than him. Similarly, Ajith knows that his academic scores alone are not enough to pluck him out of his background. Both Noor and Ajith understand why the authorities turn a blind eye to students cheating during exams and why they cannot complain against it even though, in principle, they know it is wrong. Poverty, class and caste divide, gender stereotypes and overturning traditional roles, child labour, politics, corruption, urbanization and modernization, technological advancements and their implications, green initiatives (at government school level) are some of the major themes, apart from the more human and abstract ones such as differences between perception and reality, growing up and the turmoil of adolescence with all its love-hate relationships.

This book is not simply a commentary on social evils, but is also a deeply personal project. Koshy understands the people she is writing about, no matter how different they may be from her on the surface. Simple, sensitive, occasionally humorous, the style endears the characters to the reader.
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