The Amazing Racist by Chhimi Tenduf-La

The Amazing Racist by Chhimi Tenduf-La

--reviewed by Divya Dubey (publisher, Earthen Lamp Journal)
Publisher: Hachette India
ISBN: 978-93-5009-912-4
Extent: 232 pp
Price: US $ 12.99

[Published in Asia Literary Review]

Chhimi Tenduf-la

The opening pages of Chhimi Tanduf-La’s debut novel, The Amazing Racist, put a smile on the reader’s face instantly. The novel begins with the witty white narrator, Edward Trusted, a schoolteacher in Colombo, tickling the reader with his hilarious witticisms as he recounts his adventures in Colombo courtesy his Sri Lankan girlfriend, Menaka Rupasinghe. The situations he finds himself in echo the hilarity.  As the plot progresses, it acquires greater flesh and substance.
It is difficult not to find parallels with Two States, a similar novel by the p
opular Indian author, Chetan Bhagat. In the first part of this book all character archetypes come together: the Irresistible Heroine, the Madly-in-Love Hero from a different race/religion/country, the Formidable (prospective) Father-in-Law.  The beautiful Menaka Rupasinghe has a long comet-tail of boyfriends behind her – a fact Thilak Rupasinghe tries to rub in constantly to dissuade Eddie from marrying her. As the blurb mentions, for their marriage to happen it is Thilak Rupasinghe, ‘her orthodox terror of a father, whom he must woo and whose farts he must kiss.…’

Like the majority of Asian fathers, Thilak Rupasinghe – the ‘amazing racist’ of the title – wants to maintain his family pedigree, so he is – naturally – against his daughter’s decision to marry a white man with blond hair and blue eyes. 

The battle of wits is played out in Part I. Eddie tries his best to win the favour of his soon-to-be father-in-law, while Thilak Rupasinghe leaves no stone unturned to put Eddie into trouble at every opportunity – to the extent that he offers him employment in his organization that Eddie cannot accept legally, and then reports him to the authorities in a bid to get him deported.

Just when the reader begins to feel the plot is familiar and hackneyed, a twist in the tale changes the scenario. Part II of the book transforms an ordinary romance novel into something completely different and rarely written about in literature: an evolving relationship between father-in-law and son-in-law, both the men brought together by a child. As Menaka slowly loses interest in her husband post marriage and involves herself more and more in the politics of the country, Kiki, her daughter finds her mother’s love being supplanted by her father’s and grandfather’s – her grandfather turning into a de facto parent.         

It is indeed Thilak Rupasinghe’s personality that rules the novel. In the initial pages of the book he is introduced as ‘the great litigation lawyer and former President’s Counsel. A man so feared that it was said you had to look over your shoulder if you thought about him.’

Soon after, Eddie hears him giving instructions to his son before a trip in another room:
Don’t enter a girl’s room. Don’t speak to strangers. Don’t drag your feet when you walk. Don’t cross the railway line. Don’t swim in the ocean. Or the pool. Don’t drink. Don’t smoke. Don’t do drugs […] Don’t jump out of a boat. Don’t jump into a boat. Don’t go in anyone else’s car if they have been drinking. Don’t even look at a motorcycle….

When Menaka’s brother finally steps out, the reader realizes he is ‘a man with short greying hair and a w
hite beard’, probably in his mid-thirties.

Unlike Romesh Gunesekera’s Noon Tide Toll or Minoli Salgado’s A Little Dust on the Eyes, the Sri Lankan Civil War or the tsunami – two life-changing events for the Sri Lankans – are not central to the action in the novel, though the writer does mention them fleetingly.

Being Half-English and half-Tibetan and having lived in London, Hong Kong, Delhi and Colombo, the author has multiple homes and can maintain an objective perspective. In an interview with Adilah Ismail he reveals that ‘his family moved to Sri Lanka because his father wanted to retire in a Buddhist country and his mother, the well-known educationist Elizabeth Moir, was setting up some of Colombo’s key international schools’.

The character of Thilak Rupasinghe draws much from his real-life late father, Kesang, in that he battled cancer too. Chhimi, therefore, is familiar with all the stages of the disease and the impact it has on the patient, which makes the portrayal authentic in every detail.

In spite of the love-hate relationship Thilak and Eddie share, Thilak has a better understanding of his daughter as well as his son-in-law and cares for them in spite of himself. He is the one who anticipates and forestalls his daughter’s moves. The character sketches are strong and realistic. Menaka seems to share her basic characteristics with Scarlet O’Hara of Gone With the Wind, though she is somewhat redeemed when the author reveals the reason behind her fear of commitment (`a la Maggie Carpenter of The Runaway Bride) – her own abandonment by her father at a very young age before he accepted her again.

Chhimi sticks to his light-hearted narrative style and even the most serious scenes are broken by sporadic yet subtle humorous passages. In the same interview with Ismail, Chhimi comments, ‘One of the dangers of writing comedy is that you can get carried away and that’s why I stuck to characters I knew.’ Though the characters borrow recognizable traits from real-life people, he insists that the novel is not autobiographical.

The numerous amusing episodes in the former half of the book can, at times, appear contrived, but the latter half is tremendous – the doses of humour being just right. Chhimi raises certain important issues with much sensitivity. The ‘amazing racist’ though he remains racist till the end, inadvertently discloses a soft spot for his victim, which is responsible for many poignant moments as well as surprises in the book and marks it as distinct from others in the same genre.
********

She Will Build Him a City: book review

She Will Build Him a City: Raj Kamal Jha

Publisher: Bloomsbury
Month/Day/Year of release: February 26, 2015
ISBN 10/ASIN (10 digits only): B00QRWVQVC
ISBN 13 (13 digits only): 978 9384052423
Publicity contact email: Anurima Roy: anurima.roy@bloomsbury.com
 Genres: Fiction
 Reviewer: Divya Dubey
Extent: 344 pp

[Published in The New York Journal of Books: https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/she-will-build-him-city]

Raj Kamal Jha, chief editor of The Indian Express, is the author of three outstanding novels. In 2000 The Blue Bedspread, his debut work, won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for the best first book (Eurasia) and was also the New York Times Notable Book of the Year. In 2003, If You are Afraid of Heights was shortlisted for the Hutch-Crossword Book Award. In 2006, Fireproof topped CNN-IBN’s list of the best books published in India.

 She Will Build Him a City, Jha’s latest contribution to Indian Writing in English, published recently, was completed at Staatsbibliothek, the state library in Berlin – his own Tower of Bollingen for a year during his sabbatical from work. Though the setting is Delhi, the celebrated historical city as described in most of the well-known Delhi novels is absent. It does not have the old-world charm of Shahid Siddiqui’s Shahjahanabad (or Old Delhi) for instance (The Golden Pigeon, 2014). Nor does it focus on any major political or historical events that might form the backdrop of the action as in case of Aatish Taseer’s newest title, The Way Things Were (2014), despite the authors’ deep interest in Sanskrit – the common denominator linking them closely. Jha does not, for that matter, share Pavati Sharma’s concern with the trials and tribulations of today’s middle-class Delhiites either as demonstrated in her latest release, Close to Home.   

Raj Kamal Jha’s Delhi is a dark, morbid place – a ‘city of horrors’ where old landmarks such as forts, gardens and lakes have been replaced by metro tracks or stations, ugly construction sites, colossal glass-and-concrete buildings, particularly shopping malls which, once their lights and air-conditioners are turned off in the night, miraculously become home to an altogether different stratum of the society. This darkness also pervades the characters’ psyche. It can drive an ordinary man to despair and madness, to hallucinations of having committed rape and murder, blurring the lines between dream and reality; to revelations of guilty secrets by a mother to her estranged daughter as an attempt to justify her decisions after her husband’s death. In yet another unknown corner of the city, a healthy orphan boy is left at the doorsteps of Little House – an orphanage – by his mother: a Dickensian character in a Dickensian setting, though Jha’s world view is anything but Dickensian. The incident is witnessed solely by a stray bitch sitting on a garbage dump nearby, who acquires importance as a character later.

As Jha himself says in an interview with Livemint, ‘If thoughts could form coloured bubbles over the head, dark for bad, bright for good, and if I am looking down at the city from the sky above, I am drawn to the big, black smudges.’ His Delhi, therefore, is a city where these ‘black smudges’ take centre stage.  The storytelling style is experimental – moving from the periphery to the centre – a narrative from multiple shifting perspectives, which can seem daunting at first. Three threads run parallel and come together only towards the end of the book. 

Known for his cinematic technique, Jha does not disappoint his readers. Graphic descriptions are interlaced with elements of fantasy to make subtle suggestions and comments: the stray bitch on whose back Orphan makes his way out of Little House and who becomes his self-professed custodian; the babies in the night who, like Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, send a thought-message to other babies and tiptoe out of their homes to march towards The Mall; the Kafkaesque CR or ‘cock roach’ – son of one of the five hundred farmers who are forced to sell their land to developers for the construction of the ‘Apartment Complex’, and the Balloon Girl (echo of the French movie The Ballon Rouge) who floats in and out of the rich man’s apartment block, guiding and protecting him are some paradigmatic instances.   

Satire is oblique, occasionally direct, but always sharp and unsparing. Class divides and urban hypocrisies are exposed through different characters. Priscilla Thomas is a brilliant example. A prominent TV journalist, she announces her desire to adopt a child – a son – on national television. As a consequence she lands up at Little House, bypasses Orphan whom Mr Sharma, the in charge, has reserved for her, and instead chooses Sunil, a child with Down’s syndrome expected to live for a year or two at the most.  Later in a two-hour special programme:

The State Chief Minister and the Union Minister for Child Welfare are the chief guests. A panel of experts discusses Down’s Syndrome, the public apathy to disability, the need for a new law, they all agree that The Amazing Adoption of Sunil Thomas – as the show is now titled – will do wonders in raising public awareness and sensitivity […]

As for Mr Sharma, he gets as many as 420 seconds on TV […] in which he is told by Ms Thomas’s assistants to talk about how and why Ms Thomas’s move is a ‘landmark decision’ in the history of child welfare in India. 

By his own admission Jha is affected most by ‘the fault lines where worlds intersect – man, wife; husband, son; day, night; city, village; silence, noise; fear, hope – what

Raj Kamal Jha

lies in the spaces between these lines’.  His life as a journalist has provided him with a great deal of raw material for his works that explore uncomfortable subjects from domestic violence to prejudices, class divide and even incest.

This novel too was shaped by such experiences. He says, ‘I was returning home in a cab. There was no one in the India Gate circle, save for a roadside vendor. He had only a single red balloon left on his cart, the balloon that does wonderful things in the book.’

It is interesting that this amazing piece of work should have appeared hot on the heels of Sandip Roy’s Don’t Let Him Know, another original and experimental work from the same publisher’s stables. At a time when some people feel IWE has reached its saturation point and nothing new remains to be done, works such as these make a contrary statement and are very welcome.   
***

Savithri’s Special Room and Other Stories: Manu Bhattathiri: book review

Savithri’s Special Room and Other Stories:  Manu Bhattathiri
--review by Divya Dubey

HarperCollins
206pp
Rs 399

[Published by Hindustan Times: Nov 19, 2016:   http://www.hindustantimes.com/books/a-return-to-innocence-review-of-manu-bhattathiri-s-savithri-s-special-room-and-other-stories/story-QHTBgGNNxdU7ZIOBqyS2jL.html ]

For a lover of short stories, especially of the traditional variety that harks back to the likes of RK Narayan’s Malgudi tales and the ethos of the mid-twentieth-century India, Satyajit Ray’s characters in Indigo and Stranger stories or the subtle twists in the narratives of Saki and O Henry, Savithri’s Special Room and Other Stories is a literary bonanza, which creates nostalgia for an era long gone. This collection tries to resuscitate a genre drowning under the flood of modern fiction set in a modern world in the recent years. Rather unsurprisingly, it has also landed on the ‘Tata Literature Live! First Book Award’ longlist, along with five other nominees – an honour it deserves well.

In this debut collection, Manu Bhattathiri has concocted a delicious yesteryear dish using fresh recipes with tried and tested ingredients: Karuthupuzha – a fictitious ‘sleepy little town in the interiors of south India’ – much like Malgudi, and its entertaining and sometimes idiosyncratic characters caught in extraordinary situations in their ordinary lives.

Usually, it is quite easy to pick a favourite story or two from amongst such a collection, but the task is almost impossible in this one. Each of the nine interconnected tales is a gem with a simple plot that begins in the most innocuous manner. The appeal lies in the way the narrator
builds up the narrative and introduces the subtle turn of events. It transports one to a simple world as it existed before machines took over completely, before humans became semi-automatons themselves in a bid to outdo each other and the pace of life changed completely.

For instance, the first story, ‘The Cold’, introduces Kunjumon – an employee of Eeppachan Mothalali, the owner of a rice mill – who, upon a sudden whim one day, decides to show some charity towards the residents of Chamel’s Old Age Home, except that though his intentions remain noble, procrastination plays the villain.

The story, ‘The Man Who Knew God’ is another entertainer with Murali – a storyteller – for its protagonist. As the narrator mentions, ‘Apart from arriving at exotic points of view, no one knew what Murali really did.’ He goes from being a storyteller at the toddy shop to being perceived as a scholar and a champion of the underdogs in town (including that of Joby – the slipper thief), to being a teacher to the town’s children, to being a universal counselor-cum-psychiatrist – until Destiny intervenes.

The title story, ‘Savirthri’s Special Room’ is about an old couple, Vasu Appooppan and his wife Savirthri Ammoomma – as they live in a dilapidated house, waiting for the annual visit of their son, daughter-in-law and grandson, Kuttan. The story begins with a vivid description of their house: ‘Nature, from all sides, was trying to get in. Moss was slowly, secretively climbing up most of its walls. Weeds grew straight up and stood on their toes to peek in through its windows, as if checking out their future home.’ The relevance of the imagery strikes home later on in the story.

Some of the best stories are perhaps ‘Paachu and the Arrogant Tuft’, ‘The Wife’s Leg’ and ‘The Scandal’. In the first, Inspector Paachu, soon to retire, decides to pump fear into the hearts of the townsmen so that his image is maintained even after he quits the police force, but is beaten by a stubborn tuft of hair on his head that refuses to settle down; in the second, a very jealous Eeppachan Mothalali takes his young wife, Amminikutty, to task – but she has her revenge; and the last in which Shanta, Savithri Ammoomma’s maid, falls victim to a spiteful scandal created by Maniyan, the ‘most evil man’ and a labourer in Mothalali’s rice mill and yet ends up as the winner.

A return to the pre-machine age in terms of setting, characters and stories is also visible in Ali Akabar Natiq’s recent collection, What Will You Give for This Beauty and in Arunava Sinha’s The Greatest Bengali Stories Ever Told. However, Bhattathiri stands apart because of his sense of humour so subtly woven into his narrative. In some ways he shares it with Kanishk Tharoor, but while Tharoor is still somewhat distant and incisive in style, Bhattathiri is quite indulgent towards his characters. Once can imagine his narrator as a denizen of Karuthupuzha himself.

Manu Bhattathiri

Perhaps the only criticism one can offer is that the women sometimes come across as lesser than men, but that fact can be blamed upon the times the stories are set in and which they realistically reflect. Bhattathiri’s themes steer clear of politics. Instead they focus on the portrayal of the society: human nature, follies or foibles and relationships in a certain cultural context.  His characters are amazingly unforgettable – Mothalali, Chamel (owner of the Old Age Home and seller of porn magazines), the cuckold Kunjumon, Murali, Paachu Yemaan, the singer Acchu and her lover George Kutty, and several others who will probably be remembered as well as – if not better than – RK Narayan’s.  This book is a classic. 

Don’t let Him Know by Sandip Roy: book review

Don’t let Him Know by Sandip Roy
-- reviewed by Divya Dubey (publisher, Earthen Lamp Journal)

Publisher: Bloomsbury
Extent: 246 pp
Price: £ 16.99

 Published in Livemint: Jan 3, 2015

Is Sandip Roy’s debut work Don’t Let Him Know a collection of short stories – little lagoons connected by imperceptible waterways that bring them together as a well-knit whole? Or is it a novel that digresses into such independent yet interlinked little tales?

Few writers have succeeded with the former structure besides Raymond Carver, whose intratextual references are quite well known. Aravind Adiga’s Between the Assassinations is an instance; Shankar Vedantam’s Ghosts of Kashmir can be considered another paradigm.

A thorough reading of the novel – with each chapter a stand-alone story by itself – compels even a hardboiled critic to recognize that Roy’s breaking new ground here. The Acknowledgements section reveals:

A few of these stories appeared in early version elsewhere. ‘Ring of Spices’ appeared … in Contours of My Heat […] ‘A White Christmas’ is inspired by ‘Black and Blue’ from the anthology, Men on Men […] ‘Games Boys Play’ is a reincarnation of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ from Storywallah [...] A version of  ‘Great Grandmother’s Mango Chutney’ won the Katha Prize for Indian American fiction in India Currents Magazine....

Yet at no point in the book can one identify these blurring lines or spot dissonance. Instead the non-linear narrative these chapters weave, relate the family saga in a distinct style: through remarkable character portraits.

The usual diasporic murmurings make a deceptively simple beginning. After her husband Avinash’s death, Romola Mitra is visiting her son Amit, daughter-in-law June (an American) and grandson Neel in California. As a dutiful widow she has relinquished non-vegetarian fare, including fish for which she has a passion. However, American advertisements on television showing tantalizing pictures of food inspire in her a craving for a McDonald’s burger. This craving leads to the first of Romola’s incredible adventures in the city. Though the ugly scene at the fast food joint is another déjà vu (think English Vinglish), the end is not quite what the reader would expect.

Weaving past and present episodes together, the chapters bring to surface the characters’ personalities, ambitions and motivations, concerns with sexuality, secrets and lies that rule their lives. For instance, Romola was once in love with the actor Subir Kumar.  Years later at his death she wrestles her way through a belligerent crowd, all alone, to pay her last respects:

Deep inside she wanted to be acknowledged by the khaki-clad guard, by Amit, by Avinash [...] Dammit, she thought, she had sacrificed something too. She had given up Subir Lahiri so he could become Subir Kumar.

Avinash is unaware of this part of his wife’s history, just as she is unaware of most of his.
Avinash’s portraiture includes, at the age of fourteen, an encounter with his barber Sultan – one of the ‘no-good loafer boys’ he has been admonished against – which leads to him to confront his own sexual orientation. Years later he graduates to browsing online gay groups and lands up at an all-gay party where he has a rather disquieting experience. Most of his own past
is opaque to Romola or Amit, though Romola accidentally makes a discovery that alters her life.

Sandip Roy

Secrets play the most crucial role in this Pandora’s Box of a novel that shows the intersecting lives of these three members of a family fighting their own demons over several decades, set against contrasting cultural backdrops.

Amit too has secrets of his own. One of his greatest failings is to own up his mistakes even as another person has to suffer as a consequence. The selfish streak in him is very well illustrated, first through a childhood incident when Durga, the granddaughter of Mangala, their domestic help, has to pay for his negligence, and later through his attitude towards his old and widowed mother living alone in Calcutta post his father’s death.

Though parallels have been drawn between Roy and Jhumpa Lahiri, the mercurial quality of Roy’s stories is more characteristic of Rajorshi Chakraborti’s work, closer to Alice Munro’s style of storytelling. Like Munro's (or Chakraborti's) Roy's stories too 'embed more than announce, reveal more than parade'. From amusement to sympathy, to anger, to frustration, the reader’s involvement in the characters’ lives remains consistent. The beginning of the book seems somewhat tentative; the dialogue almost robotic. Gradually, however, it develops into a strong narrative with impressive characters and a store of dazzling surprises for the reader.
***

The Blind Lady’s Descendants: Anees Salim: review

The Blind Lady’s Descendants: Anees Salim: review

[Published by The Asian Review of Books]

Anees Salim’s fourth release within a year, The Blind Lady’s Descendants, is set in his hometown, Varkala in Kerala, and maintains the same blend of subtlety and satire that won him the Hindu Literary Prize for Vanity Bagh earlier this year. However, whereas Vanity Bagh looks towards the external world and addresses questions about misguided youth and religious tolerance in the society, in The Blind Lady’s Descendants Salim moves inwards – to the existentialist angst, questions about identity, fractured relationships, conflicts within the mind and the essential human condition.

The book begins with a suicide note from the protagonist, Amar. It is no ordinary suicide note, for it segues comfortably into an autobiography spread over 300 pages, divided into five parts, drawing the reader in from the opening paragraph itself:

When I was young—probably six or seven, not older than eight anyway—our mother would drive tiny nails into the front door to ward off bad luck. Bad luck, then, must have come in through the back door...

Amar is the youngest child of a well-to-do family fallen on bad days. His narrative recounts his family’s dysfunctional members, their inanities, eccentricities and insanities. Amar’s parents, Hamsa and Asma are “two people who should never have met, and least of all, married” and his siblings, Jasira (the beauty queen and “the eternal heartbreaker”), Sophiya (the ugly duckling) and Akmal (“who saw the hand of Allah in everything”) play significant roles in his life. They live in a house simply called “The Bungalow” and its dilapidated condition is symbolic of the decadence that pervades their lives.

When Amar is five, a circumcision ceremony is held for him and his brother from which, screaming with pain, Amar escapes the ritual when it is only half complete, so that in adolescence he begins to consider himself only a “Half-Muslim” and later renounces his faith altogether. Even though he appears as somewhat of an eccentric character portrayed through the eyes of his family, neighbours or friends, his observations about life are rather astute:

Past is a thin armour
You can’t get back in with that paunch.

Blindness or the inability to see/perceive is a significant motif that runs throughout the book. At best the vision of the characters is coloured or skewed. Amar’s grandmother—the Blind Lady of the title—is physically blind and—metaphorically—in the dark about the truth of her own situation regarding the sale of her house, since the family has kept the fact secret from her. The tutor with whom Razia, Amar’s cousin and his aunt Suhuda’s daughter, elopes is a “cockeyed bastard” – so engrossed in planning a future with her that he fails to perceive that Razia and he don’t belong together in the first place. Amar himself has an eye defect and tends to blink frequently, a habit he shares with his dead uncle and alter ego, Javi, whose life is inexplicably though intricately entwined with his own.

 Amar is twenty-six as the book begins. Incidentally, twenty-six is an important age. It is the age at which Javi committed suicide—just before Amar arrived in the world. Throughout the novel a mystery shrouds Javi’s role and identity, unravelled bit by bit through the scrapbook about him Amar creates with painstaking effort. His desperate attempt to uncover his dead uncle’s past, as and when he can gather information, helps him comprehend his own life that seems to be shaping up as its sinister parallel.

To reconstruct Javi’s past he receives some help from Suhuda, who was once involved with Javi. Unknown to her, Suhuda also makes frequent appearances in Amar’s erotic dreams.

Anees Salim

This is probably the darkest of Salim’s books so far. Under minimalist yet lyrical prose, incisive wit and the blithe tone is a saga of abysmal darkness, alienation, thwarted desire, travesty of ambition, loneliness, resignation, death and decay. The tragedies occur one by one—several major and minor characters meet their death across the 300 pages—and leave a strong impact upon the protagonist and his mental equilibrium.

Salim’s portrayal of the fractured life of a Muslim family in the sleepy small town of south India with its traditions and ceremonies is quite authentic and remarkable. This book is one of the finest examples of black humor to appear in the recent times. The author’s sense of humor is scintillating and infectious. He is clearly not a sentimentalist, but his work is both poignant and stimulating. 


**********

Rain: Sriram Subramanian: book review

Rain: Sriram Subramanian
--reviewed by Divya Dubey
Readomania
200 pp
Rs 250

[Published by Hindustan Times, Dec 10, 2016: http://www.hindustantimes.com/books/share-my-dream-time-review-of-rain-by-sriram-subramanian/story-nWT7MZ4jTXiByuz8srg4IN.html ]

It isn’t every day one comes across an architect-cum-interior designer protagonist in a debut novel by an IIT/IIM graduate. Sriram Subramanian’s Rain establishes its distinctive features right from the very beginning. The fate of Jai Dubey, the hero, hangs upon a major project which his firm, the Phoenix, needs to finish to perfection within a tight deadline for him to be able to earn the big bucks required to build a dream house for his wife, Sarika. This commitment to her and her mother, Mallika, comes as a spur of the moment decision, recklessly announced during a heated argument with them, in order to compensate for the sacrifices Sarika made for his sake when she married him. She stays with him in a small apartment, having relinquished her parents’ old, lavish home in the south of Pune. Jai’s resolve is further strengthened by a prediction
of his doom by the end of the year from Sarika’s esteemed family astrologer, Pandit Borkar.

The blurb of the book says, ‘Architect Jai Dubey trusts in reason – not in faith and prayer. When Fortune deserts Jai and his carefully ordered life spins inexorably out of control, he stands on the brink of ruin. Only a delayed monsoon can save Jai’s biggest project from disaster.…’ In this the text is a tad misleading since it makes one believe that the plot hinges upon the dark clouds looming large at the horizon and the disaster they threaten. It doesn’t. Because disaster does strike and it strikes pretty early on in the novel as a result of Jai’s misplaced trust in an old friend and business partner, Ravi, whose habit of cutting corners and rushing on with the job leads to this inevitable debacle and, consequently, Jai’s poverty when even Sarika deserts him and returns to her family. Even though these developments are foreshadowed in the book, the early climax leaves the reader wondering – what next?

Sriram Subramanian

Surprisingly enough the hero’s quest is not to build the dream house in spite of the odds he faces – as it appears initially – but to rediscover and reinvent himself. To achieve that he has to lose everything he has first. Considering the trajectory the book takes after the first climax, Subramanian has a great deal more to offer through his complex plot and subplots – involving a dead younger brother (Sunny) and a potential mistress in the background. The narrative moves from the here and now to the spiritual realm: personal guilt, turning within for answers, evolution and redemption of the self; from luxury to poverty; from upper-class circles to living on the streets, engaging closely with the riff-raff and being sucked into their daily lives. It is here that the personal becomes political and themes ramify through various major and minor characters: Ashok, Sarika’s big brother – a political goon and a type of anti-hero Jai abhors; Iyer – the owner of Café Royale – in his short exchange with the bully officer in-charge demolishing his property as witnessed by Jai; Ashish Jagmohan of the Society Committee where Jai lives whom he constantly ignores; Raju the street urchin who gives him shelter at the time of crisis; Avinash Shinde, the corrupt policeman with an eye on Lakshmi, Raju’s mother; the political bigwigs who use unemployed youths like Raju and Chetan from the streets to achieve their own ends, amongst others. As Jai pushes back his own troubles to involve himself more in other people’s lives, his personal journey to true liberation begins.

Sriram Subramanian is fantastic at drawing well fleshed out characters – both major and minor – as well as big and small conflicts that keep the reader captivated throughout. His eye for detail is also worth mentioning, for that is what provides the book its realism. A couple of loose threads do remain even at the end of the book – for instance, Jai’s take on his commitment to build Sarika the dream house, as well as her own thoughts and feelings on the matter; the significance of Sarika’s career and the purpose of her visit to Hamburg; the elusiveness of Saloni Singh and her importance in Jai’s life, etc. However, all these are minor distractions and do not really take away from the pleasure of reading an otherwise brilliant piece of work.

*****************

Close to Home: Parvati Sharma: book review

Close to Home by Parvati Sharma
 reviewed by Divya Dubey
Publisher: Zubaan
Place and year: India, 2014
Extent: 204 pp
Price: Rs 399
ISBN: 9789383074822

[Published by Biblio magazine]

Close to Home, Parvati Sharma’s first novel is a simple and engaging read. Readers who have enjoyed her collection The Dead Camel and Other Stories earlier however may find it less stimulating than the former. One could say the biggest strength of this book is that it does not pretend to be great literature, though certain issues of significance have been woven in: caste and class privileges and divides, politics, varying models of sexuality and heterosexist biases.

In an interview with The Indian Express, Sharma says about her protagonist, Mrinalini:
‘I wanted to create a character who was not particularly sensitive to the class divide but was well-intentioned. This is a world that I know about and am privy to, and it is feudal, vicious and horrendously unequal but we prop it up because it props us up […] I wanted to look at the way power works inside the home, between those who appear to have it and those who don’t […] Increasingly, I think a lot of people are impatient with the poor, with socialism. There’s this urge to charge ahead, ‘‘develop’’, make lots of money. There is a lot that happens in between.’ (Lifestyle, The Indian Express, August 10, 2014).

The opening scene between Mrinalini and Jahanara – two friends sharing a barsati in Jungpura Extension – shows a star-struck Jahanara confessing her love to her incredulous yet flattered roommate. While Mrinalini decides to play along with her for the moment (for the lack of a better pastime), the true object of her interest is actually her boyfriend Siddhartha – studying finance in England and hence temporarily absent from the scenario. The rest of the chapter is a parade of the girls’ fantasies expressed through staccato humorous dialogue, which might have been more effective had it been slightly shorter. The length of such exchanges between the characters often makes them trite.

Sharma has a knack for subtle humour well illustrated in the mention of the furniture ‘that Siddharth’s parents had sent across from their termite-ridden Jorbagh home.’ Amusing little vignettes such as this add to the book’s appeal.



On the other hand constructions seem more natural and the narrative more articulate in The Dead Camel. For instance, when the protagonist spots a dead camel on a divider on the road:
At the office I almost brought it up, but it was a Monday, and Monday morning conversation is restricted – it aims, in a doomed sort of way, to recreate the warmth of the weekend inside a cubicle, there is a forced hilarity in its tone; my silent camel would have tilted the balance with its ungainly weight of the world.

Compare the short extract with this single sentence from the novel:
Mrinalini was so obviously delighted by this – the dotcom, though unstinting by way of motivational talk and pizza lunches, offered little real excitement, and Siddharthaa only called on Sundays – and so eager with her questions and generous in her felicitations, that Jahanara, who had tensed as if for a blow after uttering the words I think I’m gay, had uncoiled and unfurled and unthinkingly, discovered, in the time it took them to roll another, that she only ever wanted to tell Mrinalini all her secret and fears, and that the strength of her feeling being what it was, it must be, it had to be reciprocated.

Unfortunately, there is no Joycean grace in the latter quote; instead the sentence structure is unwieldy. Likewise, the first two chapters of the novel seem unnecessarily verbose and at times convoluted. They create the impression that the writer is trying too hard. From chapter three onwards the prose is more fluid.

Mrinalini marries Siddharthaa upon his return from England, breaking Jahanara’s heart in the process. She makes several overtures including ‘sentimental emails’ and ‘formal invitations’ which Jahanara ignores ‘in the interest of her convalescent heart, which was all too liable, still, to fall into daydreams of what might have been.’

Much later at a party Mrinalini meets Jahanara again. Upon learning that Jahanara is not single any more, she blurts out unthinkingly, ‘What’s she like? Is she a real lesbian?’

Even if inadvertently, this part of the novel bears a thematic resemblance to a part of Murakami’s Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. When Haida is told about Tsukuru’s homoerotic dream, he disappears from Tsukuru’s life without a word of explanation. Though Tsukuru is not gay, he thinks that ‘Haida had partially absorbed Tsukuru’s sin, his impurity, and as a result he had had to go far away.’ (Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, p. 106; italics mine).

Parvati Sharma

Both these instances throw up questions about the reaction of many heterosexuals when confronted suddenly with confessions of homosexual proclivities or sentiments. While Haida’s mute withdrawal may seem more understandable, Mrinalini’s casual role-play comes across as mean, dangerous and more disturbing.

In retaliation Jahanara accuses her of being self obsessed and storms out of the gathering, forcing her former ‘lover’ to introspect and prove her wrong.

Enter Chhote Lal (an old faithful servitor of the family), his wife Beena and daughter Anjali – the last adopted by Mrinalini as her protégé in a bid to prove her altruism to Jahanara. Though Mrinalini is against the idea of having children of her own, she leaves no stone unturned in trying to woo and mould little Anjali.

In an urban middle-class Delhi where domestic helps and car drivers are lifelines for most working people (and perhaps one of the most popular subjects of conversation in several office bays every morning), it is natural they should find a crucial role to play in the story. In fact their active involvement in the plot renders the novel authentic.

It begins with Mrinalini’s innocuous offer of a car ride to the excited child, develops into a regular habit of pampering her with cartoon DVDs and learning material, allowing her to encroach upon her personal space – physical and mental – at all times of the day and bestowing little gifts upon her. But she cannot keep the class divide at bay for too long:

The cartoons that Mrinalini skimmed through were either too violent or too inane – or […] “too much in English. She has no idea what’s going on, and how’m I supposed to explain to her why a fat panda wants to learn Kung-Fu?”

A short misadventure in an auto when Mrinalini disappears with the child for hours creates some sourness between the mistress and the maid. To establish truce Mrinalini encourages Anjali’s parents to dream the great Indian dream – of admitting Anjali into a big school. All of Mrinalini’s good intentions freeze, however, when she accidentally eavesdrops upon a revelatory conversation between Beena and Chhote Lal and sees her constant efforts from Beena’s perspective.

The dilemma of cast and class makes a tenuous thread in The Dead Camel too. In the title story for instance, there is a brief mention of Arundhati Roy by a character who says, ‘…I’m a great fan of Arundhati Roy’s […] if you stand her novel against anything she’s written since – or even before – it’s no longer a love story, is it? It’s a really long impassioned article on Dalit rights.’
The conversation then segues into the difference between fact and fiction, the mechanics of journalism, poetry or ‘any kind of art’.

In Close to Home caste dynamics are referred to directly through Mrinalini and Siddhartha’s neighbour Brajeshwar’s published book in which he lampoons them as Raj and Simran. Brajeshwar has also been Mrinalini’s rival as an aspiring author:

She [Simram] told me a long story about watching a man climb down a shitty drain to unblock it. Raj interrupted to say caste had been hijacked by profiteers […] He warned us against getting emotional. Simran said yes, patriarchy was even more entrenched than caste […] We owed our privilege to others’ sufferings and she thought it was a writer’s primary duty to expose injustice.
Sharma is obviously aware of her own class privileges and the location she writes from. Her voice is clear and unapologetic. Even Ambedkar’s much-in-the-news-for-all-the-wrong-reasons Annihilation of Caste (this year) finds a fleeting mention, but the author shies away from taking a clear stand on it. In the context of Round Table India discussions and debates of late, this theme could have been explored further.

The characters have been portrayed well, especially the women – Mrinalini, Jahanara, Anjali and Beena. Sharma’s protagonist is not like Indira Parthasarathy’s Kesavan, striving to break free of his orthodox Brahmin shackles (Poison Roots, Amaryllis, 2014). Her dig at her characters is more Chaucerian in character; her attitude towards them more charitable and indulgent, their weaknesses portrayed more as personal failings than offences of a class. Beena is as guilty of posturing as her mistress. Even towards the end she and her family do not manage to conquer class barriers. Some might view Sharma’s writing as cynical, preferring to maintain the status quo, but it is only a realistic reflection of our life and times.
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