NARRATIVE
Love, and all that
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`Boman Desai is an Indian expatriate writer, and with that territory comes certain predictability in terms of storytelling style and choice of themes — that of nostalgia, of a world lost or altered, the crucial element of memory and the jet-set concept of transnationalism.'
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MUCH of Boman Desai's fiction deals with memory, and with the re-enactment of his past experiences mapped on a shifted superimposed fictive topography. One of his earlier novels, The Memory of Elephants, is a good tautological case in point.
In his new novel, A Woman Madly in Love, he explores a similar terrain that includes at its core a relationship between Farida Cooper, an older woman and a younger man named Darius; with the treachery of her Joycean scholar husband as a third strand; and a lot more. The story shuttles between Chicago and Mumbai, "spanning the years between World War II to the Eighties". A Woman in Love is a longish book of over 400 pages, but one does not feel its prolonged length due to Desai's deliberate and skilful construction of a well-paced and cadenced narrative.
An interesting device that Boman Desai employs is the use of the "epistolary technique" — a device that historically goes as far back in time as the birth of the modern English novel with the likes of Richardson and others. In this novel, he uses this mode to convey key elements that drives the plot rather effectively. Further, the use of contemporary dialogue, not only adds a believable canvas, but also aids the narrative process to gallop and canter forward.
Extensive use of quotations from the literary and academic world — from people as varied as Henry James, Doris Lessing, John Updike, Gloria Steinem, Oscar Wilde and others — are used, cleverly placed as epigraphs at the head of each chapter. It is a ploy that could be both interesting and distracting, a ploy that may colour a certain kind of reader with a bias. But then that might be exactly Desai's intentions, and if the latter is so, then he is successful. In fact in the entire novel, there are no chapter numbers, but simply chapter titles that seamlessly join up what visually appears (albeit misleadingly) as a collection of short stories.
Boman Desai is an Indian expatriate writer, and with that territory comes certain predictability in terms of storytelling style and choice of themes — that of nostalgia, of a world lost or altered, the crucial element of memory, of course, and the jet-set concept of transnationalism. As Desai shuttles between two major cities of the world, between the relationship of a man and a woman that cuts across half a generation, certain elements that are key ingredients to the making of a successful novel are omnipresent — yearning, love, sadness, marriage, friendship and all the allied recipes that accompany them.
The sex in the novel is rather unsatisfactory because of the way it is presented in a typically coy "Hindi-filmi" style. It is of a tad "touch-me / touch-me-not" variety, to the point that it almost appears Victorian in attitude. Here is an extract: "When his hand squeezed her breast she moaned, but when the same hand, warmed now by her thigh and breast, returned to her bare midriff, she became more resistant, selfconscious about a trickle of tiny black crisscrossing hairs that led south from her bellybutton. `Horace, what are you going to do?'[she accedingly protests]."
"Hairs that led south from her bellybutton" — for god's sake, give us a break. If one is so desperate to describe an anatomical area, then just use modern appropriate word/s, and not beat about the bush (pun unintended, of course). Take another example: "She held out her arms, raising her breasts, rubbery nipples thick as pencils, their auras mingled in bursts of stardust" — this is school-boyishly repressed and full gooey-giddy romanticism.
Indian fiction in English, as opposed to say classical Indian poetry, fails miserably when it comes to writing about sexuality and intimacy. While we pretend ourselves to be liberal, it was our forefathers who were much more cool and relaxed about such things to the point that it was celebrated as high art — in paintings, sculpture, fiction, and poetry.
Another drawback in Desai's novel is his showy use of the world of academia, his overt display of "well-read-ness", knowledge of art, trendy feminism, and erudition in general. If these were more subtly couched or understatedly displayed, then they would have come across with more classy results. But this excess is exactly what irritates an intelligent reader's attention from what is otherwise a highly readable, enjoyable, and competent novel.
Boman Desai's first novel, The Memory of Elephants; his second, Asylum, USA; and now this new one — all deal with, in some way or another, the Parsi community at large. The evocation of both the characters and the community are done in fine detail, both beautifully painted and poignantly fleshed out.
"The good end happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means". This Oscar Wide quote, from "The Importance of Being Earnest", that Boman Desai uses in the last chapter of A Woman Madly in Love, strategically placed by the author himself, perhaps alludes to the carriage and accurate tenor of the novel.
A Woman Madly in Love, Boman Desai, Roli Books, 2004, Rs.350.
Sudeep Sen's Postmarked India: New and Selected Poems (HarperCollins) was awarded the Hawthornden Fellowship (U.K.) and nominated for a Pushcart Prize (U.S.).
SUDEEP SEN
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