FICTION
Chronicle of love and loss
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`The Last Song of Dusk is a breathless piece of narration, which, in its sartorial magnificence, invites you to suspend all disbelief for a moment... '
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SOME authors dazzle you with their flair for the written word. They weave elegant sentences from seemingly ordinary strands; overwhelm you with the deftest touch. Others make for compelling reading because their plot-driven fiction holds you in a state of rigor mortis. But only a very good writer (and that is a rarer specimen than most would have it) manages to craft prose that is, at once, gripping and gorgeous.
Every once in a while, someone comes along and achieves precisely that — with his first book.
Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi's debut novel, The Last Song of Dusk, is a breathless piece of narration, which, in its sartorial magnificence, invites you to suspend all disbelief for a moment, and — if you will forgive the left-handed compliment — tricks you into adopting that state; revelling in that condition, even, well until after you have drunk in the last syllable.
Four decades after Gabriel Garcia Marquez discovered the tone for his One Hundred Years of Solitude, Shanghvi ambitiously endeavours to piece together his own mythology, complete with a foul-mouthed parrot, a beautiful artist who paints souls and walks on water, a positively evil house that will not allow its walls to soak in happiness, and a 17 months, four weeks and six day-old prodigy humming a "fata morgana of a tune" for the first time in his altogether brief life.
Set in the early part of the last century, The Last Song of Dusk is an Indian tale that relies heavily on the exotic Latin American charm of magic realism. But while Marquez's reflection on loneliness was a poker-faced satire that nevertheless outlined almost every kind of isolation with the deepest sympathy, Shanghvi's novel, for the most part, is an earnest chronicle of love, longing and loss; a somewhat guileless, deeply touching (if overdramatic) exploration of solitude against the humorous backdrop of improbably colourful characters.
The theme is unambiguously defined in the opening sentence of the novel when the principal character is introduced thus: "On the day Anuradha Patwardhan was leaving Udaipur for Bombay to marry a man she had not even met in the twenty-one years of her existence, her mother clutched her lovely hand through the window of the black Victoria and whispered: `In this life, my darling, there is no mercy.'"
Anuradha and her husband, Vardhmaan, gradually lose sight of each other and their relationship flounders, unable to cope with tragedy after tragedy until, ironically, neither is able to comprehend the joy derived from life's small redemptions. The storyteller-doctor, Vardhmaan finds it impossible to cope with the losses of his mother and son, and is haunted by the fact that he was powerless to intervene as they died. The chasm that grows between Anuradha and Vardhmaan after the loss of their first-born is achingly reflected in the drying up of his tales; and sadly, the birth of a second son does not ease the conflict, for the couple has now grown acutely afraid of loss. Anuradha, herself, must learn to deal with the looming death of her best friend, Pallavi.
Meanwhile, somewhere in the middle, the momentum shifts towards Anuradha's cousin, the heartbreakingly cynical artist, Nandini, who is willing to sacrifice almost anything in her pursuit of fame and wealth. Her rise to prominence in Bombay's snooty social circles is almost as swift as her fall, and her experience is held up to take a dig at society's hypocrisy.
At its best, the quality of prose is of the highest order — it is, in fact, poetry. Take, for example, Shanghvi's description of a particular painting: "a discus of imagination whirling out paint". On the flipside, at times, Shanghvi appears self-conscious about his undeniable talent, and displays symptoms of verbal diarrhoea.
Right through the novel, the tone is unapologetically anglophilic, and Shanghvi has inevitably been accused of writing for a Western audience: the use of the word "even" in the opening sentence no doubt lends gravity to that view. His critics will no doubt cry "colonial hangover" — Shanghvi sounds a little enamoured of Brit customs — but that, in itself, is no crime. The conversations sound a little implausible in places, but that aspect can be ignored simply because the 26 year-old former chef and kennel-boy, offers remarkable insights into the nature of relationships, our irrational fears, the business of dying — and living — with a dash of healthy irreverence.
The humour, bawdy at times, belies the sadness floating adrift; and finally reminds us of the desperate reality that individuals condemned to a lifetime of solitude do not have a second opportunity on earth.
VIJAY PARTHASARATHY
The Last Song of Dusk, Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi, Penguin Viking, Rs. 395.
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