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Literary Review
FICTION
Echoes of Nabokov
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`If you're the kind who flinches from reading Femina in dentist's clinics, Tejpal's book is not for you.'
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MR. TEJPAL is consumed by ardour and nostalgia. He has pounded together a startling work of Nabokovian fiction. We understand that, after gruelling sessions in the law courts, he pounded out 800 words or so every day for 15 months, and produced a work, which he may be justifiably sensitive about. It draws from real life, as all fiction must. However, it reminded me of a "Calvin and Hobbes" cartoon, where Calvin, to an enquiry about what is fictional about the autobiographical narrative, says "I'm throwing a flame catcher!" In this case it is a large Orientalist section on a Maharaja, Paris, and a white woman. The latter haunts the protagonist, like an Amitav Ghosh translation of a Tagore story.
New sensationalisms
There is nothing that Mr. Tejpal's protagonist has not done, (slender, bearded, and with one ear-ring) and yet, in seamless honesty, he draws in conjugal love into the Lolita frame, for several hundred pages. However, since it is neither illicit, and nor is the heroine underage, we presume that conjugal amity is now a site for sensationalism in Delhi. Yet, survival instincts and the visible statistics for normal happy families are such, that in spite of serial monogamy (S.C. Dube's term), most people do have a chance of sustained sexual happiness from the ages of 20 to 40, should they so choose. After that, it is the selective nature of biology or culture which defines whose chances are high for what.
Leaving aside the logistics of sensuality, the book is interesting, with forays into travelling by car into the hills and building a house together, some unnerving sections of working in Delhi in a magazine, where ambition rules over ideology and creates slippery enclaves for those who do not submit, and the life chances for those who take a different path. The sections on working class philosophy are hilarious, tactile, energetic and somehow very redeeming. Curiously, some of the botanical sections are better than the self-sustained pornography.
If you're the kind who flinches from reading Femina in dentist's clinics because the female bodies represented are so avid, Tejpal's book is not for you. He delights in dog-earing his 1970s copy of Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex but Were Afraid to Ask.
The Alchemy of Desire, Tarun Tejpal, HarperCollins India, 2005, Rs. 500.
SUSAN VISVANATHAN
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