FICTION
No journey of discovery
SHEBA THAYIL
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A broth of identity crises, home truths and local colour but some bits float to the top.
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Black Lentil Doughnuts; C.K. Meena, Dronequill, Rs. 250.
I DON'T know whether the art of the review, like much of journalism, hasn't run its course and is now only as riveting as a white elephant. You'll pay some attention because it's there, but in the end how much does it matter?
Perhaps what matters more is the fact that C.K. Meena sweated blood while splayed publicly on the cross like all authors before her, and that is accolade enough. I'm not damning with faint praise, it is remarkable that writers complete their design, so lonely and heartbreaking a road do they travel.
Lonely characters
Black Lentil Doughnuts is that, too, with characters essentially alone and trying to bridge their islands, but there is no journey of discovery for the reader because it doesn't say anything new. Remember the two obvious rules of writing, that it's not what you say but how you say it (Vernon God Little, DBC Pierre), that it's not so much about structure but very much about ideas (Ash Wednesday, Ethan Hawke).
In the initial try, you may find Black Lentil Doughnuts murky, like an overflowing gutter after the rains. But for all of us who have had our lives milestoned by everything from Les Fleurs du Mal to Shantaram, the gutter is never uninteresting. Meena tries to plumb the dark depths of psyche; she gives us a broth of identity crises, characters, home truths and local colours but only bits float to the top, or shine through.
In the first place, anyone reading Black Lentil Doughnuts would think we were all more homo than homo sapien. There's the protagonist Shanthi who is more boy than girl; two of her best male friends who are gay as day; Bindu who is unbelievable from the very beginning with her friendship with a homeless man on the streets of U.S. and who gets caught in a communal conflagration in India before plighting her troth to Shanthi. It all seems a bit contrived — either that or I've been living with my head in the sand and don't see homosexual India in all my brothers and sisters. In any case, being gay is only interesting to the person/families involved, to make the reader involved, you need to tell us something life changing. Black Lentil Doughnuts is about a flurry of lives; it doesn't change yours.
The danger of putting real conversations in a book is that it is usually dull. If you're trying to duplicate coffee house banter (a very Bangalore pastime), all I can say is: There's a limit to truth in fiction. Yet through it all, Meena never tries to explain Indian words in italics as though she's writing for a foreign audience in the hopes of winning the Booker — good for her. It's just unfortunate that the realism of her text is not weighted with the unusual, the abstract, the thought provoking.
But the Kerala passages make you smile, (everything you ever wanted to know about Malayalees but were too afraid to find out), with dollops of humour thrown in, like when Shanthi says of Lilly, the not so lily-white, "I'm sure there is a God. Only he could have pushed Lilly from one class to the next."
Meena does have the turn of phrase, but it skims like a stone on your consciousness, it doesn't strike the heart. Take the maid Janu's "tale like a tawdry bracelet, cheap in the eyes of the world but precious to its owner"; about Bindu to whom "books, instead of forming a fortress around her... .kept her spirits whole"; on night sounds encompassing bolts, tumblers, a cat upsetting an empty Brown and Polson custard powder tin; on family in India that "was like a long and close-knit muffler wound too tight for comfort".
Need for good editor
The want of a good editor was felt long before one read Beela for Leela but it's regarding the teacher Leela that we are, finally if briefly, entranced. Once Leela (TG Vaidyanathan to whom the book is dedicated?) "had swept through the universe with her rapier, there wasn't a single human figure left standing". But it is Leela who complicates life by simplifying things (anyone who has read Dostoyevsky understands that), who leads Bindu to the understanding that `belonging nowhere was simply a first step towards belonging everywhere.'
Now there's clarity of idea (and the bit on the View Master is the second divinely-expressed emotion of solitude); there's the reason to read Black Lentil Doughnuts.
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