Impossibly good
SHEBA THAYIL
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Who is this author, who could write such a fluid and heartbreaking book?
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Graffiti My Soul, Niven Govinden, Penguin Books, p.224, Rs. 275.
THE night I finished reading his book, I dreamt of Niven Govinden. I ran up to him (he looked like his protagonist, tall, great hair), and grabbed his hands (I felt he needed reassurance), and said, "I know, I know, it's awful to say it, stupid even, but I remembered Confederacy of Dunces, and then I remembered Vernon God Little. Are you ok?"
Graffiti My Soul is not derivative, but it belongs to the same memorable category as these two wonderworks, with its tragi-comic protagonist and its hell-on-earth slice of life.
Fascinating read
Who is this author? How could he write a book so fluid and heartbreaking, so deserving of the greatest gift a reader can give in return — not wanting it to end — and we've none of us heard of him? Walker Percy, in his introduction to Confederacy, said how he could literally not believe his eyes on first reading the book, thinking to himself that it was impossible for it to be that good. Well, so is this one.
It's also darkly funny, from the minute you're introduced to the 15-year-old anti-hero, in fact punk kid, running wild in Surrey, England: Veerapen Prendrapen, also called Mr. V-pen by his paedophile track trainer, or Vera by those who don't value their life, or V by those who dare because they can.
His Tamil dad has run away with an optician, his Jewish nurse mum is debating having an affair, and his friends are the usual suspects made up of losers and misfits most of us remember hanging with in high school, the more wary steering clear of following them out of it and right through to the bitter end.
V has no such problems. He is as clean-cut as Eminem, his idea of a good time bashing some lone pedestrian over the head, capturing it on a cell phone for posterity, titling it Man On Ground In Misery, and then going home to watch the telly. He has three great loves, though, music and running, and a girl called Moon. Thankfully, the author doesn't take the easy way out and make any of these redeeming qualities; his work would have been tainted by the facile, the less real, had he done that.
In fact, there is no attempt to make V endearing, but with a character as cool, passionate and witty as he is, he doesn't need to be — there, that's the secret we women have been trying to hide for years.
Several songs
The story starts off with death, and ends with a kind of sigh, in between are these several songs.
The first melody is youth (that pale forerunner to the abrupt clarity of being aware of the world outside yourself, but so sweet while it lasts), and its language: Giving the W for Whatever sign, the finality of discussions with the phrase "End of"; the talk of "Unspoken rule number 4578", and which kid hasn't had a list that long while struggling to be part of a group, any group?
Here is V on a date with someone who is not Moon: "Her eyes shark about my chips", and he thinks "gluten is the biggest verboten on my diet sheet... I'm a Nazi about food", not to mention uneasy about "homosexualists" and contemptuous of just about everything else, from a "drab pasty woman over thirty with a big red mouth looking like a sore vagina", to "Lardy meatheads with Alpha-male competitive streaks".
So youth is slipping away fast, really; the outside world is impinging in a very nasty way indeed. And it's not all V's imagination, either.
The second running ditty is the way Govinden holds out on secrets throughout the tale, slipping them in to your gasp which is as delicious as reading "Being a W. to the A.N.K.E.R.", an insider communication between writer and reader and the Black Eyed Peas.
Then there is the delicate strain you keep hearing every so often which suddenly bursts into a modern Romeo and Juliet love story; you do not see it coming. V may not be "nice" but when he faces the horror of being sidelined by his only friends, and the girl he is in love with, we know whose side we're on.
Shoddy editing
It's the same girl with the once-eating disorder, "like living with a suicide bomber who'll never take his coat off", and the end makes you as angry as you are with the book's editors who paid scant attention to trifles such as clean copy. If you read one "it's" for "its", you'll read many words they just weren't inclined to delete. Example number 4578: "I don't understand the greed of the these people".
It would have been different if Niven Govinden had gone by the name of Vikram Seth. And the irony is there's no question who's the better writer.
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