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Set in the placeless expanse of a networked world, amidst campus life in New Delhi, and in the spaces of Shumonto Roy’s and Ivy Sengupta’s memories, this novel has a seemingly basic plot with an engrossing premise: In this wired world you can have as many multiple names and identities as you can open multiple screens. And this raises perplexing questions. Can you really? If so, does your virtual identity reflect the real one? Is it a means to escape reality? Which is real and which the fantasy? As a voice says “…here you won’t find faces, only masks. Isn’t that a relief, the foreknowledge? But you can take flights Olive, go higher and higher, farther and farther, much beyond your wildest fancy.” How’s that for a statutory warning with a liberal dose of temptation?

So how do you exercise restraint in these parts when you can “do anything, talk to anyone, read anything and write whatever. Freedom bounce, that’s what she called her state.” It’s here that Ivy and Shumonto have a virtual rendezvous. Actually that’s putting it mildly. It borders on cyber sex and eventually ends in marriage. Ivy is a lecturer of English Literature and Shumonto, a microbiologist. But like many marriages, theirs too is shaken by a skeleton in Shumonto’s closet. Quite literally. Irene Scott, an old flame from his days at Johns Hopkins, (not John Hopkins as the author and editors have let it pass), consumed by AIDS, emerges ghost-like through an email long consigned to the trash bin of the past. Her “presence” creates a fault line between man and wife, awakens guilt, fear and reawakens old memories. “Ivy was virtually connected to Irene, Irene was post-mortally linked to Ivy, and he was perceived to be connected to both.”

Our hero’s response is to lapse into cold silence to grapple with grief, guilt and fear, while Ivy resurrects Ophelia. The “aphasic” Shakespearean woman is one of her three virtual identities, Poison Ivy and Olive Beetch being the other two. But Ivy’s Ophelia is everything Shakespeare’s is not. The real O could never have hoped to speak as much as her namesake does in the chat rooms of this novel! In fact, it’s Shumonto who becomes wordless. Ms. Chakraborty plays around with this interesting idea and gets to remedy the injustices of literary criticism by giving Ophelia a voice.

The only “real” people who can talk Ivy through her problems are her sister and friend. Otherwise, she spends an inordinate amount of time in chat rooms disgorging a torrent of words. The troubling portrayal of the dichotomies and “schizophrenia” of contemporary culture warrants a halfway serious engagement with the novel but there are enough occasions to throw up your hands and say, enough of these garbled words that say everything yet nothing.

To this, the novelist inserts her pet peeves, concerns, and views on the blazing issues of the day and you have the intellectual and the politically correct along with the bizarre. Some of it brilliantly expressed. Shumonto muses, “The idea of a double bed was a bit romantic… forcibly joining two separate sleeps together. Two sleeping bodies, two distinct nightmares, two different streams of consciousness united by law and law only. Under the misnomer called love.” As you can see, Ms. Chakraborty’s language and frames are very visual. She speaks through images and metaphors — some that work wonders and others such as the jug, bucket, lid and tumbler ensemble — that don’t quite make the sky, rain and earth picture speak a thousand words.

Don’t expect a linear narrative. It takes you forward and back, here, there and everywhere mimicking the staccato method or madness in the way thoughts roam; from the present to the past and back. And you are left trying to hang on to the thread of the story...Is it about the angst of a wife? The callousness of a man? The amorality of our times in which anything goes? The loneliness of a wired generation? Can the characters sustain the unfettered role play and handle the consequences? Well, if art imitates life, then there are no clear answers. The only certainty is moral ambivalence and ambiguity in this frequently intriguing novel shot through with some fine prose and poignant, poetic images.

A generous snipping of words would have relieved it of some impenetrable tosh. There has to be a very good reason to give a reader 25 pages of inane, brain-numbing chat conversation on the subject of sexual preferences, the pleasures of…no prizes for guessing…chatting! And sexual banter. I still haven’t figured it out.

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