Whodunnit
A storm of a secret in a teacup
KANISHKA GUPTA
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Inane characters, a tedious plot and pretensions to upward mobility make for a forgettable read.
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Secrets And Lies Jaishree Misra, Harper Collins, Rs. 275.
Bubbles, Anita, Sam and Zeba were once schoolmates at the prestigious St Jude’s convent in New Delhi. They were the crème-de-la crème of their batch – the girls everyone wanted to imitate. Now adults, three of them are living in
London, while one is in Mumbai.
Weathered by their privileged yet hectic lifestyles, corporate husbands, nagging in-laws, work pressure, love lives, public image, etcetera, etcetera, they are shaken out of the monotony of their daily routines when they receive a letter from their old headmistress,
Victoria Lamb – pejoratively known to them as Lamboo – inviting their batch of ’93 to a reunion at the hostel.
A wound from the past – the unsolved death of one of their batchmates, the haughty and sharp-tongued Lily D’Souza – reopens and sucks these four women in.
What follows is a tedious, mostly monotonous, over-written account of their lives, interspersed with flashes from their schooldays running as a parallel narrative.
Hard on the reader
For a long stretch of the book, the reader is inexplicably reminded of the wistfulness being faced by the women over the letter, against the backdrop of their present lives – be it the billionaire wife,
Bubbles Malhotra, thinking about it alongside the occasional tantrums thrown by her mother-in-law, or Zeba, a Bollywood starlet, while on the sets of her latest film – causing the reader to start getting exasperated and wish that the story would move faster. Unfortunately, the plot plods along like an ass, instead of galloping like a race horse.
The narrative painfully shuttles between 1993 and 2008, throwing in predictable and annoying subplots in the flashbacks – the headmistress’s secret child, one of the friends having a fling with the Chemistry teacher, and another liking her friend’s brother (who dies tragically).
The novel and its characters ooze with an ersatz sophistication, making it almost impossible for the reader to engage with any of the four characters – as school kids or as grown-ups. There is heavy-duty description in the London chapters, with the author painstakingly filling the reader in on the minutest details, be it brands, shops, streets, cars, squares etc.
One might even say that the tags and labels are emphasised more than the characters wearing them.
Unlike authors of the chic-lit genre, who are either writing about their generation or are genius ventriloquists, Jaishree only manages to create four protagonists who seem forced and pointless. The denouement too, when it comes, is nothing exceptional and not reward enough for bearing with hundreds of pages of drivel.
Intrepid
It is no secret why Jaishree Misra’s Secrets and Lies is not sitting atop an ever-thickening slush pile, with the bored editor painting her toe-nails a cheery post-box red (like Bubbles).
Anyone who is bold enough to finish this book should be conversant with the art of speed-reading – dropping lines, chunks of text, even whole chapters – because when you turn round the corner of a plot twist you’ll be met with yet another long street of predictable narration.
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