| Her trials and tribulations, told with an amazing sensitivity through her early schooling and college years, and with candour when it comes to internship and practice in London, then Madras, through patient histories and medical tribulations, journeys through choleys, thyroids and gastrectomies, are a warm tribute to her profession, a realisation that hits her when a repentant (yet defiant) Jai refuses still again to return to Angheri but isn't above asking her to start afresh with him in Madras (forsaking his wife and children to their plush Bombay life). "The world loves those who work hard and if it happens to be a doctor," she observes, "they worship him." |
| There are doubtless echoes of the author Kavery Nambisan's own life in Nalli's voice and experiences, but what is astounding is that two of this season's sterling books should be written not by professional authors but by qualified surgeons with presumably busy outpatient departments and operation theatres. |
| While Nambisan's is a journey that is infused with the rich nostalgia for a quiet life and the need to heal in the country's deepest hinterlands""she herself has worked in rural Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka""Kalpana Swaminathan makes no apologies for writing a book of fiction that is probably as dark a tale as has come from the stable of Indian writing. Her motor neuron struck protagonist is Clarince Aranxa, confined by a debilitating disease that will claim her by slow degrees, but not before letting loose a string of dead bodies""some that haunt the past, others occurring as history (and passion) unfold in and around Bougainvillea House, where she has come to spend her fading weeks. |
| Clarince Aranxa will likely go down as fictional India's darkest heroine in a psychological thriller. Puritan, judgemental, snobbish, temperamental and clearly clairvoyant, her forecasting is only too true: "One thing is certain. I am not going to have a quiet death." As skeletons tumble around her and secrets spill with a hypnotic cadence that is almost scary, Swaminathan introduces Dr Liaqat Ali Khan to the story. |
| If Clarice is the book's strength, Liaqat""its unlikely doctor-detective "" is its weakest. His fulminations, the pressing need to uncover Clarice's story and the time and money he devotes to the exercise fail to come alive even under Swaminathan's ministrations. In giving him a maverick persona, idiosyncracies that are imposed rather than lived, you cannot but help wonder whether she is trying to create a character with future novels in mind. |
| But it is Swaminathan's language which is the most seductive element of the book. The book has a marvellous pace so that the chasm between decades, days and dates is overcome with ease. From a catatonic pace, reminiscent of Clarice's descent into the frightening sanctuary of her own mind, to its rapid transitions between characters, Swaminathan teases the story along till you are fully absorbed in the tangled webs of evil and destruction. |
| If the two books are as totally different as they are absorbing, their common thread is the astute eye of the two surgeons who clearly have made a habit of observing human behaviour. If Nambisan's is at least to some extent an autobiographical allegory, Swaminathan's is a story almost too horrific to imagine in real life. The difference though is in their stamina as writers. Nambisan's book starts at a slow pace and is a quiet lyrical read about aspirations and ambitions that reaches a canter towards the middle and then settles down to a happy pace. Swaminathan begins brilliantly, and though you remain hooked throughout the tale, it loses its steam somewhat after the middle. But that both hold the cure for insomniac readers is only too clear. India's patients ought to be cheering. |
| THE HILLS OF ANGHERI |
| Kavery Nambisan Penguin Price: Rs 350; Pages: 193 |
| BOUGAINVILLEA HOUSE |
| Kalpana Swaminathan Penguin Viking Price: Rs 395; Pages: 346 |
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