I was the third choice to review this book. The first was Neha Bhatt, who, age-wise, can be placed in the same generation as Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi, this book’s author. After plodding through 10 pages, Bhatt chucked the book in the general direction of Rrishi Raote.
Raote, who does not mind blogging about medieval emperors dying of dirty diseases, read a few pages and left it lying unattended. Some time after that, it miraculously found its way to my desk, and brought in its wake the books editor asking for a deadline.
Among my many pretentious traits, I often regurgitate famous lines; this time it was: “The buck stops here.” So did the book. And thus began a lesson in humility, for, when it comes to being pretentious, Shanghvi is far-far ahead. In a manner of speaking, he wrote the book.
Let’s first get the storyline out of the way, which can be done quickly because, despite the pre-release publicity generated by the incorporation of the Jessica Lal murder case, the plot refuses to thicken. The murder, which captured the country’s imagination — all right, at least Delhi’s, or at least that of Delhi’s middle class — is largely incidental. One of the characters had to die, so she dies the Lal way. The rest of the book is about how some of the characters cope with her death, which they do very badly, in a way that fails to hold interest.
The lead characters are either confused, or losers, or confused losers. Karan, a school teacher-turned-photographer-turned-teacher-turned-photographer, falls in a love with a married woman, gets jilted, falls in love with a single mother, jilts her. Samar, a piano whiz, gives it all up at a young age. He is gay, but loves Zaira, an actress, but does not want a relationship with her because he cannot have sex with her, but is shattered by her death almost as much as by the death of his dog. Karan’s partner, Leo, goes away for unexplained reasons. Rhea falls for Karan perhaps because he resembles her husband, but fails to love her husband who is completely in love with her, and later ditches Karan, only to find that her husband has disappeared. There is a minister, who loses his virginity to a buffalo, and poisons the buffalo for the fear that it would give birth to his child.
An outstanding narrative may have propped up the storyline to respectability. After all, it has the modern-day ingredients of high-society life, murder, homosexuality, movies, sex, etc. Instead, what we get is a tangle of excessive, unnecessary, forced metaphors. Many writers use sleazy language (for instance, Vikram Chandra in Sacred Games), mostly because it is integral to the narrative and their characters cannot be expected to speak any other way. Shanghvi does it for unfathomable reasons. Some of the sleaze comes not from a character but from the author. So, glee drips “out of Natasha like precum”. Words escape “the judge’s mouth involuntarily, like a premature ejaculation”. Most of the characters use similar lingo. At one place, the buffalo lover says, “I thought I’d covered all the bases.” That is taken from a sport the Americans love.
The book disparages Bollywood, but describes a lovemaking scene in which the male lover’s tongue is “like fingers parting the petals of a reluctant rose”. When Karan thinks that he and Rhea are meeting for the last time, he hears in her voice the sound of “a train departing its station” (Jab We Met?). All the Bombay clichés, too, are firmly in place, such as, everyone in the city is “running away from loneliness” and the city discourages friendships.
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Even when not being sleazy, the book deals largely in metaphors. Dumpy Roy’s presence is described as distinctive, “like mould on bread”. When Rhea cries, she produces soundless sobs that shoot up “from the well of an inconsolable sorrow”. Karan’s and Rhea’s desire for each other is deep as a canyon. Loneliness is like a nagging toothache. And when Karan climaxes, Rhea catches it expertly, “the thick rain of an angry storm”.
By the end of it, my only concern was to finish the book, merely because it would be unfair to the readers of this review if I did not. I had lost interest in finding out what would happen to the characters, because, frankly, my dear, I didn’t give a damn.
THE LOST FLAMINGOES OF BOMBAY
Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi
Penguin
Rs 499; 368 pages