B for boardgame, S for strategic window

In happier times, writers would simplify their plots with a little sketch of the characters at the beginning, so you knew exactly who each was, but in these days when literature, like art, has reached a level of abstraction, such simplification would be at odds with "understanding" a book ""the complex exercise that it now is.

Irwin Allan Sealy's A-Z is an abecedary, a painterley book where each reader will take from it exactly what he wants. In that sense, Red is a visual feast for the eyes, the descriptions sensuous, teasing, like words in a painting, framed in each page like a work of art. After the first chronological reading, here's a book that can be enjoyed at random, moving from the C for Coffee to T for Tintinnabulation, linked, but also to be savoured for itself.

But still, to make a list:

Aline: Mystery visitor at St Petersburg who fetches up in Dariya Dun (Dehra Dun, silly) carrying a whole olive tree that her lover's mother won't accept. From painting from her roof to painting her body black to go out on a nocturnal raid, why does she change lovers?

Henri Matisse: Long ago deceased, whose paintings fill up these pages, their red a metaphor for life and passion. Blood and wine. And violence.

Gilgitan: From painting trucks to stealing paintings as part of the gang that raids houses in the Dun, he finds acceptance in the arms of Aline""but will end up in prison.

Manda: Or Mandalay, the narrator's daughter who loves "Indian"""the clothes, the food, the music, but will flee back when she's frightened in the middle of the night by a visitor.

N: Manda's "Poppadumb", and narrator of the book, once a habitue of Goyal Cybercafe-cum-Lending Library till he discovers the freedom of owning his own computer and broadband connection, a link to Olivia, his wife in New York who won't settle in the valley with him.

Olivia: Somewhere at the end of cyberspace, wife, mother""future?

Red: A colour, but also a guest appearance as granddaughter of painter Aaron Medlar, who slashes the priceless Matisse work, The Painter's Family, because there's so much truth (and pain) in it. What is her relationship with Aline?

Zach: The quintessential bachelor, he downloads paintings by Matisse to study their details on his monitor, composes music, and lives with his mother (the formidable Mrs Wilding, who will send tiffins of hot food to Aline's but will not entertain thoughts of her as a daughter-in-law).

In the end, though, Red is an interpretation of Matisse's paintings, especially The Painter's Family and The Red Room, where a cast of characters each lead a double life. Is the maid a former mistress? Is the mother also a spouse? Why won't the daughter stay?

Dariya Dun is the unlikely town where they all meet, a backwoods urban sprawl that counts Mrs Goyal's cybercafe and a Barista among its attractions, and where a gang of blackshorts impacts the middle class lives of the sahibs""unrecognised petty workers by day who empower themselves at night with soot and grease applied to their bodies.

The narration is pushed along by N, the narrator, and zings through the internet, as the alphabets unfold""E is for Enter (as in break and enter), F is for family (Matisse's? like Matisse's?), L is for love ("...out of impatience and guilt and pain, and uncertainty and loss, but also light and falling light, is fashioned love"), O = nothing, P is for paintbox (Aline's, that she will give to Gilgitan for the police to find later), R is for roof (from where Aline watches Zach at work, and then disturbs him with e-messages, inviting him over for "a spot of Double Dog" or "Punjab vodka"), T is for tiffin, for tongue, for thrills, U for unwired and W for wired, X = target, and Z for zzzz (which you can't afford to do for fear of missing something and having to start all over again""the way a painter might need to start all over again should he emphasise the wrong expression, paint the wrong contour, or choose the wrong red).

Matisse, dead these many years. Dom, the "aborigines of India, treated as slaves by all later invaders except the British". Rom, "a variant of Dom", a breakaway group that became the gypsies of Europe. Zom, "variant of Dom; A man, a human being". In the same breath, spine, book, abecedary.

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RED

Irwin Allan Sealy
Picador
Price: Rs 495; Pages: 344