Kishore Singh: Other books

Something Black in the Lentil Soup

Reshma S Ruia
Pages: 245; Price: Rs 250
Penguin

There is no better proof of India being a nation devoid of a sense of humour than this book that attempts to lampoon a wannabe poet with a determined mother, who makes it to Wordsworth's Brittany, only to be humbled and humiliated for his gauche manners and worse poetry.

The writer picks a wonderful theme, and packs in the right characters""and then fails miserably to move anything forward. The result is a terrible kedgeree where it's difficult to decide which is the worse: the liberal sprinkling of typographical errors, or the fiction itself.

The lower division clerk masquerading as a poet who finds himself in London, and the bridge between poor rhyming verse and good poetry could have provided great moments, but only ends up serving as a comment on the guileless desi versus the sophisticated plagiarist.

Alas, the temptations of the West""most of them indulged by members of the Indian community ""which Ruia wishes to use for parodying situations, doesn't quite work. In the end, the book only serves to show a predecessor by two decades, The Inscrutable Americans, as a work almost of literature.

More important: what's Penguin doing? Publishing works best left to those whose market is lurid railway platform kitsch?