In his fourth book, also his second novel, writer and novelist Bhaskar Ghose attempts to neatly package India in a manner that will surprise readers.
"Parricide", which was recently released is much like everything the average novel about India is not -- it does not present a picture of a squalid, torpid, corrupt and poor landscape where the characters are trying to make sense of the time and place under the irresistible onslaught of the west.
Ghose's characters are well-etched out in their individuality as modern Indians, as Delhiites, cosmopolitan and forward-thinking but completely clued in and in tune with the present.
In his first book, a non-fiction titled "Doordarshan Days" Ghosh recounts experiences working with Doordarshan of which he was the former Director General. He has written another nonfiction book about his experiences at the IAS, and a novel titled, "The Teller of Tales."
In his new novel published by Harper Collins, Ghosh cleverly introduces an advertising reference point where the hero is part of a winning campaign in a contest for ideas to promote the 'Year of India'.
Touching off from the past is also the main beef around which the novel revolves. This concerns a review of a miserable son's tortuous ties with his irascible father after the early death of his mother.
Ravi, the son and the focus of the story, suffers the misery of a forced marriage wherein the father completes the son's humiliation and compounds his hatred with some wicked conniving.
The plot does not obsess with a son's discontent with his father and a loaded history of mutiny and oppression; especially when the son, in an act of revenge, appears to hasten his father's death.
Ghose instead tries to go inside the mind of the creative Oxford-returned copywriter and flesh out the vacuum which oftentimes those living the good life find themselves confronted with.
In fact, "Parricide" is a book about Ravi's haunting emptiness echoing in the space between Delhi and Lucknow, for the Uttar Pradesh capital is the other city in the book, where the son has spent his joyless childhood.
The book also scores a huge hurrah on account of its women, each lovable in her own way. Outside of the departed mother, whom we are introduced to as just an image and a fleeting memory, none of the women can be said to fit any stereotype such as that which informs the creative projection of the modern Indian woman.
