Book Review: The Butterfly Generation

A book review published in Biblio:

Skimming the Surface

The Butterfly Generation: A Personal Journey into the Passions and Follies of India’s Technicolour Youth -- by Palash Krishna Mehrotra. 

Rain Tree/Rupa Publications, New Delhi, 2012, 264 pp., Rs 450

Palash Krishna Mehrotra’s non-fiction debut is described as “part memoir, part travelogue, part social commentary… the first book about New India to be written from an insider’s perspective”.

In the first section, ‘One-on-One’, each chapter is ostensibly a sketch of one of “India’s technicolour youth”. The much-touted “insider’s perspective” seems to serve mainly to assemble a cast of desperately uninteresting characters – bankrupt photographers, girls from “the local theatre scene”, a dancer on her way to the US, even a cosmetic dentist who “makes a bomb decorating the teeth of wealthy white women” – whose only reason to be in the book is that they have all shared narcotic substances with the author. “That week there’s some MDMA floating around at house parties. Aditi and I do some together with a bunch or friends.” Or: “I know Gaurav. We’ve dropped acid together.” Or again: “We’re running out of hash. Prateek calls me saying we need to score.” This is no reason to condemn them or him, but unfortunately these chapters contain zero insights, and there’s only so much of other people tripping that a reader can take. Sample: “The star has given me energy, dollops of it. Also a sexual vibe. Naked exgirlfriends dance in front of my eyes… All they want to do is to make me happy, give me pleasure, massage my cock with their lips.”

Even the sole non-PLU person in here, an auto driver from Dehradun called Nandu, is only known to Mehrotra because he doubles up as a dealer. And so even in this chapter we must spend at least part of the time hanging out with Mehrotra and Nandu as they get stoned. “Nandu passes me the joint and claps his hands excitedly. There’s a tweeting sound from the ceiling every time he claps. It’s something he picked up in a Chinese goods store in Calcutta – the Singing Bird Electric Lantern. It’s quite something.” We get it. A great part of the ‘New India’ is getting stoned. So what?

It doesn’t help that Mehrotra seems content to merely skim the surface of these lives. There’s Anita, 24, for example, a corporate lawyer who “treasures her independence” and lives alone in an apartment in Bombay but – the ‘but’ is implied everywhere in this piece, even if it isn’t articulated – is hunting for “The One” based on her mother’s instructions to settle down. She “lets [him] explore her breasts” but doesn’t want to kiss, she dances raunchily to a Bollywood item song for Mehrotra’s benefit, but wants him to sleep on the couch. One gets the feeling that she would have made for a fascinating chapter, if Mehrotra had only been willing to listen. But he decides that another night on the couch is not for him, and leaves abruptly, leaving the reader, too, with a sense of incompleteness.

When he does stay with someone a little longer – and stops talking about himself – he is capable of making the interesting observation that makes or breaks one’s sense of a character. Captain Andy the pilot, who prefers alcohol, gets a few wryly memorable lines of this sort: “If it’s an expensive cognac he leaves it in his car, making a trip downstairs each time he wants a refill. He drinks expensive liquor and says he can’t afford to share it. Besides, people can’t really tell the difference and it would be wasted on them.” Bits of the chapter on Bombay scriptwriters are fascinating — like the café called Pop Tate’s where they hang out, where the television is always tuned to a 24-hour Bollywood news channel. “What might pass as light entertainment elsewhere is hard news here in Versova, the heart of the Hindi film industry.” But Mehrotra then carries on about Pop Tate’s for three paragraphs.

That’s the thing about this book. Most of the time, Mehrotra seems like he can’t be bothered, either with people or with writing about them in any detail. At other times, he belabours a point so much that you no longer feel it’s the slightest bit insightful, or meanders on endlessly about something he’s already discussed several times. This should not surprise us, perhaps. In a previous avatar, Mehrotra was the sort of journalist who, when he wanted to explain the popular Hindi acronym KLPD (Khade lund pe dhokha) in his column for the news weekly Tehelka, produced a four-line-long piece of doggerel instead: “I was hard and erect/ and ready to flow/the signals were all green/ oops! where did she go?” This stellar piece of poetry is now available to us again, since that Tehelka column has become a chapter in the book, under its ridiculous original title, ‘Inside the Sari’.

This second section of the book – ‘Wide Angle’ – is where Mehrotra really comes into his element, holding forth on pretty much everything he wants to, without feeling the slightest need to back up his throwaway assertions with anything that might be called research. In ‘Inside the Sari’, for example, he’s out to “crack” the “codes” that govern “relationships, sex, the dirty business of love and life” in India. He assures us that reading Indian women’s magazines in English – Femina, Cosmopolitan and Women’s Era – will explain a great deal. While magnanimously granting in one sentence that there are “different magazines, different types of Indian women, multiple codes”, in the next sentence he feels able to airily assert that “Indian women used to sit demurely, legs crossed sideways, whenever they rode pillion on a two-wheeler. Now they sit with their legs confidently astride, toned arms gripping their boyfriend’s sixpack.” Which women? Where in India? Of what class background(s)? How old? None of this matters to Mehrotra, who has already moved on to his next pronouncement – “Yes, the sexual revolution is finally underway in India” – based on a few sentences about condom ads and morning-after pills on primetime TV.

This is followed by yet another unbacked assertion: “homegrown chicklit sells in the thousands”. One may wonder: Which books is he talking about? And why does the selling of chick-lit suggest a sexual revolution? But questions are futile. Mehrotra is up and away, with nearly four pages worth of conversational snippets reproduced from a call-in radio show called ‘Between the Sheets’, and hey presto, end of chapter. A chapter as ridiculous as this can only lead us to the conclusion that none of Mehrotra’s intended readers are Indian women. Oh, you are one? And you want to know how to “crack” the codes that govern Indian men? Well, Mehrotra’s message is clear: for that you don’t need to go to men’s magazines – you have Mehrotra himself.

In another chapter called ‘I Love My McJob: The Birth of India’s English-speaking Working Class’, Mehrotra announces that “the average Indian’s attitude to work has changed”. “In the showrooms of global capitalism”, it seems, there is “a newfound respect for physical labour” and nametags that bear only first names erase all signs of caste so that “centuries of prejudice are instantly wiped out”. The ludicrous wishful thinking of this apart, Mehrotra does not even bother to reconcile one set of observations with another: a few chapters later, in a chapter called ‘Servants of India’, he spends a paragraph telling us that “middle class Indians are generally averse to menial work. If they could, they’d hire toilet attendants to wash their bums. A young banker can’t be seen with a broom; an upwardly mobile young woman can’t be seen doing household chores”. In one of his few useful observations in ‘Inside the Sari’, Mehrotra points to the fictive world of Cosmopolitan which discusses the division of such household chores as washing up and cooking, knowing full well that most Indian readers will go home to a house with a live-in servant. So which is it: is the Indian middle class’ inherent hierarchical-ness alive and well, or has liberalisation freed us all from oppressive structures and nasty things like caste? And if the answer is that it’s complicated, it really would be nice if Mehrotra gave some thought to addressing that complexity, rather than giving us contradictory generalisations.

In the third and final section, ‘Here We Are Now, Entertain Us’, the “insider perspective” essentially seems to justify Mehrotra spending what feels like aeons trawling through his long-drawn and boring memories of growing up in pre-liberalisation India — boring not just because pretty much any upper middle class reader over 30 in India remembers those years of Doordarshan and cassette-buying often in as much detail as Mehrotra does, but because he has almost nothing insightful or new to tell us about that shared experience.

This final section does contain the only chapters that seem like they’re based on a combination of immersion and research: several about the emerging music scene (including such gems as our invention of “sitdown rock ‘n’roll”, and one analysing the emergence of reality TV in India, a reasonably interesting subject except that one must deal with a fresh stream of Mehrotraisms, such as “Rarely will Indian couples interact with each other as individuals. Everything about a person is passed through the filter of Bollywood…”.

This book is especially disappointing because it comes from Mehrotra, who can write taut, thoughtful, even arresting prose when he puts his mind to it. Eunuch Park, his book of short stories, which I happened to review (Biblio, May-June, 2009) did contain glimpses of Mehrotra’s now ceaseless desire to shock and provoke, but it was written with greater empathy and greater attentiveness than he seems to provide a single one of his subjects here. From the lazy, slipshod arguments, flat descriptions and self-indulgence on every page of The Butterfly Generation, one can only conclude that Mehrotra thinks nonfiction needs neither research, nor commitment — nor editing. He has proved himself devastatingly wrong.

Published in the March-April 2012 issue of Biblio

Book Review: Between Clay and Dust

Musharraf Ali Farooqi's earlier novel, The Story of a Widow (2009), was the delicate, understated tale of the middle-aged but still wooable Mona Ahmad, whose disciplinarian husband's sudden death leaves her in possession of an independent fortune and a desire to experience the freedom she's been denied all her adult life. One of the things that made that novel unusual, at least in the context of South Asian writing in English, was Farooqi's choice of protagonist: a woman who is no longer young, someone who has assumed that the pattern of her life is set forever, but now finds that she is a position to make changes. The recently-released Between Clay and Dust also features older people being forced to grapple with unexpected change. But unlike Mona Ahmad, these characters are indisputably in their twilight years. The crumbling, once-grand domains of Ustad Ramzi and Gohar Jan, both barely surviving the post-Independence transformation of popular tastes, are a far cry from the comfortably-off Karachi in which Mona leads her cosseted existence. The end of princely patronage has sounded the death-knell for both Ustad Ramzi's akhara, once the focus of an unending stream of admiring fans and would-be pahalwans, and Gohar Jan's kotha. The great pahalwan and the celebrated tawaif must deal with a harsh new world, governed by the market on the one hand and an impersonal bureaucracy on the other. But even as he describes lives that are increasingly affected by such unseemly things as municipal inspections and leaking roofs, Farooqi manages to retain a distant, otherworldly air. If his present-day Pakistan, as one grateful reviewer of The Story of a Widow pointed out, displayed a "complete absence of dictators, diasporas and post-9/11 traumas", his 1950s inner city has managed to remain unscathed by the "ravaging winds of Partition". Not for Farooqi the burgeoning historical canvas of an Amitav Ghosh, or even the unobtrusive (but omnipresent) detailing of a Vikram Seth. What we get instead is a setting that's left deliberately unidentified, the aim of the words less to recreate a known geography than to evoke a mood, distill an essence. The elegiac mood is created as much by the inevitably tragic ebb in the tides of its protagonists' lives as by Farooqi's choice of language. There is an old-world quality to his prose that some might think teeters on the verge of purple — "The turmoil that had seared the fibre of men and gored their souls had not touched this quiet habitation" — but that, if read with the cadences of an imagined other language echoing behind the English, feels exactly right. There are moments, though, when this feeling of 'translatedness' begins to extend its welcome; for instance when Farooqi writes, "He always experienced a deep sense of harmony in that place" — rather than simply "there", or "turquoise-coloured mosaic panels" – rather than simply "turquoise" (my italics). Sometimes the awkwardness is just the outcome of sloppy editing: "his life, too, would have conformed to that of his elders' existence and become part of it". Other curious linguistic choices include the repeated use of 'raga recital' for Gohar Jan's evening mehfil, 'nayika' for tawaif, and words like 'ewer' and 'mattock' where the Hindustani equivalents or at least less archaic English words might have been less jarring. { There is an old-world quality to his prose that some might think teeters on the verge of purple but that, if read with the cadences of an imagined other language echoing behind the English, feels exactly right. But none of these linguistic stumbling blocks can quite divert one from the pleasures of a tale well told. There is a bell-like clarity to Farooqi's delineation of his characters, his slow unraveling of their motivations and desires. Instead of doing anything as indignified as building towards a crescendo, Farooqi maintains a deliberate even tempo. Even the most dramatic events are described without drama. In this carefully laid out world, balance is everything. Farooqi's arrangement of figures is almost perfectly symmetrical: if Gohar Jan's life is tied to her kotha, Ustad Ramzi's heart lives in the akhara — and in the graveyard of his ancestors that is attached to it. Ustad Ramzi's tumultuous relationship with his brash younger brother Tamami has as its counterpart Gohar Jan's complicated connection with the young tawaif Malka. The Malka episode — which I won't give away — hinges on the way a tawaif's life swings between freedom and necessity. And balance is also key to wrestling: as Ustad Ramzi's tragic epiphany goes, "Did the essence of his art not lie in creating a delicate harmony between strength and the opposing force?" It feels somewhat unfair, then, that Farooqi decides not to balance the attention he gives his primary protagonists: Ustad Ramzi — and the world of the akhara, its pitchers of sardai and two-kilo-mutton breakfasts — gets far more space than Gohar Jan, who despite all her potential complexity, ends up playing a mere foil to Ustad Ramzi, yet another version of the golden-hearted courtesan we know only too well. This is a quietly affecting book, with a profound understanding of tragedy: that what happens to us is as much a function of how we respond to events as the events themselves. Published in the Sunday Guardian.

Redemption Songs: Jai Bhim Comrade

Anand Patwardhan’s revelatory, sprawling documentary Jai Bhim Comrade is a remarkable record of the visual and aural history of the contemporary Dalit movement in Maharashtra.

A man stands next to a truck, using a massive pitchfork to unload a mound of garbage from it. The camera pans downward, and we see that he is ankle-deep in garbage, garbage that is strewn indiscriminately across a vast open maidan. This sea of untreated, rotting trash, occasionally rising into little hillocks where the trucks have been unloading their cargo, serves as one of Mumbai's few designated rubbish dumps — and the man we are watching at work is a designated municipal sanitation worker.
 

Yet he is bare-bodied and barefoot, working as hazardously as he has for nearly 20 years: without being made a permanent employee, without being given even the most basic equipment to protect his body from the dangers hidden in the garbage: sharp objects, acidic substances, and the constant threat of infection. For a long time, they did not give us even water to clean ourselves, he says. If our truck broke down, no-one would give us a ride. After they finally created a union, Mumbai's sanitation workers demanded that the municipal corporation supply them with gumboots and rubber gloves. But the corporation has refused, it is fighting the case in court. They have the money to pay the massive fees of big lawyers, says the man softly, but they can't afford to give us gumboots.

The sanitation workers appear for perhaps 10 minutes of Anand Patwardhan's film, but there is something about the sequence that stays with you. The matter-of-fact way in which the workers describe their merciless working lives. The unredeemed grimness of the visuals. The municipal worker who identifies his caste as 'Jai Bhim wala'. And overlaying all of this, a sonorous voice singing "My Raghu went to Mumbai": words and picture and music melding to show us how tenaciously caste still holds our attitudes to labour in its grip.

The work of sanitation in India is still inevitably assigned to Dalits, with both the work and the worker being treated with a palpable disdain that can only stem from deeply-ingrained notions of pollution and purity. Later in the film, watching upper middle class Marathi interviewees couch their distaste for Ambedkar Jayanti celebrations in terms of crowds and dirt, one thinks of the academic Aditya Nigam's disturbing suggestion that modern incarnations of upper caste privilege continue to have a powerful afterlife "precisely because they are no more articulated in the old language of caste", circulating instead in 'modern' discourses of "merit", "efficiency" and "hygiene".

The continuing existence of caste-based discrimination, as well as its consistent disavowal – by savarna elites, by right wing political formations, but also by a tragically blinkered left movement – this is the subject of Jai Bhim Comrade.

It is an epic subject, and in Patwardhan's hands, it receives epic form.

{	The work of sanitation in India is still inevitably assigned to Dalits, with both the work and the worker being treated with a palpable disdain that can only stem from deeply-ingrained notions of pollution and purity.

The narrative begins with the deaths of 10 Dalits in Mumbai's Ramabai Nagar locality in 1997, when the police opened fire on a peaceful gathering of people protesting the desecration of an Ambedkar statue. The brutal killing of innocents, and the impunity with which the police justified their action — even producing doctored video footage to suggest that those mowed down were attempting to set fire to some tankers on the other side of the highway – deeply affected Vilas Ghogre, a Dalit musician and poet.

Ghogre was what in Marathi is called a shahir – a poet for a social cause. He had long been part of Ahavan, the cultural wing of the CPI (Marxist-Leninist), before being expelled from it for "deviations" from the party path. He also happened to be someone whom Anand Patwardhan had worked with closely. No one who has seen Patwardhan's Hamara Shahar (1985) can forget the riveting voice of Ghogre singing 'Katha sunon he logon, vyatha suno he logon' (Listen to this story, people/ Listen to this pain). Patwardhan met Ghogre several more times, recording more of his powerful music on tape, but then lost touch with him. So when, a few days after his visit to Ramabai Nagar, Ghogre tied a blue cloth around his head and hung himself from the ceiling of his hut – leaving behind a scrawled note on the wall that read: "Down with the police action. I salute the martyred sons of Bhim. Hail Ambedkarite unity. Shahir Vilas Ghogre." – Patwardhan was moved and disturbed enough to take his camera and go to Ramabai Nagar. That initial visit was the beginning of a 14-year-long journey, at the end of which Patwardhan had collected over 300 hours of footage.

The 3 hour film he has finally culled out of it is perhaps the closest thing we have to a visual and aural history of the contemporary Dalit movement in Maharashtra. It is first and foremost, a commemoration of the many deaths that have followed the Ramabai Nagar firings: Ghogre, of course, but also Bhagwat Jadhav, a young Dalit Panther leader killed by the Shiv Sena at a protest rally in 1974; Bhai Sangare, a Panther ideologue whose razor-sharp oratory may have caused his death in 1999; the Bhotmanges, killed in Khairlanji in 2006; and many others. So Patwardhan takes us stoically into bereaved Dalit homes, speaking to women who have not allowed themselves to grieve, or men who lament that they have failed to "mentally discard caste". He documents the long-drawn failure of the inquiry commission and the courts to impugn Manohar Kadam, the police inspector who gave orders to fire in Ramabai Nagar.

Patwardhan (second from left) speaks at the VIBGYOR International Film Festival, Thrissur

Patwardhan's quiet interviewing of Ghogre's erstwhile comrades is a clear indictment of the Indian Left's failure to recognise caste – symbolised here in their remarkable comment about his headscarf at the time of death 'not really' being blue, the colour associated with Ambedkarite movements. But even as he tracks the Dalit-led Republican Party of India lurching from one compromised alliance to another (the Congress, the Nationalist Congress Party, even, in a grotesque instance of political erasure, the Shiv Sena and the BJP), Patwardhan seems less interested – or able – to explain how a figure like the radical Dalit poet Namdeo Dhasal, once a Dalit Panther, could elect to join hands with the Hindu right.

But perhaps a search for such an answer is futile. It is valuable enough that Patwardhan shows us a whole host of people who question the holy cows of mainstream Hindu society: the daughters of an Ambedkarite father who speak laughingly of how they have to hide their aetheism from schoolmates; the Dalit leader who gets a still-hesitant crowd to say "Ganapati cha baap kumhaar" (The father of Ganesh is the potter who made him); the golden-voiced Sheetal Sathe of the Kabir Kala Manch whose political choices – the Sambhaji Bhagat songs she sings, the man she has chosen to marry – radically depart from her mother's simple religiosity (but without rancour).

In the 10 days since I saw Jai Bhim Comrade, the newspapers have reported that 27-year-old Sheetal Sathe is now on the run, "wanted by investigating agencies for her alleged Maoist links". Meanwhile the Patna High Court has acquitted 23 persons accused of perpetrating the massacre of 21 Dalits at Bathani Tola in Bhojpur in 1996, citing "defective evidence" (all 23 had been convicted by a sessions court in 2010). In legislative news, the government has proposed increasing the penalties for a 19 year old law that prohibits the hiring of manual scavengers: a tacit acknowledgement of the fact that not a single case has been registered under it so far, while 25 lakh households still depend on the manual removal of 'nightsoil' by Dalits.

In such a world, even Patwardhan's too-pat technique – tripping up random English-speaking people with seemingly sanguine questions – seems entirely justified. "Dalit issue frankly is definitely ameliorated over the past half a decade or so," says one undergraduate Barista-goer. Can you cite any examples, asks Patwardhan. "Oh no," says the boy calmly, "there's no-one like that in my circle."

Published in the Sunday Guardian.

Film Review: Tezz has the thrill, but where’s the dil?

“Aajkal izzat maangne se nahi milti, chheenni padti hai” (You don’t get respect by asking for it these days, you have to snatch it), says Akash Rana (Ajay Devgn) a few minutes into Priyadarshan’s new film. Before you can snap your fingers, Akash and his accomplices Adil (Zayed Khan) and Megha (Sameera Reddy) have planted a bomb on a train from London to Glasgow, and are demanding 10 million pounds to defuse it. Cut to the British railway control room, and cue series of mobile phone calls between sombre bomber Akash, train brain Sanjay Raina and top cop Arjun Khanna.

Tezz could have easily been an action-filled riff on A Wednesday: a lone man using a bomb threat to get media coverage and force the government to pay attention. And the film does spend an inordinate amount of time trying to convince us that Akash is the tragic victim of evil immigration laws. But how getting a lot of money out of the British government in exchange for 500 innocent lives is going to get him ‘respect’ is never explained.

In fact there’s much that is inexplicable about Tezz. In a Bollywood world where Indians abroad have never been shown as anything but well-off, well-settled NRIs with their dil in Hindustan, it’s interesting to finally have a Hindi film that allows for the fact that not all desi immigrants are legal, and that they want nothing more than to never have to return to India. Unfortunately, having hit upon a potentially interesting subject, Tezz is content to leave the treatment paper-thin.

Ditto for its characters. Who is Akash Rana? Where did he grow up? Why exactly does he think he can get away with not having legal status in the UK? Why, instead of being deported all by himself, doesn’t he simply take his simpering British wife (Kangna Ranaut, with scarcely anything to do) and child and go off to India – especially if he’s an engineer? The film has no answers. Zayed Khan and Sameera Reddy’s characters get even more slender backgrounds: just a couple of over-dramatic flashbacks which are supposed to explain why they’re risking their lives to aid Devgn’s train bomb ploy. Well, they don’t.

The guys they’re up against – the British establishment, represented of course by the desi cop Arjun Khanna (Anil Kapoor), desi railway controller Sanjay Raina (Boman Irani) and yet another desi cop (Mohanlal) – don’t have it much better in terms of characterisation. Anil Kapoor, playing a feted UK police officer, doesn’t look like he’s on the verge of retirement. But since we’re told he is, it seems a trifle unbelievable that he should have to fight “you guys are all terrorists” slurs from a random white colleague at this stage of a grand career. And make no mistake, it is grand – he’s the only cop I’ve ever heard of who gets to address an all-white British Parliament. Mohanlal is completely wasted, spending the whole film stuck on the bomb-threatened train where all he gets to do is deal with intermittent outbreaks of passenger panic. Oh, that and speak in a South Indian accent to a little girl speaking in a North Indian accent, who turns out to be the daughter of Establishment Desi No. 3: Boman Irani. Irani, being the talented actor he is, manages to imbue his (equally slender) character with a semblance of teary reality. But on the whole, this is a film where characters don’t really matter.

What matters are the chase scenes, the aerial shots of the train whizzing through the British countryside, the nailbiting stunts. And by Hindi movie standards, these are really rather good. I sat rooted to my seat watching Sameera Reddy rafting dangerously over rapids with a yellow waterproof suitcase and a bike over the heads of nonplussed British cops, all the while being followed by a combination of helicopters and police cars. Zayed Khan had my favourite chase scene, doing a lot of impressive somersaulting across a series of London subways and bridges. And Devgn gets to do a micro-mini-version of a Third Man-style splash through the sewers. All rather fun, and none of them look even faintly ridiculous while they’re doing it.

There’s a great scene in Tezz where Anil Kapoor and his team think they’ve got Ajay Devgn surrounded, until they break into the farm and find a solitary cellphone sitting on a chair in an empty room, routing Devgn’s voice through it. “Maan gaye isko yaar, bahut English picture dekhta hai saala,” laughs Anil.

Same goes for Priyadarshan, clearly. I just wish this Hindi picture had a little more kahani in it.

Book Review: The Resignation

The Resignation
Jainendra Tr. by Rohini Chowdhury
Penguin
200 pp; Rs 250

Divided Virtue

Published 75 years ago, Jainendra’s quiet condemnation of an extant middle class morality echoes through time.

I FIRST stumbled upon Jainendra’s Tyagpatra (The Resignation) as a play staged by Delhi theatre doyen Rajinder Nath in 2007. What struck me most then — and again now, when reading the novel in this new translation — is how startlingly honest it is about relationships, marriage and middle-class morals. The narrative centres on a woman called Mrinal and her struggle to find a space for her desires within the constricted contours of middle-class society. The tale is told by Mrinal’s nephew Pramod, now a highly-regarded judge, who has just received news of her death and is accosted by guilt at having failed to stand by her all his adult life.

Jainendra wrote Tyagpatra in the first person, crafting the internal dialogue between the younger, often baffled Pramod and the older, anguished one into a deceptively simple narrative. Like the 13-year-old Leo of LP Hartley’s classic 1953 British novel The Go-Between, or the precocious (also 13-year-old) Briony Tallis of Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Pramod is the classic child in an adult world, forced to deal with things he doesn’t quite understand — but is deeply affected by. “If she didn’t like that place, then she shouldn’t go there — that’s all there was to it!” thinks the young Pramod, unable to grasp why his beloved Bua must return to her husband’s home. The adult Pramod, sadly, knows better: “The matter wasn’t as simple as I made it out to be — this I understand very well today. Marriage is a knot that ties two people together but one that ties them to society as well. It does not break merely because one wants it to!”

The adult voice of Jainendra’s narrator can be banal in his verbosity — “Upon which beach do the waves of that ocean end?” — but the child narrator fixes charmingly upon the irrelevant detail. So when Pramod, like Leo and Briony many years after him, finds himself delivering letters between Mrinal and her friend Sheela’s brother, he is arrested by the letter itself: “I wondered if I too would one day have such good handwriting. The ‘My dear’ with which the letter began — I liked the way it had been written so much that for a long time I tried to form the ‘My dear’ of my letters in the same manner.”

At the novel’s core, however, is Mrinal’s disillusionment: her failed efforts to found her marriage on honest foundations, followed by her radical break with “civilised society”. The episodes where Pramod — now an LLB — tries unsuccessfully to confront his Mrinal Bua astutely plumb the depths of middle-class schizophrenia. Is a woman like Mrinal, abandoned by her husband, a tragic victim? Or is she a sinner, because she has chosen to live outside the bounds of middle-class morality? All Pramod’s books cannot give him his answer.

Mrinal’s letter to Pramod, on the other hand, is a model of clarity. The people amidst whom she now lives may be “the dregs of society”, but they are honest. “In this place, it is inconceivable that anyone would present himself as being of good character, or that he would wish to or be able to do so… Here, pretence and deceit are impossible… Good breeding that is only a veneer is revealed here for what it is.” Elsewhere, she reassures Pramod that she is not about to become a prostitute: “I can understand the necessity of giving one’s body. I will be able to give my body, perhaps that will be necessary. But to take in return?”

As contemporary writer Mridula Garg points out in her afterword here, Tyagpatra is perhaps the most quoted and discussed of Jainendra’s novels. Jainendra must have known that a heroine like Mrinal would shake up most readers in 1937, when the book was first published. I imagine my late grandmother, born in 1927, as a reader who would have connected with Mrinal. It’s almost tragic that her candour can still surprise us in 2012.

Published in Tehelka Magazine, Vol 9, Issue 17, Dated 28 April 2012.

Film Review: Vicky Donor

Vicky Donor is that rare thing: a laugh-out-loud Hindi movie that has both irreverence and soul. Screenwriter Juhi Chaturvedi and director Shoojit Sircar have taken a hush-hush subject that most people would tiptoe around, and placed it bang at the centre of a film that’s both hilariously funny and wonderfully honest – without ever feeling sleazy.

The plot is as follows. Vicky Arora, 25, lives with his widowed mother Dolly and his grandmother Biji in a small house in the very middle class neighbourhood of Lajpat Nagar IV. He seems like a nice boy, but he doesn’t have a job and isn’t trying terribly hard to look for one either. He seems more-or-less content to spend his days mall-hopping and playing cricket in the park with his buddies, while effectively living off his mother’s earnings from the beauty parlour she runs downstairs. Enter Dr Baldev Chadda, who runs a fertility treatment clinic and sperm bank in Daryaganj, and is always on the lookout for sperm donors who can come to the aid of his stressed-out, “insecured and highly ambitious” clients. Chadda spies Vicky when he’s in the process of fobbing off his pet white Spitz on someone (because it failed to bark at a thief), and decides at first sight that this is the man to solve his current crisis of ‘quality sperm’. “Shakal dekh ke bande ka sperm pehchaan jaata hoon,” as he says to the bewildered Vicky. So begins Chadda’s long and hilarious campaign to convince the reluctant Vicky that donating sperm is neither funny nor obscene, but simply a natural thing that he can do – and earn good money doing.

Chaturvedi’s hilarious dialogue for Dr Chadda is absolutely spot-on, from assuring Vicky that sperm donation “is an ancient science” to telling him that he’ll be doing a social service. But it’s the brilliant Annu Kapoor who breathes life into this amalgam of bizarre Aryan race purity theories and sheer dogged business sense, turning him into a character who’s as familiar as he is memorable. Ayushmann Khurana, a television star and ex-IPL anchor making his filmic debut here, is a complete natural as Vicky, combining the requisite Dilli macho bluster with an artless vulnerability that has thankfully little drama about it.

In fact, Vicky Donor steers clear of high drama for most of its running time. The relationship between Vicky’s rum-swigging mother (the superb Dolly Ahluwalia) and eccentric old grandmother (Kamlesh Gill), for example, brings to life a daughter-in-law–mother-in-law dynamic that’s often hilarious while staying refreshingly honest: “Hangover jitta banda kucch bhi keh jaanda hai (When one has a hangover, one can say anything at all),” says a drunkenly apologetic Beeji in advance for being crabby in the morning.

Even Vicky’s persistent wooing of pretty bank employee Ashima (debutante Yami Gautam) stays light and frothy almost all the way through, even with the romance culminating in the inevitable over-the-top Bengali-Punjabi family face-off. The caricatures that Vicky’s mother and Ashima’s father (veteran theatre actor Jayanta Das) respectively draw of the ‘other’ community are broad and predictable – loud, uncultured Punjabis who flaunt their money, versus miserly monkey-cap-wearing Bengalis who don’t know how to have a good time – but the sharply-scripted wedding negotiation scene seems entirely believable. And by the time you’ve gotten to the end of their happily tipsy wedding, you’re really not likely to complain.

The post-interval section is somewhat less fun, mostly because the filmmakers up their drama quotient as they propel us towards a fuzzy feelgood climax. But the emotional twist in the tale – which I’m not going to give away here (other than to tell you that Chaturvedi wanted to call her film Phool Khilein Hain Gulshan Gulshan) – does give everyone a chance to display their acting chops. Gautam turns a tad too screechy (and then perhaps a little too maudlin), but Khurrana acquits himself marvelously, as do Ahluwalia and Gill.
It’s also worth mentioning that Vicky Donor is a Delhi film, though like with everything else about it, it wears its city-ness lightly. It doesn’t make too big a deal of its locations – the Daryaganj clinic with its slightly dodgy associations, the Lajpat Nagar terrace across which Beeji quarrels incessantly with the bitchy neighbour ‘Pepsi Aunty’, or Dr. Chadda’s terrace with its too-good-to-be-true view of the Jama Masjid – but each of them is nicely captured. And the dialogue is a pitch-perfect rendition of Dilli-Punjabi-speak, studded with English words in exactly the right places: “Gents ko samjhein aisi ladies bhagwan ne banai kitthe hai? (Where has God made the sorts of ladies who will understand gents?)”

Vicky Donor shares with last week’s Bittoo Boss a likeable debutante hero, a script that’s almost wholly in Punjabi and a desire to address a serious topic with a light and frothy touch. Unlike Bittoo Boss, though, Shoojit Sircar’s second directorial outing (after 2005’s watchable Kashmir-shot romance Yahaan, in which Minissha Lamba made her suitably coy debut) the emotional-moral core of Vicky Donor never feels like a politically correct add-on. Sure, it doesn’t cling very hard to the possibility that there might actually be people who don’t need children to feel ‘complete’, and neither does it want to argue too aggressively against the desire for biological children rather than adopted ones – but then every film must pick its battles. Vicky Donor has picked one, and fights it most disarmingly.

Published in Firstpost.