When well begun is not always half done

A young boy is supposed to play Krishna in a movie his grandfather, a mythology film mogul, is planning. The setting is the south of India. The Emergency looms on the political horizon. The boy has pinned all his hopes on the film; he has been taunted and ill-treated by his cousins at his grandfather’s house in Tamil Nadu. His parents have already abandoned him.

Somehow, due to a change in the grand­father’s fortunes, the film never gets made. Till here the story is told well. The pain of the lonely, abandoned child comes across. The descriptions of the film industry are realistic. The grandfather, a man slowly getting out of fashion, finds himself unable

to cope with the new demands and sensibilities of a changing industry. His retirement from films due to the grand debacle of the Krishna project also signifies the end of an era. All this is competently narrated. The story begins to falter right after the grand­father becomes involved in politics, a decade later. The protagonist assists the grand­father’s protégé in her election campaign. She wins and he shifts to Delhi, as her unofficial secretary. Along the line, he meets a character called AK, a fixer, so to say. Her character, despite the usual qualities of reso­urcefulness and manipulation, with a suitably shady background, doesn’t come to life and remains a stereotype.

AK decides to send the protagonist to USA to run a marriage bureau. From here onwards, the contrived nature of the plot becomes increasingly clear. There is nothing in the travails of the protagonist in the US to hold attention. He is writing a novel, we are told; the marriage bureau doesn’t really need him. The section called The Myth, Book II, is that novel, I suppose, for it has no obvious links with the main story line, apart from the hummingbirds that appear in it, like they do on the cover of the book. It is virtually impossible to read this part because the prose is so tedious.

If the improbable love story of the protagonist was not enough, the author tries to turn the book into a thriller towards the end by suggesting that AK’s character had overtones much more sinister than hinted at previously. He brings in terrorism and the Twin Towers, none of which makes sense.

The author’s obsession with the word ‘rea­lity-abuse’ is seriously problematic. He uses it absolutely anywhere he wishes to, without any care whether it is appropriate.

Only the first part about the child and his loss manages to hold attention. The rest is not convincing because the characters fail to move. The adult protagonist has nothing to distinguish him or make one feel strongly for him. It is also hard to take interest in him or AK, despite all the bombastic dialogues given to her by the writer. It is a book that promises much but delivers little.

— Abhimanyu is a freelancer based in Delhi.

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