Minimum City

Saraswati Park (named after the suburban Mumbai residential enclave where the main characters stay) is a book about “love and loss and the noise in our heads”,the blurb on the book jacket says; it is supposed to depict “how,in spite of everything,life… continues”. Capturing the continuum that is life in 250-odd pages is a tall order for any creative artist,to say the least,and Joseph sets to accomplish the task by letting us peer into the life of Mohan Karekar,a letter writer who plies his trade near the Mumbai GPO and dreams of writing short stories,his wife Lakshmi and Ashish,a 19-year-old nephew who comes to live with them.

Ashish is a homosexual,and nervous,uncertain descriptions of his erotic escapades (a kiss is a “perfunctory swoosh… by a fat,hot tongue”) first with a rich,callous brat from college and later with his English tutor are all the rising action that you would get out of the novel. The climactic point in the narrative is Lakshmi’s refusal to come back to her home and husband while visiting an ailing relative,the sign of a creeping frigidity in the marriage.

The rest of the book contains painfully meticulous descriptions of almost every activity imaginable in a middle-class Indian household,often employing images that are jarring,inadequate or downright bizarre (an entire page is devoted to the kachrawalla and the task of taking out the garbage in the morning). Mohan,for example,would be sitting in the train,“arms straightened like cantilever posts”,while his wife’s arms,in the act of wearing a sari,would be dancing as “cheerfully as the limbs of an automaton to pay out the fabric,pleat it,and secure it at the front”. Characters would be humming songs that bring forth “vaguely poignant feelings”,they would get up “feeling insubstantial” or behave oddly “as though enacting a simulacrum”. Their philosophy would put the quotidian to shame: “You only saw yourself truly when you met your siblings,was that true or merely half true?”

Mumbai (its buses like “oversized water buffaloes”,its air conditioners that look like “strange,rustic offerings”),with its legendary spirit and chutzpah,its intoxicating allure of the glamorous and the forbidden,fails to bring Saraswati Park alive. Suburban life is dull,drab and monotonous and here it remains so,without any redemption or grace. There is no epic significance in our kirana stores,no certainty of an epiphany in day-to-day living,punctuated as it might be with brief episodes of loss and sorrow. The lack of that drama would make the book unappealing to an Indian reader.

As far as the West goes,next time Joseph should let the reader find out what a jalebi is,instead of burdening the narrative with “the brittle coils of fried translucent dough,sticky with syrup”.