A long-winded slice of Bombay
Karan seth is a young photographer who works for a Bombay-based publication, The India Chronicle. His boss, Iqbal Syed, sends him to photograph a reclusive pianist, Samar Arora, who graduated from Juilliard, performed his first concert at the age of twelve, and went into retirement at the age of twenty-five. Karan, who is working on a personal project to document facets of Bombay, sets off on this task.

In the course of his work, he meets Samar’s lover Leo as well as his close friend Zaira, a movie star who is “single-handedly responsible for raising India’s National Masturbation Index” — and who is being stalked by a politician’s son. Meanwhile Karan, exploring Chor Bazaar in search of a “Bombay Fornicator” — more commonly known as a planter’s chair — meets Rhea Dalal, a rich housewife who once wanted to be a potter but now spends her time being, er, a rich housewife. The plot moves beyond the lotus-eating, Bellini-drinking Page Three lifestyle when, roughly a third of the way into the book, the stalker, besotted by obsession, rage and drink, suddenly pulls out a gun and shoots Zaira at a fashionable nightspot. While the stalker’s father pulls all kinds of strings to protect his son, Samar grieves for Zaira.

It’s hard to know where to begin with this novel. It’s full of issues (gay relationships, Section 377, AIDS, unequal marriages), people (an actress, a genius pianist in early retirement, a genius potter who never was, a genius photographer in the making...) and vignettes of Bombay (flamingoes at Sewri, aarti at Babulnath temple). A few moments are nicely done, but as a whole the novel is completely over the top. Shanghvi has a gift for the odd, vividly startling description, and sometimes these work very nicely—at Haji Ali, flamingos with graceful necks “like freshly serviced strings on a sitar”; at Juhu Chowpatty, “a bright orgy of billboards that hacked up the tender night”; or, on the way to the Kanheri caves, “a puzzle of shadows changed shape with the passing sun”; or, seen from the window of a high-rise, “a row of ugly cars looked like canker in a dog’s ear”. More bizarre, but funny nevertheless, is this description of the magazine’s purring fashion editor: “Glee dripped out of Natasha like precum”. And quite sweet, the description of a newborn baby who “gazed up at the nurse in intense rumination, his liquid, almandine eyes gleaming with tender curiosity for all the terrible and fine things that lay beyond the parameters of his comprehension for now.”

... contd.