Summer Romance

The Girl by Sonia Faleiro (hb); Delhi: Penguin Books India; 2006; pp. 124; Rs. 250.

Never have I been more misled by what a blurb says. Based on the blurb, I expected a love triangle of a girl and two men "who are achingly curious to discover what made her give up her life to the sea." It promised a "tender and disquieting story about love and its infinite capacity for betrayal." Even though I didn't exactly feel I could warm up to a story that had love triangles, deaths in the sea and diary-ridden revelations--I was still in an expectant frame of mind, wondering what the book would be able to unfold "about hope so powerful that it negates reality and opens the doors to a future that is never to be." The Girl is not a "disquieting love story"; it is a disorienting one. There are no betrayals except what the reader might feel. And finally, I "achingly" failed to see how the girl's self-willed death could become a symbol of "hope," powerful or weak.

Luke is the narrator for the most part with bits from the girl's diary thrown in, separated by italics. The strength of this novel is of course, the girl and Luke's relationship which is done artfully. It could have been a "tender" love story but that too is foiled by a weakly managed love triangle. The girl and local shopkeeper Simon's relationship seems to have come as an after-thought. Simon and his friends make an eclectic bunch of fashionistas. One of them sports a red corduroy and baby-blue sneakers, another capers in black-and-white checked shirt with matching pants and a green felt beret. Simon wears black drainpipes, a pale pink scarf and a silk shirt. The deplorable fashion sense aside, I think, Simon --who "couldn't handle the girl and was afraid of [his mother] Mama Lola"--is a buffoon whom Faleiro is audaciously asking us to take seriously as the man in a love triangle. When Luke has gone off, the girl asserts that Luke had given her "life," which makes Mama Lola retort back in indignation. Her son responds to the situation by not paying attention to this small talk: "He saw himself sitting in a five-star hotel sipping a cold, pink drink through a straw. Sucking on a cherry, his tongue reluctant to shred this unexpected treat. Nice."

Imagine my indignation, when Father Costa, "a young man in a hurry to do God's work," who has potential to be a member of the triangle, simply disappears from the story and the text without cause or reason or explanation. So even though women feel uneasy around this priest, even though he has searching green eyes and there is after-Mass gossip and rumours about him, it is Simon not Father Costa who gets to be the romantic hero!

I had settled for the fact that this was going to be a plain story about heartache. Boy meets girl, they spend a couple of nights together, boy leaves, the girl mopes...all that is understandable. If that had driven her to the sea ...that would have made sense too. But Faleiro has other plans. After a catatonic fit in the abandoned Pereira-Costa home the author has the girl trying to get back to her life. Faleiro had a chance of making the girl the symbol of 'hope' here, but that opportunity is missed. The love triangle is supplanted by stories of the girl's isolation, madness, losses and deaths, her mother's car accident, her grandmother's death, her grandfather's death, her unborn child, her self-lacerations, her torpor, her Wuthering Height-esque anguish, her demons and her sadness.

The most bizarre twist must be the symbolic weight placed on the girl by Luke, the man who abandons her and returns after her death to read her diary and to claim the house the girl has bequeathed to him. The girl catapults into Everyman who has ever suffered the rubs of tragedy. "To be all she was worth, which was so much more than you or me or all our dreams together. The girl was our hope. The collective hope of all those in Azul who knew her or wanted to be her." Melodious as this sounds, this is rant.

I couldn't make out what the genre was. Was it feminist gothic, existential romance, a melodrama with a psychological twist, a woman's crisis wrapped around a thriller-tragedy, an absurdist fusion? Whatever it is, Faleiro uses language felicitously. There are stretches of enchanting descriptions of Azul: "The garden was thick with bushes of glowing pink and red bougainvillea and trees dripping hard yellow mangoes to the ground below. The woods that stretched across Azul were scented with drops of coconut milk and shrouded with the pine aroma of secrets." There are deft sketches of life here and there. Consider this one when the girl's house was put up for sale: "How many honeymooners or families, or young lovers who would want to run up these slippery blue stairs. All dripping cold, yelling for the last remaining dry towels, just that little bit drunk from too many beers on the beach, warm and happy..."

The delicious feel for life is thwarted with a touch of sentimental gothic as the same passage ends "how many of those people would want to sleep in a bedroom that had communed with the dead?" A passage with Faleiro's signature: "I carried with me the stickiness of sap and the bubbling heat of fresh toddy. I ran down the beach, my head buzzing with multiple flavours of a giant bowl overflowing with fruit: hard, black grapes, fresh peaches, small sweet raspberries, a watermelon so big I could dunk my head in the wetness of its scooped-out heart..,And I should have known that the hot-cream odour of self-satisfaction that trailed him everywhere would not wash away with salt water or soap or the fervour of a woman in love, His long artist's fingers, the soft red skin behind ears pierced with silver, the bump of thighs muscled by a lifetime of swift escapes...all exuded that almost imperceptible scent of careless fascination for change."

I was almost incredulous that one who could write with such intensity could be capable of writing strange things like: "exaggerated coconut trees," "minute specks of nobodiness," "embroidered envelopes," "blue clouds of monsoon."

The story in conclusion is about grief for losses, real and imagined. It is a summer romance about things that will not last. The Girl will elicit comparisons with Arundhuti Roy's first novel The God of Small Things. Faleiro takes us to a similar topography, to "verdant hill where peaks spread like twin palms across the village..amidst a flat green field studded with custard apple trees and completed with jasmines, [where] sleeps a deserted temple inlaid with gold" but she leaves us there floundering with a weirdly disjointed story.

Nuzhat Amin Mannan teaches English at Dhaka University.