Koftas and Coleslaw. And then some!
The anti-hero of The Long Reverie of Partha Sarma (Penguin India, Delhi, 2007) is a twenty-four-year-old man with no particular ambition in life. Partha has no job and lives off his parents. While he does have a close group of friends that he goes to movies and parties with, he continually feels alienated from them as he sees them move further and further away from him in terms of their professional and social life. His lack of experience in the real world is something that Partha fails to recognize, and at times sneers at, as he puts himself above such things. However, his detachment from the humdrum workings of society and the distance he feels from others his age nonetheless creates a void within him that he attempts to fill making verbose entries into his journals, drinking incessantly and falling into the company of the romantic Ahmadi sahib and the infuriatingly patronizing Kaushik. To them, Partha vents his frustrations at the world, giving them an excuse for their pseudo-intellectual, quasi-senile ruminations. Considering himself above the masses and droves of people who go to work everyday succumbing to the world's mundanity-- Partha is happy to ignore the fact that he has become part of the hoi polloi who are unemployed! He does not manage to find a vocation in life throughout the novel! I suppose the biggest problem with this novel is that the chief protagonist is not memorable - a serious problem considering that the novel is mostly about him and his thoughts! It is not possible to say that he is likable, or that he is despicable or that his troubles will haunt the mind for any significant period of time. This novel attempts to explore the feelings and thoughts of a young man facing a new, grimy, hypocritical world and it provides some insight into why he would feel this way. However, all it most persuasively manages to do is leave a bland aftertaste. The writing is overwrought. The writer is trapeze-ing between indeterminate moods and styles. On one page the hero is twentieth-century over-sensitive "anti-fashion" (p.9) man sniggering at the world and himself (I suspect) and on the next page he seems to gung-ho into nineteenth-century soul-wrenching swoons--now he is stomping and swearing, now he is the weary sophist burdened with bile and melancholia. The wild swings are impossible for the reader to keep up with and made infinitely more nerve-wrecking because Sriram's novel is a trap for flighty philosophical profundities, obtuse diary entries, cringing conversations, cryptic asides, non-doings and a voluble death wish. The book - I am looking for a polite word here - was 'tiresome'. Not because the subject was a bleak one but because it thrashes a bleak subject to death. The reveries are possibly intended to show the hero's mind as a cauldron of images and random sensations. When one has tired of Partha's tedious prose: wounds are wounds when you're hurt, and their memory lasts--like sense-memory! Fear, like rust, seeps and corrodes. So much energy and feeling: expended to what end? Oh, thinking is useless! And purposeless! The sheer chaos of reality warrants no reflection! Experience doesn't give perspective: experience is opaque! (p.89), there are unwarranted surprises, like TWO whole pages on how repulsive lizards are. And then there are other ordeals - for example, the heated exchange that a young woman (and Partha's love interest) Akanksha has with her crusty mother on getting the maid to make kofta and coleslaw. Sixty or so pages on to the book, I was about to give up, sadly concluding that The Long Reverie of Partha Sarma is a bizarre mash. Kofta and coleslaw. However, I did read on and slowly realized that the book had taken on an ambitious theme which, had it been done with less fuss and a more defined sense of purpose, could have been something to talk about. What redeems the book is Sriram's wry understanding of human relationships - not his excruciating study of ennui smothered with Rilke, Keats, Wordsworth, mystics, Khayyam and so on. He is able to zero in on facets of yuppie life that strains credulity (I can't imagine in what kind of a world an interior designer comes to a party dressed as Mary Poppins or someone dressed as Spiderman shoots gelatinous stuff from a hose) - granted this is very, very weird but somehow the sections where Sriram is more readable are where he stops pontificating and writes in a clean, no-nonsense prose - for example, about Mr. and Mrs. Dutt's marital life. Or about a harried young man called Shaurab who is unsure whether he is still in a relationship even though he is in a furniture shop with his girlfriend who is browsing for beds and coasters. I was still counting how many pages I had left to reach the end, but I was ok with a writer who writes "hormones do for love what it does for acne" or "she made him happy, so she controlled his happiness". If one is patient, one is rewarded by sections that are not jaunty hype but written with 'pleasant' (Sriram loves this word!) ease.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel.
Comments