My reading has been on a decent trot lately. In less than two weeks I completed reading Usha's The Chosen. Don't laugh. That is brisk reading by my standards.
Reading one of Usha's books has been on my mind for many years, long before she won the Vodafone Crossword award. More than a colleague she has been a friend and I have been curious to see how she writes.
The plot in The Chosen is quite different and a lot more involved than the plot in Adiga's WT. I will end up comparing these two although I am not sure that is appropriate in any way or for any reason. Adiga and Usha write different genres of fiction. I do not know what to label them; but I can sense enough of a difference to make that distinction. The only reason I compare them is that I read Usha soon after I finished reading Adiga.
For starters, I narrated the plot in WT in three sentences or so in an earlier blog. Usha's story would take a lot more real estate. It reminds me, in parts, of the Bollywood classics of the nineties like Hum Dil De Chuke Hein Sanam, Taal and so on: Lots of characters that weave in and out of the story, rich in narrative detail, tonnes of melodramatic romance that seems to go on for a little too long for the comfort of an unromantic churl such as me. That last bit is in sharp contrast to Adiga's plot where romance is primarily consists of his characters, men and occasionally women too, indulging in the primeval biological urge of man, in wham-bam-goodbye-ma'am (or goodbye man) style. Usha's characters are eternally in foreplay, I would say, at the risk of sounding risque. I had almost begun to think for a while after reading WT that this may well be the essence of man-woman relationship after all. It took me a while to come out of that cynical reverie.
The story in The Chosen goes somewhat like this. Nagaratna (Nagu) and her mother are cast away in Bangalore by the tides of misfortune that wash away Nagu's father into an untimely end. Studious Nagu completes her BCom, takes up a job in Vidyalaya, a school that is different in that it tries to provide a spiritually orientated education to the kids of well heeled parents who, I presume, would like their children to grow up as genteel citizens in spite of their wealth. Nagu's decides to work as an administrator at the school in preference to a more mainstream job in the same garment factory as her sister in law. That is just one of her many early attempts at not wanting to belong to the middle-class life styles and aspirations of the joint family that she grew up in.
Usha portrays skillfully the many nuances of a lower middle income community in the Bangalore of the late nineties / early two thousands although in my opinion she is off by a few years in this view. I suspect that the city and its very middle class sensibilities had been run over by then by the immigrating parvenus of the fashion and technology world, with their swinging, drug and drink laden culture of rave parties and wild sex that they brought to the city with them. I absolutely loved Usha's presentation of the strange irony of an institution that peddles a spiritual upbringing, in which the iron knuckles of Miss Pandit,wrapped inside the velvet gloves of exhortation of self improvement and self development,typified in letters sacking the various teachers,put down petty egos and politics with ferrous firmness.
The school is a project of a spiritual institution on the west coast of Karnataka. As an employee who works closely with Miss Pandit, Nagu gets entwined in the other world that would appear like a natural extension - the ashram. But somewhere in Usha's delivery that fusion does not come through smoothly enough. Again, I enjoyed Usha's description of life at the ashram, complete with intrigues and mysteries. Now, those may be what I saw them as. It is possible Usha did not intend them to be so. One gets a sense of how the peace in the spiritual peace in that ashram can be quite brittle, even vulnerable. How the overall atmosphere of serenity could well be the happy coincidence of a number of individuals aspiring and struggling to come to terms with the numerous personal battles that they are fighting within themselves. And of how all of that spirituality, like American healthcare, is only for those who can afford it in the form of a sizeable financial deposit. But for those who can afford, the ashram is very egalitarian in its dispensation of its spiritual
largesse, seemingly admitting people without any pesky KYC style questions about where and how they made their pelf - as in the case of the hardnosed sweatshop owner Vasant.
And then, while working in the school, Nagu experiences incipient romance, which to my mind happened rather too abruptly. But it drags on like it often does in Indian movies or in the Mills and Boon novels that my sister used to borrow when I was in college and I used to devour surreptitiously for fear of embarrassment.
Caught inside this vortex of a romance she does not know what to make of, the highly aseptic world of pine windows with taselladed curtains exclusive silks, and arty dance programmes by men and women in tumescent clothes at the ashram that seemed to be willing to beckon her and the power that she enjoyed at the school that came with the proxmity that she seemed to enjoy with Miss Pandit, Nagu seems to be well and truly detached from her lower middle income roots and its realities that she would have loved to but had not managed to break off completely.
And then one day this bubble, this chimerical world of glass that she had allowed to envelop her suddenly crashes. She is let down by the man she thought was madly in love with. Miss Pandit, the high achiever dumped her as she scrambled out of the school without so much as taking leave of Nagu, to save her own claim to the higher stakes of the leadership of the ashram. And Nagu is left to the not so tender mercies of a new management of the school that in a sardonic twist types out the same letter, sacking Nagu from the school, that she had earlier typed out to six others.
That leaves Nagu. all of twentyone, with little worldly experience, not belonging to either of the world that she wanted to belong to or to break away from. Meanwhile her friend had been happily married to one of the men whose romantic interest in her she had disapproved of and spurned, while the other man who seemed to be willing to wait for her in spite of her numerous rebuffs had moved along slowly in life to be able to eventually buy a car, albeit used.
Usha's mastery of the art lies in her skills as a raconteur. She demonstrates great virtuosity in presenting detail that reads like a pen portraits, something that Namita Gokhale points out in her review, although in places it appears that she may have brought in some of those details just because she felt it had to be there even if she may not have been sure it was needed. Her imagery is flawless, something that I find missing in many contemproary Indian writers. I only wish the style was a little easier on less literate folks like me.
Her story has many more characters than Adiga has. But every most of them add to the plot, barring a few "extras" like Dhana, Sylivie or Vijay who do not even titillate me, let alone enthral.
At a broader level though one wonders if all the story about Nagu's past in Gubbigudi could have been narrated in just three pages. I am sure Usha intended to carefully develop her Nagu out of her beginnings in Gubbigudi. If she did, I seem to have missed that evolution. As an indolent reader who loves parismony with the written word I would have liked to miss those few extra pages and been perfectly happy with a 280 page novel instead of the 320 in the edition that I read. And that I guess is what makes me see some sort of a Freudian association with the Bollywood classics of the nineties.
Since I started comparing with The Chosen with WT, it may be in order for me to close with this final point of comparison. Adiga's Ashok Sharma aka Munna and the many sleazeballs of Darkness that populate the story make you sit up fuming at the depravity that they spread across the country, including in my beloved Bangalore. The characters and settings of Usha's novel leave you with a nice languorous feeling, quite like the nice fuzzy drowsiness that overpowers one after a hearty meal of good bisibelahulianna and basundi. One feels lullabied into a hope that the ashrams in the real world will offer some real solace to the embattled soul in a world torn by greed and conflict, like the greenery that the residents of Muttu had helped grow in the red and rocky barrenness of Kavalkot.
Usha: If you ever read this review, I would like you to know that after reading The Chosen you have turned from a friend I like to a friend I admire too. I shall waste no time reading your other novels. I say that not in the tongue in cheek manner that Benjamin Disraeli is supposed to have responded to his writer friend. So please keep writing more of them. So that there is hope for souls like me who turn despondent about the future of Indian writing after working through pulp like Seven Point Nothing, or whatever is the title of that book was that was made into a campus based movie.
Nanni. Namaskaaram.
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