A 17-year-old boy from a village on the Konkan coast arrives in Bombay in 1899, learns a thing or two about life and, over the years, through pluck and intelligence, builds the foundation of a happy, prosperous future for his family and himself. There are reverses and betrayals, of course. Things, in business and in love, don’t always go according to plan. It might seem at the outset that in writing The Secret of More, Tejaswini Apte-Rahm has set herself the task of telling a story in the style of the great novelists of the 19th century, notably Charles Dickens. As it traces the story of Govind Abhyankar, aka Tatya, from where, along with his dada (older brother), he carries a letter of recommendation to a Bombay cloth merchant so that he may get started on a career, to the end where, surrounded by his large family — children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews — in a sprawling bungalow by the sea, he looks back on the long road behind him, The Secret of More is very much an old-fashioned bildungsroman in structure. But there is a lot more to commend this novel than the obvious literary homage. In the hands of a writer with less control over her material, the vast canvas against which the action plays out could quite easily have made for a bloated mess. Consider everything that Apte-Rahm sets out to portray in this novel: Not only the story of one man, from early youth to old age, but also the birth of the film industry and the political and social changes rocking India in the 1920s and ’30s, including the growing empowerment of women. Given the scope — and its heft, at nearly 450 pages — The Secret of More is a surprisingly pacy read. Apte-Rahm doesn’t stint the reader as she sets the scene — whether it's the Mulji Jetha Market in Kalbadevi where Tatya makes his bones as a businessman, the crowded chawl which is his first home in the city and where his children are born, or the green, lush land in Borivali where he sets up a film studio. One might complain, perhaps, that Apte-Rahm could have done more with the period and the setting of her story. Was there a more fascinating place on earth than Bombay in the early 20th century? But the intimate connection that she helps the reader maintain with the characters, letting them drive the story, makes up for it. Even as the focus of the story remains Tatya, this isn’t just his story, with the women in his life emerging as compelling characters: Radha (nee Yamuna), married off to Tatya as a young girl, becomes the emotional anchor of a growing household; Durga, their daughter, who defies the expectations of society and her family to overcome great odds and make a life for herself; Kamal Bai, the bewitching star of the silent films produced by Tatya’s studio, who becomes the unacknowledged, unnameable third in his marriage. The Secret of More won the Tata Literature Live! Book of the Year Award for Fiction this year and it is also on the shortlist of JCB Prize for Literature. It is easy to see why. It creates a world that is hard to resist, populated with characters whose insecurities and flaws, joys and triumphs, the reader can easily identify with. Apte-Rahm’s prose, particularly when it deals with long descriptive passages, is at once evocative and controlled. Yet, the one thing that could be considered as letting down this novel about the ambition of one man and where that leads him is perhaps that it is not ambitious enough. That it allows its story and characters to only go so far. At the end of the novel, one wonders how much Tatya really staked and how much he lost. The answer, unfortunately, is, not very much. It reduces a little from the dramatic potential of the story. To be sure, Apte-Rahm must be commended for not allowing predictable melodrama to bog down the story, particularly in a scene in the final third of the book, where Kamal Bai confronts Tatya. It is a turning point in the novel, offering options that a lesser writer might be tempted to take up, but Apte-Rahm performs a feat of literary legerdemain that lifts the central love triangle entirely out of the realms of cliche — a delightful surprise in a novel that tries hard — succeeding to a large extent to tell us a story that is at once fresh and familiar.
