Madras Melancholia

For a book that is called Virgin Gingelly, the aroma of the oil that is characteristic of a Tambrahm household is sorely missing from its pages. Instead, there is self-conscious narration, and indulgent wordplay that shrouds every sketch. When the protagonist, a struggling writer and husband, calls himself an “apprentice of silence” — “I have a need to be exact. I chisel language… Each word has to count, each barb to sting” — one wonders if he is speaking for V Sanjay Kumar, who appears to swing wildly between short bursts of brilliance and ponderous clichés. Indeed, there is no room for averages in this novel, set in the fictional middle-class settlement of Rainbow Colony in Chennai. Like the writer’s prose, the people of this colourful landscape, gilded liberally with un-italicised phrases in Tamil and Hindi, are too fastidious, too facile, and, often, too overbearing. They weave in and out of each other’s stories of identity, culture, love, religion and aesthetic, but speak in one disdainful voice.

A housewife beats against the cage of domesticity, a disillusioned young man weeps after planting a bomb, a Kumar in Chennai hurls obscenities in Hindi at condescending Tamils, a childless couple grasp at a lapsed relationship, the elderly walk barefoot over a lifetime of regrets. Endure this lugubrious saga if only for the pithy phrases and poetry that emerge from it.

At some point, a character holds forth on why he buys “exotic” books. “The first page should have metaphor, unusual language and one thing bold,” he says. Kumar’s novel has all those. Much like its unhappily married protagonists, what it doesn’t have is an “overarching theme”.