Bombay Fizz

SITTING in her home in British Columbia, Canada, Hiro Boga has leaned across the continents, splayed her fingers in the sands of Juhu beach ...

SITTING in her home in British Columbia, Canada, Hiro Boga has leaned across the continents, splayed her fingers in the sands of Juhu beach in Bombay and built a castle of memories. Parsi girl grows up, goes to study psychology in the US and decides to live her life in the West. Her protagonist Shahnaz8217;s life is her own.

Shahnaz brings alive a way of life in one of the richest Parsi houses in the 8217;50s and 8217;60s. The mansion by the beach has uncountable rooms with high ceilings and leather armchairs. Run by a battery of servants, the meal-time air sings with the aroma of goat-pulao-with-saffron-and-spices and thousand-almond-chicken-cooked-in-double-cream. Children get birthday headbaths with milk and rose petals. Every day, they are chauffeur-driven to private British schools in Bentleys and relatives live at Peddar Road and Malabar Hill. A world of the Gymkhana, weddings at the Mahalaxmi Race Course and parties at the Taj.

In wafts the stink of the Bombay Ducks drying on Juhu beach; the sight of the municipal tap in the nearby hutments or the pus-filled stumps of maid Sunder8217;s daughter hands chopped by her in-laws in nearby Poona. The author has managed to throw open an even spread of the sights and smells of the most alive city in the country.

The novel8217;s characters are not just Shahnaz, her manic-depressive mother and her slothful husband Shahrukh; under Boga8217;s evocative spell, cities 8212; Bombay and Eugene 8212; too stir and take on a life of their own. Sometimes, the two meet. 8220;The somber mass of evergreens that stand erect as gurkhas at the end of our street.8221;

Shahnaz
By Hiro Boga
Penguin India
Price: Rs 295

Shahnaz of two ages grows simultaneously in the chapters of Boga8217;s novel: 21 and about to leave for college to the US with her husband, and 12, at the brink of a summer vacation in a beach bungalow. She is hardly the spoilt little rich girl. On her last day in Bombay before she leaves for the US, she climbs up a ladder in her father8217;s library to talk to her mad mother. She sails through the air and lands on her back as her mother pushes her away with her legs.

The Enid Blyton sort of exploratory childhood becomes a downward spiral of misery from the moment she turns away dejected from her mother8217;s bedroom on a birthday and lands a crystal ashtray between her shoulder bones. Dilnaz was a genius mathematician who never wanted children and returned from her two years in Washington, DC to her doting husband and two daughters in Bombay with great bitterness.

As the manic depression sets in, everybody recedes from Shahnaz8217;s life 8212; her beloved doctor-aunt Perin, other relatives, friends and even her father who escapes into work, the servants and her younger sister to boarding school. She bears the brunt of her mother8217;s madness.

In Eugene, the small university town in Oregon where she escapes to from her mother, the serenity of her world is shattered by the jarring sound of her husband8217;s obsession with television. Working her way out of the oppression of her mother8217;s fear and her husband8217;s slothful uncaring, Shahnaz slums it out through student years and finds herself on her feet but alone. She explores 8212; kisses the second man in her life and even smokes marijuana 8216;8216;which fizzes and pops like mustard seeds in Sunder ayah8217;s frying pan8217;8217; 8212; and grows.

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Shorn of 8216;8216;layers of other people8217;s thoughts and desires8217;8217;, she finds in herself the genius of her mother Dinaz and the survival instinct of her surrogate mother Perin.

The power of Boga8217;s first book lies in revealing her unjaded memories of Bombay but also the cathartic story she has to tell.