Island Magic

She has the remedy. To him, she represents the tantalising possibility of putting him out of his misery through a chance meeting at the World Food Day meet.

A complex relationship between a coloniser and the colonised, the latter weighed down by history, groping for clues in her umbilical chord that would link her to her troubled past, a history of miscegenation — Love’s Perfumes. The title is tantalisingly deceptive.

The attractive black Myrna, an environmentalist, holds the key to the recently divorced high ranking Dutch civil servant Arno’s insomnia. All the ingredients are present for a heady love story, a love story it is not.

At best, the novel is about prejudices, it is peopled with troubled souls coming to terms in a white world. But it stops midway, like the stories of Myrna — roped in by Arno — to find a remedy for his sleeplessness. Does he ever get to fall into a deep stupor? We do not know. We’ll never know.

Myrna’s remedy is her grandmother’s sleep therapy — storytelling as a way of putting one to sleep — temporarily. Myrna’s story, her own, is also her way of getting to deal with not just her past but the history of her people. A white great-great-grandmother who had slept with a black man, banished in one of the many Caribbean islands.

A subjugated lot, bedded by the colonisers, leaving the kids of the union a little confused and abandoned. Myrna’s story rambles — flitting through the troubled history of the Caribbean (encapsulating two centuries in 134 pages) as they heave under subjugation to become free from the shackles of the coloniser in this case the Dutch, gliding through the complexities of the present century, intrigues, coups, relationships, more sex, till it comes to lightly rest with the present.

The umbilical chord has found its anchor. Towards the very end, Myrna finds the link with the senior Dutch minister that had kept her tied to her past and the relationship is over.

The problem with interpolating a lot of bloody history in a slim volume is that it leaves one insatiated. Love’s Perfumes is heady, it crackles like a matchstick, sizzling for a brief moment only to fizzle out too soon.