One Day, with Vakil

Vakil has now produced his second novel, One Day, that has its funny spots but is slower and more deep than sharp. One Day is a Mrs Dalloway-ish 24-hour journey into the lives of Ben Tennyson, his wife Priya Patnaik and their son Whacka. In the course of a day, Whacka’s third birthday, unfolds the crisis that has threatened their marriage. It’s a long, packed day that ends in a fight.

One Day has been hailed as a comedy of North London manners and an ironic masterpiece, but Vakil seems a bit uncomfortable with the description. ‘‘It has its ironic moments,” he admits, relaxing in Delhi before the book’s India launch. “But it’s also about how people behave. This is the way it is. It’s more like a camera. It’s like I open the window and say, look what’s there.’’

Why 24 hours instead of a more sprawling canvas? ‘‘I eventually chose that structure because it worked. I wanted to concentrate on a small area to dig deep.’’ Description of food runs through the novel, as it did it in his first book. ‘‘Food like sex is an integral about life. And if you are doing a realistic book, I find it difficult to keep these away,’’ says Vakil who’s interested in writings on food.

Whether it’s an interest in food or tennis — he’s played the game since he was a young boy — autobiographical fragments festoon One Day. ‘‘One draws a lot from past experiences and from one’s readings,” he notes. “But the novel comes first. The character comes first, then the experiences.’’

So like Vakil, Ben Tennyson is a teacher. ‘‘Ben is not me but some of his experiences are mine.’’ Vakil, who lives in London with his counsellor-wife and their two daughters, teaches English at the Hornsey School for Girls. His decision to become a teacher came early. While at Doon School he fell under the spell of his English teacher Krishna Kumar. ‘‘He made it so special. I was desperate to be taught by him.’’ It was then that he decided that this kind of learning could be a good experience to give other people.

After studying at Cambridge, Vakil did a teachers’ training course before joining a school in Southall. But Southall with its concentration of Indians didn’t have many endearing moments. The London of One Day is not this mini-India. It’s a racially mixed London where the English Ben cooks better biryani than his Indian-born wife Priya and where at any given party there are as many nationalities as there are people. It’s in this London that Ben zips about in his orange car and Priya travels across in the crowded yet silent tubes where everybody concentrates hard on nothing. In Vakil’s novel, the city becomes a character with a personality of its own.

‘‘London has a such a mix of people, of space. The weather is grey but the truth is that whatever the weather or a person is, if you live with it, you begin to love it.’’ So, when London got a rare dry spell for six weeks recently, Vakil felt decidedly strange. The makings of another novel?