The Metaphor Seeker

And the hardest thing about this book is that this couple’s love for each other,so central,is too tough to get viscerally. We understand what it makes them do,we can see when it falters and when it recovers,but never quite what draws them to each other so powerfully. Perhaps Doshi doesn’t know. Who does,about one’s parents?

And yet,this book is carried by characters. The supporting cast is wonderful: Babo’s father Prem Kumar Patel,son of Shantilal Kumar Patel,grandson of Kunthinath Paras Kumar Patel,a proud paintmaker who yearns to say historic things at life-altering moments,who listens to religious music on his Walkman all night after his wife dies,because he can’t sleep. Or Cyrus Mazda,who lives next door,and stuffs his hands in the pockets of his jeans at parties,who worries about his Parsi nose,and only drives expensive cars when nobody is around to see,and even then tries not to enjoy them.

Doshi is at her best when her attention stops at one of these characters,and,over a few pages,she conveys years of growing and maturing and declining,sometimes through a single incident,and almost always effortlessly amusingly. As in when Babo’s younger brother decides,in order to dispel the gloom of a depressed convalescence,that two weeks of beard made him look “older,distinguished,capable of greatness”,and that decision causes him to further decide to rebel against his father by not changing into a paint-splattered uniform at their office. “From today we stand our ground,” he mutters,“from today,things are going to be different”,demonstrating that Prem Kumar Patel’s much-longed-for talent for the well-timed,rollingly emphatic phrase has,sadly for him,skipped a generation. Babo’s younger brother,who in the infernally confining manner of families,is called Chotu till the day he dies,has his life quietly blighted by Babo and Sian’s marriage; after sending one son off to London,and being paid with a broken engagement,grumpiness in Madras’s Gujarati samaj and much hilariously dramatic hand-wringing,Chotu’s parents can’t risk sending him off too.

Sian’s parents,meanwhile,have to dourly accept that their daughter has not only left their village for London,but London for India. The Welsh bits of the book seem very Welsh indeed: a house in Tan-y-Rhos in Nercwys,with people named Nerys and Bryn and Huw and Owen and Rhys and Blodwyn and Carys and Eleri,and stern Calvinism and quarry-workers and Dylan Thomas and egg sandwiches and upright pianos in little rooms with eye-wrenching mustard wallpaper. A world that so prizes self-containment that Sian’s father can describe Geoffrey Boycott as “looking lethal”. At one point Sian asks her brother questions about people in the village “to which Owen replied monosyllabically — married,dead,moved,sold,miner,alcoholic.”

Equally vivid,if in brighter colours,is Nercwys’ Indian twin,Babo’s grandmother’s village in Bhuj. Peacocks,the prettiest of pests,keep you awake at night; frangipani,tulsi,turmeric and bakul flowers overlay deeper scents of rain,brass and blood. And what Doshi calls red gharoli lizards,which are apparently integral to cultural life in Bhuj; they flick in and out,until they occupy enough slightly icky mental space that they deserve pride of place on the book’s rather elegant cover,and play a crucial part in the narrative’s 2001 climax.

This sense of place,shaky about 1960s London,dreamlike about the twin villages,is most intriguing about Madras,a place I have never been,but which Doshi,like so many from there,speaks of as if intoxicated with its smells and sounds.

This is one of those books that revels in little urban geographies,describing where and what things are,that here was a tree and there an ice-cream vendor,as if fixing the memory is as important for the author as is calling them up in those who shared that world. Books set in India seem to do that a lot,and about brand-names,too. Or,is it that,as people who remember a world with brands-from-here and brands-from-abroad,we respond to them more? After all,the smell of “Gold Flakes and mimosas” does,indeed,hang heavy in our gymkhana clubs,and nowhere else.

There is much that puzzles and pleases about how Doshi has written this novel. Why are lives punctuated with distant,unimpactful history — royal weddings,assassinations? Why are the best-constructed phrases in this book the chapter headings? Why are the metaphors so hit-and-miss,a bit sideways,exactly when the emotional hit is supposed to be maximum,as if Doshi is terrified enough of screwing the moment up that she has to step back and be just a little wry?

Perhaps that is the saddest part of this book. Just below the cutesieness and stretched metaphors that plague some passages,bubbles a barely sensed,wicked humour. But Doshi doesn’t let it out often enough.

Perhaps because it’s about her parents.