Where’s the Magic? Or the Realism?

We meet Anuradha Patwardhan as she’s leaving Udaipur for Bombay robed in a cobalt-blue sari with a gold leaf border to marry a man she has not met in the 21 years of her existence. And her mother, in a true Bollywood-like gesture, clutches Anuradha’s lovely hand and whispers: “In this life, my darling, there is no mercy.”

Anuradha will discover the small mercies of life — a saving grace — but first the story. Anuradha who has a gift of Song, and loves to read from the pages of Sarat Chandra (Devdas), falls in love with doctor Vardhmaan Gandharva who has a gift of storytelling. And together they set about having a beautiful, albeit stylized, life in a beautiful home — waltzing to Schumann — but for a scary window and a scarier mother-in-law who doesn’t have eyelashes but has a maniacal parrot spouting her ugly thoughts.

The Vardhmaans soon give birth to a “ridiculously lovely” son, Mohan, who also has a gift for Song and a love for the violin but who is lost in one tragic sweep. Much like our movies, happy moments are set up only to be upstaged by unendurable sad ones.

They will have another son, the silent one, Shloka, whom they will have to give up so that he may live. By then they would have moved to the house by the sea which a melodramatic flashback tells us is where an Englishman died waiting for his Indian Maharaja. Like ma-in-law Divi-bai, Dariya Mahal is malign, casting an ugly eye on the Vardhmaans, tripping up anyone who dares to scent happiness.

Poor Anuradha. “Seductress to the Gods” whose hair is “a poem in itself”, whose presence is like a “hymn wrapped in a sari”, she struggles through the novel to live up to such lavish metaphorical praise.

Though the novel is set in Bombay in colonial times, the city seems to live in the times of Bollywood. With artists and film stars, models and celebrities — the well-heeled vodkarati, as the writer tells us — the Page 3 people as we know them. There’s no colonial fervour despite the fact that “bald and beautiful” Gandhi does put in an appearance. The Englishmen too seem more taken up with India’s exotica. Two fall in love with painter, Muse and body beautiful Nandini, who deserts both on her way to Paris.

Shanghvi’s prose is enchanting in parts — “He [the baby] came on the wings of a song”. And extravagant — “the street slang of life was one word alone: irony”. And erotic, laden as it is with descriptions of love-making. But it’s not enough. So, though Anuradha will be overwhelmed by the small mercies of life, her songs, for example, you won’t be too sad to find Shloka, with a genius for melancholy, driving away into the “kind, kind mist”.