8^th DAY-Ravindra Kumar

July 13, 2003, If you are past forty, read it.  If you are past forty, don’t read it.  Navtej Sarna’s. We weren’t Lovers Like That is a novel just like that. Very well written, but occasionally depressing, it travels from Delhi to Dehradun with  frequent but well-timed stops.  Along the way, it lets us share the despair of the cuckold and the suppressed joy of the expectant lover.

Its characters are multi-faceted. Thus, while it exposes us to a father’s lament for a son, it allows us, perhaps to underscore the fact that even characters viewed with sympathy are, after all, human, to see the same man wearing the shades of a mid-career executive who “plays out sex” in his mind even as he tries to decide whether his middle-aged secretary is a sultry seductress or a played out woman with wrinkles round the neck.

Lest you run away with  the thought that there is anything remotely lascivious about Sarna’s novel,  let me pause here to tell you there isn’t. This is  a novel about ordinary people and their less than extraordinary frailties.

It is the story of a man who has lost his wife (to a friend), his child (to the marital break-up), his job (to the intrigues of private sector employment) and his hopes (to the onset of the millennium or perhaps to his 40^th birthday?). It is equally the story of a man who, when all seems lost, sets out to reclaim his past.

Those who have lived in Delhi, and studied at Delhi university in the 1970s and 80s will find their memories jogged by Sarna’s vivid descriptions of places.  But Sarna revels not so much in describing places as he does in showing himself as a writer capable of understanding how people  react to the stresses of life, and it is this ability of his that must form the basis of judgment.

One final word.  Readers in Kolkata may experience some difficulty in laying their hands on the book.  Several days after its launch, I could not find it at the shops likely  to stock  it and this leads me to the tart observation that Penguin  weren’t publishers like that. Sarna, though, for a first-time novelist, seems to have got his act together.