A Bundle of Memories - Namita Gokhale

Navtej Sarna’s debut novel unerringly graphs the cruel contours of familiar marital situations.  Yuppie angst is, to my mind, as valid a sentiment as any other, and Aftab Chandra’s song of sorrow has a sticky saccharine compulsion, a sentimental pull, that keeps one turning the pages to follow the protagonists’ many major and minor misfortunes. There is also a sense of humor, deprecating, gentle, and underplayed, laughing at machismo and mega-buck interpretations of success.

The novel is nicely structured. The train stations on the way to Dehradun, Roorkee, Saharanpur, Haridwar, become familiar jogs to memory. The author does sometimes tend to ramble, but never to digress, as the evocation of things past, of a kinder gentler India now residing only in memory, draws him away from the city of his personal defeat to the remembered sanctuary of his childhood.  The Doon valley is the repository of the protagonist’s memory, of the self that might-have-been.  Aftab is the son of a minor bureaucrat, and grows up in the numbing security of the governmental womb, with kind orderlies and avuncular clerks.  He becomes a business executive and falls in love with Rohini, without ever realizing just how much. The title of the novel  ‘We weren’t Lovers like that’ comes from this bundle of memories.

But papa doesn’t approve, and Aftab betrays true love for an arranged marriage to the seductive and self- assured Mina. Mina in turn betrays our hero, and falls in love with the odiously successful Rajiv.  Aftab is gentlemanly and understanding, although he is burning with rage and the pain of rejection.  He bumps into his ex-wife and her lover at parties and even escorts them to picnics with his son Ankur.  In short, he tries to do the decent thing, as he understands it, and fails.

Sarna indulges in some extremely effective social caricature, as when he details a typical Delhi party in all its unpitying nuances. There is a Prufrockian feel to this middle-class elegy to urban failure. Navtej Sarna clearly loves the remembered Delhi of his childhood with a fierce clarity, and evokes it in haunting prose; the yellow-painted government flats, the tented schools, the hierarchies of DI and DII flats, inexplicable to the uninitiated.

Mina, the demure young girl who evolves into the urban ‘new woman’, demanding her share and more, is also cleverly constructed in terms of characterization.  One has met her, as one has encountered the others who inhabit the novel; Aftab’s driven boss Basu, his lonely secretary Joy, his old schoolteacher Mrs. White. There are hints of their stories, of their histories, hiding in the obsessive flow of Aftab’s memories.

The novel is a social form, documenting the changing realities of here and now.  Navtej Sarna’s novel looks at the subtly changing patterns of contemporary sex and unselfconsciously records the contours of a love story that could get lost in the clamour of everyday life. After Aftab unceremoniously dumps his first girl friend Rohini in Bombay, returning to the familial net of an arranged almost-love marriage, he undergoes a gamut of tribulations that define the experience of what some advertisers might call ‘the complete mass”. He does not hate or reject his estranged wife, but accepts her with weary affection, even understanding. He loves his son with an aching protectiveness, and longs to share with him all that he has learnt and observed. Aftab reestablishes contact with his old girl friend, Rohini, and the story moves to reconciliation between the two which will be emblematic of a more mature love.

Although one reviewer has dubbed Aftab as a 'thin-skinned cuckold of negligible self-esteem,’ I dispute such glib surface interpretation. While the phenomenal spurt in women’s writing has led to an explosion of heart-on-sleeve testimonials upon menstruation, marriage and gendered identity, the equally valid realities of male hurt have met only with baffled silence.   According to the ‘slugs and snails and puppy dogs tails’ school of literary categorization, men read and write tales of war and victory, as represented, let us say, by Aniruddha Bahal’s Bunker 13.  But in a world where women too presumably watch Xena the warrior princess, it is refreshing to observe Sarna let his guard down and admit to the androgynous vulnerability of his sex.  We Weren’t Lovers Like That   is a book that grows on you, a book with roots and grasping branches.  One suspects that some of the inspired remembrance comes from the writer being in a foreign land, in the antiseptic climes the author ascribes to Rohini’s email accounts of her home in America.  Sarna’s feel for places extends to his effective evocation to the Doon Valley, of its destroyed tranquility and remembered beauty.  This specificity and sincerity compensate for some of the angularity, clumsiness and sentimentality that periodically drag the prose and narrative down.

Navtej Sarna is of course a career diplomat and at the moment MEA spokesperson in India.   It would not be out of place in the course of this review to speculate on the genesis of literary aspirations and talent amongst the members of the Indian Foreign Service. Is it due to the availability of all that spare stationary, much of it gold- crested? Or is it the spare time that our lonely diplomats have to forbear?  Whatever the impetus, our foreign service has produced many fine and some outstanding writers. Navtej Sarna’s novel adds to this long list of literary talent.