Unusual pact - Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr

Though trudging on an old romantic formula, the author manages to keep a simple love story with its share of maudlin sentiments on an even keel 

One of the advantages of reviewing Navtej Sarna’s debut novel is that there is no need to handle it with kid-gloves as is generally done with first books of the minority club of Indian writers in English. Unlike others writing in English, he has managed to keep a simple love story, with its share of maudlin sentiments, on an even keel. There are no Indian exotica in this novel.

Though the tone of the narrative is rooted absolutely in Indian sensibility - the story would have sounded equally appropriate in Hindi or Bengali, Marathi or Oriya - there are no Indianisms in the use of the English language to convey the cultural ethnicity of the characters. 

Nor is there an attempt to assume a proper English tone, nor the cultivated informality of the chatty, convent-y English that marks so much of metropolitan India.

The English used in the book is simple and lucid, sincere and supple. It is an achieved linguistic competency, and not the spontaneous expression of a literary genius. That is why, it is such a pleasure to read the story. And there is a certain polish to the prose. One of the key passages tucked away rather nonchalantly in the middle of the narrative shows it: “She didn’t say anything but screwed up her eyes in the peculiar way she had and put the napkin in the book she was carrying and, without laughing, kept the book in her bag. She did not say anything and our deal became clear to me. We were to care and not to show. We had to wrap up our love in banter and funny stories and if we hurt each other, it was not meant to matter. Enough people loved seriously, soberly. We weren’t going to be lovers like that.”

But there are enough problems as well in the novel. Sarna has hit upon, perhaps unconsciously, the old romantic formula of a hero - the unsuccessful man, the failure, the man who is no good at mechanical and professional things, but one who has the right sentiments and all that. He has cleverly pitched his hero, middle-aged Aftab, whose wife Mina walks out on him, and that too with a successful friend of his, Rajiv, as the gloomy, romantic, pensive narrator, who frowns upon the shallow sophisticates, the worldly-wise crooks, and invokes the magical glow of the vanished world of small-town India. It creates a pleasing and false picture, which ignores the bustle and contradictions, the dreams and frustrations of those living in the milling, claustrophobic towns.

In many ways, it is a monochromatic narrative. All that you see is through the un-objective eyes of Aftab, who is not really to be trusted with his impressions or judgments, though he has his heart in the right place. 
There is not much of the complexity and untidiness of the real world in this almost life-like novel. There is something unidimensional about the story.

But how does the book outlive its own imperfections? It does so because there is an overwhelming sincerity of the narrator. We know that he is giving a prejudiced view, but it is compensated for by the fact that he is able to weave a magic of romantic feeling into it. That is what storytelling is all about. Especially when he recreates for himself the life of the woman he first loved and dared not marry. He relives her life in his own mind with a touching intensity, giving it a passionate, and almost a lunatic twist. It is the strength of the underlying current of emotion that sustains the narrative tide as it were.

It is Sarna’s firmly anchored literary sensibility that makes him a long distance runner of a kind. He does not flaunt the fact that his father, Mohinder Singh Sarna, is an accomplished Punjabi short-story writer, which is reflected in the translation of one of them - “Basant, The Madman” - he has done in a recent issue of The Little Magazine, a bi-monthly which publishes essays, fiction, poetry, including translations. And there are also sure signs that he has done his own literary readings in English literature, and he shows the impact of the American writers more than that of the British. There are traces of a Fitzgerald or an Updike narrator in the voice of Aftab - the polished guy with a languid style.

Sarna has written a small novel, no doubt. But he has shown that a lot of discipline has gone into its writing. Though he makes it appear that he has written it as it came, there has been a preparation, an apprenticeship, and it is reflected in the book.