Immensely Sad and Lonely -  Qurratul-Ain Haider

WE WEREN’T LOVERS LIKE THAT hauls its protagonist into a world of loss and deep hurt. A world where the victim, this time, is a man and one who unabashedly wears his heart on his sleeve. ”Victim, not the guilty party, ”forty -plus Aftab Chandra has no qualms admitting he is lost in the emptiness that his wife of fourteen years has left behind when she walks out on him for another, man, taking with her their only child.

Betrayed, Aftab comes across as a man who would have been in control had things stayed rooted in their place, a man who could have had an ego had he not been robbed of the usual trappings of security that the married male identity feeds on. Admits Aftab: ”My vanity was hurt, my great male ego was shattered….”

Like the train journey from Delhi to Dehra Dun, which meanders through the book and carries Aftab’s thoughts back and forth in time, Navtej Sarna’s pen evocatively connects the feelings of a man forced to step sideways to assess his trampled self and patch together a personality.

There is an engaging indulgence throughout the pages of the book: moments of wallowing self-pity, wry humour, mild imagery that has the power to evoke reality such as the early morning Delhi station scene where, “Street trolleys sell tea and biscuits and yellow cake on damp saucers….” Not to mention the numerous character sketches.

Sarna succinctly makes people come alive, making them unforgettable before moving on-somewhat like a lifeguard who breathes life into a languid body through artificial resuscitation to then return to his job of looking at the larger picture.

Thus the reader is introduced to Aftab’s friends,” highly-overpriced” exhibition – savvy artists Jamshed and Brinda, who have been able to strategically expand their wealth and fame and launch the talent of their ‘bucktoothed’ daughter and ‘hamburger and potato-chips-infested son’. Or even to Aftab’s nondescript office liftman Panditjee who has sat on his “little wooden stool in the corner of the lift,” for years on end, taking people up and down, enquiring about their health, the weather and life’s other mundane things and aging all while. He is the same man to whom Aftab just cannot lie as both he and Panditjee "went back a long time.”

One can almost chat with the “once-upon-a-time-sexy-joy,” Aftab’s loyal office secretary, who sports a new hairdo every few weeks and follows a newspaper’s ‘Five Ways To’ column with religious zeal. Even the inanimate smile of Rohini, his one-time girlfriend and the one person Aftab communicates with in his state of dumped despair, has a character of its own. Recalls Aftab, ”This smile is sacred; it is secret. It comes from warm places in my heart, from sunlit corners still not invaded by weariness and bitterness.”

Yet, when it comes to the portrayal of the two women protagonists, Sarna slips into the very weariness that Rohini’s smile is said to lack. Mina, the wife of 14 years, fits into a rather run-of-the-mill mould and there is nothing exceptional about the detailing of her personality. Typically, she has a close lady friend who gangs up against Aftab and typically, yet again; she is portrayed as the unsatisfied woman who uses the age-old weapon of silence to distance herself from her husband. When she does finally leave him for common friend Rajiv, Mina is portrayed as Page Three high society woman devoted to a social cause through her post-Aftab wardrobe of earthy coloured cottons. Even Rohini, who is pictured as a life force, is so predictable. A free and independent spirit, her laughter just had to conceal that "hint of sadness around her eyes” and you know from the rather skippable long emails between the two that ‘Ro’ will soon be back to brighten Aftab’s glum life. In fact, you can bet your life depressing or otherwise on that happy end.

THE NOVEL AT TIMES likens itself to a successful Bollywood block-buster that revolves around a hero, has stereotypical heroines and unrequited love, moves towards a happy end and contains scenes enacted in different locales often without any significance to the novel. So while the protagonist does move through Delhi- Sahranpur- Roorkee-Haridwar and Dehradun (each a name of a chapter), gratis the train journey, the places add very little to the tapestry of the novel. It was as if Sarna needed the railroad to steer the central character’s stream of consciousness towards the denouement. Not that the author needed
to resort to any formula. Navtej Sarna’s exquisite writing and eye for detail would have mesmerized the reader anyway. Take the instance of when the author goes back to Aftab’s past in Mumbai, to a quintessential Irani restaurant. The reader can actually watch the predawn scene from a film: “ Some of the tables still had chairs lying upside down on them…. The owner sat at the counter, half-hidden by the glass jars of orange sweets and shiny chocolates…”

While the latter part of the novel is a bit of a disappointment- the first half is to blame for raising the reader’s expectations-the novel is refreshing in many parts despite the layer of brooding despair that is capable of snuffing out the liveliest of spirits. We Weren’t Lovers Like That is for those who can brave an infliction of gloom or handle melodrama and beautiful prose with a strong anti- depressant.