IndiaStar bookreview:

Vikram Chandra's Love and Longing in Bombay

 

IndiaStar: A Literary-Art Magazine Love and Longing in Bombay by Vikram Chandra Boston: Little, Brown 1997 268 pages $22.95   Reviewed by Robbie Clipper Sethi [Editor's intro: Robbie Clipper Sethi, Ph.D., (UC Berkeley,1981) is Associate Professor of English at Rider University, New Jersey. She is the author of The Bride Wore Red. -- C.J. S. Wallia ]     Love and Longing in Bombay is a collection of five luxuriously paced long stories linked by a frame so well developed that as eachstory began I found myself missing the frame, wanting more of the first-person narrator, Ranjit and his story-telling acquaintance, Subramaniam. Since the book is subtitled "stories," linking them hardly seems necessary ton appease the marketing forces that encourage writers to link their collections. But as Hanuman tells Sanjay, the main story teller of Chandra's first book, Red Earth and Pouring Rain (stories so intricately framed as to constitute a novel): ... you need a frame story for its peace, its quiet. You're too involved in the tale, your audience is harried by the world. No, a calm story-teller must tell the story to an audience of educated, discriminating listeners, in a setting of sylvan beauty and silence. Thus the story is perfect in itself, complete and whole. So it has always been, so it must be. The stories in Chandra's second book are perfect in themselves, complete and whole; their frame may be set far from Hanuman's "sylvan beauty and silence" but provides nevertheless as peaceful and quiet a context as can be found in the city. Something beyond the marketplace is working here. Chandra's acknowledgement of John Barth (The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor) may suggest a mutual respect for playfulness in narrative as well as the influence of The 1001 Nights. (Chandra's story-teller labors under a death sentence more final than that of Scheherazade--Subramaniam's age and illness, which in Chandra's last frame Mrs. Sub reveals as "serious.") The frame formally echoes oral storytelling, the word, "Listen" introducing every tale, though theintricacy and literary formality of the narration does not recreate oral speech. The stories are linked in more ways than one. All of them illustrate the themes expressed in the title--love, passion and the city in which all but one of them are set. Their titles link them as well, to Hindu concepts of duty ("Dharma"), about a retired major general's responsibility to his family house in Khar, strength ("Shakhti"), about a social climber's infiltration of Malabar society, love ("Kama"), which explores the limits and mysterious power of sexual passion, economy ("Artha"), about the loss of lovers/friends, and peace ("Shanti"), about the love and peacebrought to a lonely whistle stop by a woman searching for her MIA husband. Chandra's playfulness with narrative form never distances his characters or undermines the believability of his stories. His characters are fully developed and nearly as diverse as the population of their home. There's Major General Jehangir (Jago) Antia, who confronts the phantom pain of his missing leg as well as a real phantom in his nearly deserted family house; Sheila Bijlani and the intricate nouveau-riche society she infiltrates; police inspector, Sartaj Singh, whose personal life is a mess, though not as messy as the murder he investigates; computer programmer, Iqbal Akbar and his "best" "old" friend, Rajesh; Shiv, the brother-in-law of the station master of Laharia, assistant station master, Frankie Furtado, and Shanti, the mysterious woman who travels from Bombay to Laharia in search of her dead husband. The stories' plots are as complex and varied as the characters in them--a ghost story with a twist (that, to be truthful, may not work for every reader), a drawing-room drama with a twist that works better, a murder mystery with a Sikh inspector who can vie with Jane Tennyson for personal complications (and I would love to see Sartaj Singh on BBC), and love stories for both orientations, convincingly told. Chandra's generously narrated frame as well as the richly developed stories themselves draw the reader into the thoroughly convincing world in which these stories are told--Mumbai without either the exoticizing or stereotyping that tend to satisfy the expectations of an audience thousands of miles away. Both frame and stories presentMumbai as the modern Indian city it is--replete with Meeruthis, street lights, mansions and shanty towns, computers, businessmen, artists and crooks. Love and Longing in Bombay, in short, develops complex, convincing characters that stay with a reader long after she has closed the book, narrates involved, absorbing stories not easily forgotten either, and recreates a world that does its setting justice. It does all this in a spirit of artistry both timeless and contemporary at the same time. It is an excellent book.