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Literary Review
A search for lilies
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French Lover is several notches better than Lajja but it still disappoints because the characters lack imagination and the story is cliché-ridden, says SUDIPTA DATTA.
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PARIS is more than a moveable feast for Nilanjana Mandal who leaves Kolkata after her marriage to a petty restaurant owner, Kishanlal. His "vegetarian" ways awaken the feminist in Nila, who then, typically, undergoes a journey to find herself.
Along the way, she takes in the sights and sounds of Paris, comparing it ceaselessly with drab and dirty Kolkata; lives together with a lesbian writer; falls in and out of love with a French Adonis, the handsome but selfish Benoir Dupont; and realises, a trifle too late for comfort (literally the last page), that sexual gratification is not another word for liberation.
Compared to Lajja (Shame), which earned Taslima Nasrin both fame and fatwa, French Lover is written several notches better, and wonderfully translated by Sreejata Guha. But it's a disappointment in three aspects — the characters lack imagination, they are steeped in gender biases and the story is cliché-ridden. All the men in the book are scoundrels; the women victims of a patriarchal society, so much so that the protagonist Nila is moved to conclude at the end: "Do I have a land of my own? If your own land spells shelter, security, peace and joy, India is not my own land...do women ever have a land of their own or a motherland? I really don't think so."
Nila with all her fine sensibilities and her love for Rabindra sangeet and literature can't confine herself to a life of vacuum-cleaning and cooking. As she tells her suitably stunned husband: "I don't just want to live. I need more...You're talking of bread, but that isn't all. One needs the lily as well."
As Nila flees home to search for the lilies, husband Kishanlal is cast off to the depths of memory. And others take his place. When she encounters two suicides in springtime Paris, Nila can't believe that the two killed themselves because they didn't have lovers. She muses: "Love wasn't the only joy in life. There was so much more: listening to the sound of falling leaves, floating with a transient cloud, reading an entire book of verses in one long evening, so many ways of fulfilling life."
Only, Nila doesn't practice what she thinks. She literally jumps into the arms of the first French lover she meets and holds on to him to keep her Paris-dreaming alive.
When the prodigal daughter returns home to be with her ailing mother, she can't help feeling that Kolkata had "shrunk", in more ways than one. Not only were the homes smaller, so were the hearts. She takes up the cudgels for her suffering mother who has slaved forever in the kitchen and is now on her death bed. Nila confronts her father and brother and is saved only when her mother empowers her by giving her a cheque of Rs. 20 lakhs. With this, she escapes to Paris and to beautiful Benoir.
Nila tires of Benoir, not because she is sexually dissatisfied but because she realises that Benoir is in love with himself. His mouth suddenly smells of dead rats.
If Nasrin is missing home and pining for a place in Kolkata ("which is closest to Bangladesh") as she is telling the world again and again now, she doesn't let it show in her protagonist. Nila hardly misses home, Paris will do very well, thank you. With or without the French lover.
French Lover, Taslima Nasrin, Penguin India, p.292, Rs. 250.
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