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Literary Review
Just another regular guy
I SHOULD be hearing the throb of a full-blooded Harley Davidson, filling my senses with nostalgia for a youth gone past. There should have been a riot of colours, of emotions. After all that's what teenaged years are all about. Part carefree, part heavy with promises to the self, to others and most of all to the world.
But sadly, cocooned in these pages is the insipid story of a young boy, hoping to become a doctor and whose life is made up of the usual college pranks. Whose thoughts are that his parents are nags, that their marriage is almost falling apart and then, to top it all, that they've ordained him to survive in this world with a name like Bharat.
Sadly, because even as Bharat struggles to rise above the levels of mediocrity that his birth and the author have deemed upon him, he fails as miserably as a nervous young man on his first night out. What we have here is a young man besotted with his name, "everybody expects me to be great"; cynical about the survival of his parents' marriage, questioning about society's role and generally fed up. Action takes place on campus in the form of an innocuous hostel mess issue. Bharat, a.k.a. Tarzan to his friends but hoping to soon be addressed as Dr. Vishwanath by all and sundry, at some point after graduation suddenly finds himself fleeing, on his Blue Bird motorcycle, gently phut-phutting away into the hinterlands of Madhya Pradesh and Kerala.
His encounters are numerous and each one with a character more colourful and intriguing than the previous. There is Bhojvi Singh, the dreaded dacoit of Chambal who takes a liking to this confused young man looking for answers. He whisks him off to his camp where he orders him to begin treating all the patients. Bharat agrees more out of curiosity than anything else. But his final test arrives when the dacoit asks him to find a cure for his mother. Bharat takes one look at the delirious old woman, and asks for a bottle of lice killer. His assistant is stunned but agrees. Next day the young medic gets down to work and scrubs the old woman down with the lice remover. Lo and behold, she is well and her delirium a thing of the past.
As our hero continues his journey into the country, he philosophises about his life — the trio of friends, his family, their families, girls and other fetishes. Somewhere beneath all this Bharat is a regular guy, the type you'd come across at the next college campus. There are a few comic situations to relieve the tedium of this young man on his bike but even these remain inept. Like his meeting with Dr. Franklin Raghunath Rao, who Bharat stumbles upon in the throes of a vicious attack of malaria. Dr. Rao could have been the right caricature to plump up the storyline but unfortunately Bharat's superficial reactions kill even that. And even as he finally makes his way out of this mess, he bumps into his friend, mentor and guide, Shanks, who offers to take him back home.
The Truth Almost about Bharat fails to touch any raw nerve. It neither excites the senses, nor does it manage to convey a hilariously deadpan situation that every growing person is bound to find himself or herself in. Bharat's character remains that of a confused young man, whose mental meanderings border on the morose. And though the entire book revolves around him, one looks, almost frantically, for a point where others will take over and may be, provide the much-needed reprieve.
The Truth Almost About Bharat, Kavery Nambisan, Penguin, Rs. 150.
SUCHITRA BEHAL
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