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Literary Review
Yadav ki baraat
WHEN an English heiress turned tour-guide marries a Jat farmer turned taxi-driver, she might think she has a tale to tell, and Jill Lowe did. Nothing in her training — Wimbledon tea parties and riding — could have prepared her to be shown to a field when she asked if she could use the bathroom please.
Jill Lowe came to India to repair her wounded self at 52 after a broken marriage and bankruptcy. Anything else may have seemed a picnic by comparison, and when, on a Rajasthan tour, her taxi-driver turned out to be both caring and handsome, they were soon exchanging "sweet kisses", her lover charmingly declaring, "I want to get marry with you."
The book is a cross between a difficult love-story and a travelogue, succeeding as neither. Life with Jill and Yadav (curiously, she never calls him by his first name) is an exhausting car-ride from sight to sight with brief stationary interludes at Yadav's village in the company of many relatives, some named "Corrupt Brother" and "Brahmin Aunt". Monuments prompt stale description ("Gwalior's... Chit Mandir was the most beautiful and interesting place I had yet seen."). Wearying stretches are made up of pidgin English lover's talk. Naipaulesque attempts at depicting vulgar Delhi Punjabis remain attempts. Love conquers all because it is blind; but Lowe doesn't because readers aren't.
Yadav: A Roadside Love Story, Penguin, Rs. 250.
ANURADHA ROY
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