|
Literary Review
The day lasts a lifetime
IT begins provocatively enough with a scene of masturbation. For greater curiosity value, the masturbation is encoded within the parameters of a marriage which seems to have turned rancid and the act of sexual pleasure works to underscore the distance between the husband and wife as they both lie on the same bed. In another twist, the act focuses on the overwhelming sexuality of the Indian wife, Priya, as her English husband, Ben, lies besides her worrying about a lost game of tennis, searching for answers in a manual on the game. Many issues merge here: impotence (of all kinds), sex and power play, the seamier underbelly of an inter-racial marriage, the undercutting of gender stereotyping, and not the least, the memory of a lost loving union.
The larger questions, however, are all linked to one day in the lives of this thirty-something couple, parents of a small bundle of energy nick-named Whacka, who live in a seedy basement flat in London. The day begins — quarter past midnight, March 15, 1999 — a date that marks the third birthday of their little son. The narrative segues from this into several different strands which nevertheless coalesce into the momentousness of the underlying significance of Whacka's birthday for the strained couple. Not surprisingly, given the core of innumerable novels that straddle the East-West divide, a great part of the stress and strain on the marriage comes from the complex negotiations of an inter-racial union. Furthermore, and once again, true to this genre, the complexity and confusions are mounted on the canvas of sexual desire: denial or fulfilment. And then, of course, there is "the secret" which seems to be tearing this fragile yet strangely tensile relationship.
But the strengths of the novel do not quite lie here as Vakil sometimes ably and sometimes clumsily works out this familiar plot with its even more familiar concerns. The moments of grace and beauty, of clear crisp prose and keen incisive social commentary lie outside the obsessive, self-reflexive mediations of Ben and Priya on the nature of their flawed union. For me, what was new and exciting to read was Vakil's departures from the clichés of the plotline he crafts. Thus, for instance, the long sections that are devoted to food and the exposition of Ben's failed efforts to be author of the definitive fusion food book are the true core of the novel. Then there are some masterly sequences of food and the unconscious world of dreams that are rendered with an exactitude and complexity that are not quite often there when dealing with the heterosexual relationship. It is almost as if Vakil finds his own true authorial voice when he maps out the territory of food and all its attendant rituals in their social, sexual, and psychological contexts.
Food thus becomes the charged descriptor of all that works or otherwise not only in Ben and Priya's marriage but also in the professional life of Ben. For, much as the novel is concerned with delineating the slow fragmentation and simultaneous cementing of a marriage, it is equally concerned like a good old fashioned bildungsroman on the choice of a vocation or a profession. Hence, the hero's search to define himself professionally — he is an English teacher of an inner city London school — becomes the search of an urban intellectual to reflect upon the nature of his professional choice and it's social ramifications. That Vakil is himself an English teacher is possibly the reason why the school sections are dealt with in an almost schoolmasterish detail. Some judicious editorial pruning would have made the novel less uneven and the text more taut.
Yet, for all these caveats One Day does work as a readable novel because it is a honest albeit at times laboured effort on the part of Ardashir Vakil to write about people he knows best: the not-so-young heterosexual couples, cosmopolitan, intellectually sophisticated, emotionally convoluted, as they struggle to keep pace with a world where the center —
Yeats-like — very often does not hold.
One Day, Ardashir Vakil, Penguin/Viking, p.293, Rs. 395.
ANJANA SHARMA
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Literary Review
|
