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Manhattan masala
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Abha Dawesar's The Three Of Us has descriptions of sex every few paragraphs and has none of the lyrical eroticism of Lolita. But the novel, the New York-based author insists, holds a mirror to the post-modern world where science has stripped us of all mystery and dignity.
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Abha: the gay white press in the U.S. loved her sex saga — Photo: K. Bhagya Prakash
AFTER THE reading at Sankar's, Abha Dawesar didn't have too many questions to answer. Someone asked if her novel had a moral, and she said it didn't. What her narrative offered, she said, was an observation on the Manhattan life. And she wound up soon. For a book with descriptions of sex every few paragraphs, this was a tame Q&A session.
Many have asked Abha why The Three of Us can't be called a pornographic book. And things on the home front haven't been as easy as at the bookstore. Her doctor-mother, who lives in Delhi, thought she could have told the story without getting into all those details. Her cousins, some of whom had come to visit their relatives in N.R. Colony, were curious how she could have written "all that".
That is a curiosity that Abha has now learnt to live with. "In the U.S., the South Asian community is more interested in me than in the book," she says. When the 28-year-old New Yorker came to Bangalore for a weeklong visit, she was interviewed by several newspapers, and by E-TV, for which she attempted to speak in her "rusty" Kannada. Her mother hails from these parts, but Abha spent all her schooling years in Delhi.
She later went to Harvard, where she studied political philosophy, particularly Nietzsche. Then she wanted to live in New York, and scanned the newspapers to see if she could get a job. A firm headquartered in London was setting up shop in New York, and offered her one. "I learnt on the job," she says. She worked for seven years, first in a financial services firm and later in an investment bank. In the last few months, she has been a fulltime writer, and hopes to make a living that way.
Some of what she observed at the investment bank job has come into her debut novel. The Three of Us, called Miniplanner in the U.S., is the story of Andre, an investment banker, who is seduced by Nathan, his boss's boss. As the book opens, we see Nathan taking Andre to a strip club in New York, and sex happens between them and a "regular girl". "It is a common practice among investment bankers to take their out-of-town clients to strip clubs," explains Abha.
Soon Andre is in bed with Nathan's elegant wife Sybil. He is sleeping with husband and wife every alternate day and has landed in the "inconvenient" situation of having to juggle them around. After an office party, Andre gets involved with Martha, who works as a secretary, and ends up impregnating her. And then there is Madhu, his ex-girlfriend caught in a bad marriage, who comes by and finds consolation in his bed. When he has a spare day in his miniplanner, he contacts the Gay and Lesbian Center, hoping to find a lover. His typical week is choc-a-bloc with day and night appointments with his lovers.
In all her works published so far (the novel and two short stories on her website), Abha writes in a male voice. "I am writing my second novel from a woman's perspective," she says. But many have asked her the question how, given her Indian origins, she could write from a white male perspective. "It was interesting when the gay white press loved the book and didn't seem to notice or care that I was an Indian or a woman," she says. Abha is described as a South Asian writer — a label the Americans give writers from India to avoid confusing them with their native Indians.
Nathan comes across as a just man, less given to jealousy and unreasonableness than Andre's other lovers, which could explain the favourable reaction of the gay press. But Abha is aware the book could also be read as an adolescent fantasy. "In some ways, Andre has suddenly entered this stage in life where he finds himself in a sexual utopia," she says. "In some ways it is his adolescence. Andre is not the most mature of people... adolescence comes at different ages to different people."
Abha's essay on Nietzsche (1844-1900), posted on her website (www.abhadawesar.com) , says both the Left and the Right have misappropriated him. "The politicisation of university education, 20th Century pogroms for cleansing humanity, the displacement of philosophy by the behavioural sciences, and pseudo-Gothic industrial music all have one thing in common — Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche," she writes.
Where does Andre fit in this spectrum? "Nietzsche was a very good diagnostician of what's wrong with the modern world," she says. "In very broad philosophical terms, he tells us where we have failed, what our modern problems are, where democracy has failed..." She says she places Andre in the "modern or post-modern world where modern science has stripped us of our mystery, stripped us of the dignity of what was and not given us a new dignity".
Andre, for Abha, is a post-Nietzschean character who chooses "hedonism over something else, and a lot of it comes from a lack of understanding of where he fits in". His problems, she says, stem essentially from the denigration of the status of the human being "from being a soul to being a psyche". Nietzsche, she points out, saw democracy as a "bulldozer of greatness".
The sexual permutations and combinations in The Three of Us push it in the direction of situational comedy, or what Abha calls "sexual farce". Abha's characters make Woody Allen, that well-known Manhattan chronicler, look old-fashioned and conservative. Abha hasn't read him, but has watched his films. "In the past 10 or 15 years things have changed. Gay couples don't even get a second glance. New York is one of the most open cities in the world if you consider the amount of diversity, the amount of variations it allows. People walk on the streets with blue hair and nobody even notices them. This is definitely set in that New York."
Abha has read Nabokov's Lolita, but his erotic lyricism, she says confidently, is not her style. The narrative in The Three of Us is snappy in a journalistic sort of way. "That really is a matter of taste," she says. "The style is enhanced in this direction because of the pace of the city, and the pace of its life."
Alan Bloom is Abha's favourite writer. His book, The Closing of the American Mind, is close to her heart. "He was a professor of political philosophy who lived in Chicago and died some years ago. I never met him, but when I read him, I feel that he is my guru." Abha is floored by many of his ideas, including the suggestion that the beat of rock is the beat of sex, and represents the desire for continual climax.
S.R. RAMAKRISHNA
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