The jacket cover, as somebody pointed out, is interesting, to say the least. The blurb, even more so— “A feisty novel of ambition and lust”, it says. The author sounds almost fascinating. She is a member of the Madhya Pradesh cadre of IAS and this is her second novel. But what is not quite fascinating is the book itself.

Anmol and Nagina, the main protagonists of the novel, take turns to narrate their tale of avarice, selfishness and greed. Despite the interweaving of several threads— the Mandal commission, sugar mill politics and exploitation of the poor and the rich, what gets maximum attention is the tale of rich and sultry Nagina and hopelessly in lust and ravenous Anmol.

It begins pretty well with a bored out of his wits Anmol in Lajpat Nagar, hoping that a Rs 20-lakh deal will come through and irritated beyond measure with his drab and idealistic wife Vidya who is too busy fighting for women’s rights, making breakfast and running household chores to even think of sex and love.

Then comes the call from the past, as it were, from Nagina. She is the sugar baron’s daughter and she knows very well how charmed Anmol was with her, once upon a time. All she wants now is to win control of the sugar mill and lures Anmol out of his middle-class existence with the promise of lust-filled evenings. Quite like an enslaved puppy, Anmol follows her to Majhauli, in the heartland of Uttar Pradesh, and gets deeper and deeper into the muck of the caste-ridden feudal politics of the sugar mills.

From here, the story begins to falter. The pace slackens every now and then as the scene shifts from rioting students in Delhi to sweaty evenings in Majhauli. The problem, one suspects, lies in the single-dimensional nature of the lead characters.

The reader fails to see anything in Anmol except his intense desire for Nagina. And Nagina is the typical Bollywoodian vamp. Real life’s not so black and white. Sadly enough, even scenes that describe these two’s passionate encounters are passionless!

The author scores though when she gets down to the politics of it all. Here, her accounts, such as that of feudal sugar lords happily exploiting the poor, are incisive and revealing. She should have stuck to that and not tried to weave in the story of “feisty ambition and lust” into it. In fact, a non-fiction account of the sugar mill politics would have served infinitely better.

Book: The Sugar Baron’s daughter
Publishers:  Harper Collins
Author: Loveleen Kacker
Pages: 286
Price: Rs 250