It Isn’t Easy Being Taz
Dawood Ali McCallum
Penguin Original,
2007, pp 311,
Rs 295.
At the outset, this humble reviewer thought that this book would turn out to be a damp squib. On the contrary. It is a page-turner. Well, it has its own limitations, but those things later.
So, we have this story of a self-destructing (alcoholic, what else?) Taz Dhar, a Gujarati second-generation Indian, whose family was driven out from that great country called Uganda to different places (mainly the UK).
Dhar was (is) a TV presenter in Mumbai when, in chase of a silly letter sent by a person called Armitage Shanks (a name synonymous to a bathroom brand-name only janitors in the Commonwealth Nations would identify) she embarks on an arduous journey to where Shanks was apparently executed in a dungy prison somewhere in the Dark Continent.
It could have been a perfect pot-boiler for a Wilbur Smith or even a silly Sidney Sheldon. And if executed well, the above tribe might have minted money from a plot like this. Has McCallum? One does not know about the money part. But as an unassuming writer, McCallum is of their standard. Time will tell.
Now our heroine, Taz, starts off an enquiry in pursuit of getting a scoop of the story of the Shanks case, which her employer was not too keen to pursue, but for reasons unknown, ultimately agrees to. Apparently, Shanks had— again for unknown reasons— sent her a letter just before he was executed, about the circumstances of his death, which is vividly described when the novel preambles. Sounds weird? Not really.
Adventures galore
What follows are her explorations in some four different continents. There are so many incidents a reader has to anticipate— the mutilated death of the cat she loved more than anything else; a mother (what is she doing in this novel?); her ex-husband, with whom Taz still has sex for no rhyme or reason; and her sojourns in Ghana and The Gambia— to name a few.
These things apart— and the mystery part absolutely apart— the novel stands apart. Ahem, the reviewer is baffled: whether to like this guy (who wrote the novel) or the girl (the protagonist in the novel in question). The vivacity, the lucidity of the language and the suspense factor are intact. No doubt. But is there anything new to say? Yes. There is.
It is a post 9/11 novel and comprises sequences of the harsher, myriad rigid terms the world has had to go through. And India gets a fairer deal. The author has first-hand information and details about this subcontinent in terms of the conflict about the whole world that is involved dissolved into this masochism.
McCallum is no novice. He gets his facts right— right from the Gujarat pogrom to the mass genocide in non-describable African countries run by tin-pot dictators.
To give the devil his due, the veritable novel is a mystery story; nonetheless, what baffles one is not the subtlety and succulence of the plot, but the adventurism McCallum took in writing his second novel, the first being The Lords of Allijah.
McCallum is a good craftsman, most of the time; the problem is with his English. So you have a guy or a gal from Lagos, Mumbai, Berlin, Accra or London mouthing the words in the same tempo— the same impressible staccato. Should one admire? You take a call. Also, since this book is published for an Indian-reading English public, why this Americanized English? Yes. I put that ‘z’ intentionally.