Finding one’s true self
In Calcutta of the 1980’s, life was simple. There were pujos to prepare for, exams to be written, neighbourhood scandals to be concealed.
The dancing boy
Ishani Kar Purkayastha
Harper Collins
2011, pp 194
Rs. 350
For young Moyur and Jonali, best friends and almost sweethearts on the throes of adulthood, there were surreptitious games of make-believe to be enjoyed. In spite of his parents’ horrified disapproval, Moyur finds joy in dressing up as a princess and dancing to a music that is his alone.
In the course of Ishani Kar Purkayastha’s first novel, the characters grow up, fall in love and discover disappointments several times. And yet, The Dancing Boy, in its fabled telling, is a story of childhood. For most of these characters, their pasts are described only as an explanation for their eventual natures and circumstances. Which for a reader is convenient sometimes and unconvincing at most times. Everything that happens to the author’s characters, it seems, is inextricably linked to their childhoods — a trap most of us are guilty of succumbing to in our own barely-poetic lives.
Then there is the voice of Moyna. Moyur’s twin sister who ‘died before she was born’, who takes over in narrating these stories as she longs for ownership of a life which Moyur was granted but she was deprived of. Of the things that make this an interesting novel, it is clearly Purkayastha’s earnest storytelling that keeps you turning the pages and smiling at the regular escape into lyricism. Hers is a world where all relationships are clearly defined, where family honour is sacrosanct and young love is a matter of ice-cream flavoured kisses.
In many places, The Dancing Boy has a cinematic quality to it. Especially in her descriptions of Jonali and Moyur’s reticent, innocent love, Purkayastha writes in Eastman colour. Like a film with many twists in plot in which you only understand what you’re told. It is, at times, impossible to look beyond who the author tells you her characters are.
There is a stifling embargo on the nosy reader’s taste for conjecture that comes from being told what to think. While it is unfair to demand from a book what it does not intend to do, one can’t help but ask if the author could have given a better sense of the place and setting. While we are told that this is Calcutta in the 80s and 90s, there’s little to suggest it is so.
The Dancing Boy’s other fault is its reliance on obvious motifs. Take for instance, Moyur’s unlikely friendship with Boshonti, a prostitute with a heart of gold — a tiring, unconvincing turn to the story. Or at least half a dozen chance encounters that induce drama into the proceedings. Then again, this takes little away from a story well told.
Many things happen in The Dancing Boy, but its best features are the first parts which describe so elegantly simple friendships and a mother’s hurt. Even though the novel is pivoted on the recurring voice of Moyna and her intensely described captivity and her secret effect on Moyur, it is the beautifully constructed images of childhood that remain with the reader long after it has passed from the lives of its protagonists.
Towards the end, the novel diverges into tales of tragedy and rediscovering love, as Jonali marries the eccentric and abusive Suman and Moyur, Shiuli who suffers in silence in a marriage she doesn’t comprehend.
