On perishables like love and lust

When Mira Went forth and Multiplied
Shinie Antony
Rupa
2011, pp 212
250

Allow me to begin with a warning. This is not chick-lit. Believe me. To all those, misled by the blurb on the book jacket or its weird cover, who thought When Mira Went Forth and Multiplied was an easy-to-read, roll in the hay book, it is not.

This is intense and seriously funny. Attempt this screwball comedy only if you possess an above average IQ and a penchant for dark humour. Else, you might come out flummoxed.

Shinie Antony’s latest novel may not come as a surprise for those familiar with her short stories. Terrific wit and a certain unsentimentality, which sometimes borders on the ruthless, were splayed across her earlier works. And humour has been her safe and chosen battleground to explore serious issues of identity, adulthood and infidelity.

All of that is easier to accomplish in a short story. That she managed the same rollicking pace and tongue-in-cheek cleverness through the whole length of a novel is a feat in itself.

Antony’s funniness is of a conspiratorial kind. It’s personal — between you and her alone. And if you get it, it comes with a special pair of glasses — one which the writer wears to look at the world in general, missing nothing, not even rainy-day “muck batiks” on clothes.

This novel isn’t in the plot. So the publishers deceptively give it away in the blurb: a cheating man, an unfaithful wife, and a loyal, resolute one-night stand. Well, what’s new about adultery or its aftermath? The story though is entirely in the telling.

True to the screwball comedy genre (more explored in cinema than literature), the narrative is unconventional, fast-talking, full of stylish lines and witty repartees and behaves in unexpected ways.

There’s a certain Lubitsch touch in the prose that can be summed up in the remark of film critic Michael Wilmington about Ernst Lubitsch: “At once elegant and ribald, sophisticated and earthy, urbane and bemused, frivolous yet profound.”

When Antony’s Mira was plotting an escape from her small town, she thought: “Out there somewhere was freedom, anonymity, a tattoo calling out for the nape of her neck. And men. They were going to kneel around her in a circle so that she would wear a skirt entirely made of men one day.”

When she meets “her man” Sam for the first time: “Though incommunicado, Mira noted a mass civil disobedience movement in her entire being... Flip-flop went her insides. Her navel began to tap-dance.” And when they copulated, it was: “Pure want.”

One-liners too are in abundance. Mira “ate poorly and ailed deep in her heart, her hymen alone healthy as a horse.” Post-heartbreak, she wants to recover, reach “between the dizzying heights and the doldrums, a desired domicile called Survival”. There are hilarious pearls of contemporary wisdom: “Perishables like love and lust are best refrigerated in marriages.” And the best of all, Antony’s parting shot: “Perhaps all practical women begin as impractical little girls.”

There are two ways to read this book. You can devour it in one, unbroken read. That’s of course the easier way. The other, and the prescribed much better way, is to roll the lines a little over your tongue, let the wit seep in, and then, savour the aftertaste. This way, by mid-book you would’ve acquired a not-so-easily-satisfied taste for intelligent humour.