A real potboiler

Mothers, Lovers and Other Strangers
Bhaichand Patel
Pan Macmillan
2013, pp 248
299

When will our Indian writers in English learn that a mix of sex, dead bodies and four-letter words cannot always make a thriller? But one always hopes to be the exception. Ah, it is better to have written and failed than not to have written at all. In any case, who can resist the temptation to prepare such a blended drink when Khuswant Singh is the mentor?

What I like most in Bhaichand Patel is his utter frankness. He confesses that the inspiration for his novel was Seicho Matsumoto’s Inspector Imanishi Investigates. Matsumoto was a prolific Japanese writer of crime fiction with a difference. His life spanned almost the whole of the last century. He had leftist sympathies and corruption at all levels in the Japanese society was his target. What an ideal situation for our novelist! “Two characters in that novel, a father and son, wandering in the backwoods of Japan with a begging bowl stayed with me,” says Bhaichand. With that image at the centre, he has lurched forward and put together his novel.

Like Matsumoto’s novel, Mothers, Lovers.. begins with an unidentified body on a railway track. That is enough for Patel’s opening bars.  Presently, we proceed with the protagonist, Ravi, on his journey from Dharavi to Bollywood. In between, we have plush doses of homosexuality, get pickled in whisky, vodka and what not. Professional one-upmanship is his forte. After all, Owen Meredith has assured us that “fair chance, held fast, is merit.” On the top as a music director, Ravi has everything going his way. Residence in Pali Hill. Mercedes, not Maruti. An employer himself before he is 30!

If all this is here, can the eyes remain static? Dolly Rai, the fading film star, gives comfort, while sprightly Sandhya gives connection. Her father has arranged for a Padma Vibhushan for his future son-in-law. The central part of the yarn is the usual film-folk stuff of making money whilst throwing all kinds of morality to the winds. Producers deflowering teenage girls with ease. Music directors stealing tunes from little-known Arab and North African recordings. Quite a dull fare.

Well, filmy duniya is such and documentation is welcome. Then Bhaichand gets derailed as he goes back to Ravi’s earlier days of being a potter’s son. Through graphic descriptions of the degradations of poverty, when it is combined with leprosy, the reader’s sympathies are extracted by kilolitres. The reserves of Bharatiya naari, which snaps at last only to drag her into the quicksands of further degradation, starvation, death and cremation as an unclaimed body complete the picture. Inspector Waggle is not exactly Inspector Eitaro Imanishi, but he is not as bad as Doyle’s self-important Lestrade. Mother Theresa’s Sisters of Charity is duplicated too. Ravi is also a close double of Motsumoto’s hero.

Some questions trouble us. Why was it Ravi’s benefactor, the well-meaning Jagatram, who dies in his hands? Because Motsumoto also has a kind-hearted man as the victim. As in the Japanese novel, the only murder is that of Jagatram. Even that is accidental. The other deaths in the novel are all due to natural causes. Women receive a raw deal in the novel as in its Japanese counterpart.

All in place in the Indian scenario.For the rest, the novel gives accurate snapshots of the sputtering panorama of Indian life. The thought of Dhirubai Ambani probably made Bhaichand choose Bhuleshwar as the location for Arya Lodge: “On a clear day, Bhuleshwar could be seen from the ridge a few minutes’ walk from Ravi’s residence. But it took his driver almost an hour to get there through the chaos of the old city… Ravi was not happy. His car competed for space with carts overloaded with merchandise and hand-pulled or hand-pushed, by sweating, dark, shirtless men, some of whom were old and reed-thin.”

This describes accurately the story spread in Mothers, Lovers... An overcrowded stage, a constant anxiety to be on the move and reach the destination, the variety of people, be it in Dharavi or in the tinsel world, the juxtaposition of the rich and the poor, the healthy and the diseased, hope and despair. Just that, no more. There are no patches of emotion to give us a footpath into the heart of Ravi or Radha, who are losers in the end. The cover would have been a better indicator if it had carried a clutch of green and red glass bangles instead of the golden bracelets. That would have made the novel a homage to the sorrowing Indian woman who lives in darkness at noon.