JOIN USWhat’s behind the painting?
A popular actor recently tweeted he is mighty disappointed that most books are written nowadays with the express purpose of hurriedly converting them into a web series. One wonders if that is really such a bad thing — at the least, this goal, especially in a debut author’s mind, may ensure that the chapters are crisp, and the plot meanders less than usual.
Whether first-time author Tarun Mehrishi had this goal in mind or not, we do not know. But ‘The Portrait Of A Secret’ is a pageturner, alright. Sometimes for the wrong reasons. The non-linear narrative, which shuttles up and down at a dizzying pace, ensures that the reader, every now and then, turns the pages back and forth as well to figure out whether a particular chapter is set in 1948 or 1970 or 2010!
The novel begins with the theft of two paintings from an agricultural research centre in a remote town. Turns out there is not only a money trail behind the paintings (whose cost the auction house Sotheby’s estimates to be around Rs 200 crore each) but also a sinister reason for the theft. Not to mention a background story that involves Devika Rani, Svetoslav Roerich, the ISI, Maharaja Hari Singh and a slew of other characters, some real, some fictional.
Ambitious but with no pretensions of being high-brow, ‘The Portrait Of A Secret’ weaves together seemingly disparate real-life-inspired stories together in an attempt to present an ultra-grand narrative that nods and winks at all the big-ticket historical events you can think of — the Mumbai blasts, the attack on the Indian Parliament, Kashmir accession, ISI infiltrations...you get the drift. Why, even the Bolshevik Revolution does a guest appearance! As untenable as this sounds, curiously, it all holds together somehow and the result is a happy time pass of a book that ties up all the loose ends pretty neatly while being frustratingly clever about its big secret.