Ghalib Shiraz's Dhalla's book catches you unawares. Just when you are resigned to another — somewhat florid — account of the Great Indian Diaspora, it decides to throw a whammy, or two. Just when it is chugging along nicely like a cross between Brokeback Mountain with an Asian twist and a gay version of a Mills & Boon romance, it decides to introduce an altogether new dimension. In fact, The Exiles hits its stride somewhere in the middle of its rambling narrative; it comes into its own when the author explores an extra-marital fling between two queer men from the point of view of a wife who is not merely betrayed but straight!
Is the betrayal any greater, the book seems to be asking, because the husband's affair is with a man and not a woman? Would the wife's pain have been any less if the “other” had been a woman? And what of her inexplicable sense of shame? As though she is guilty and responsible for driving her husband away — that too, into the arms of a man? Could she have done something, said something to have prevented this? And what of their college-going son? How is a mother to protect her homophobic son from finding out that his father has not merely walked out on them, but has done so with his gay lover?
Deliberate complication
Not content with posing these questions — each of which deserve a nuanced exploration — Dhalla decides to complicate matters somewhat. He introduces, late into the narrative, a potted history of the persecution of Indians in Kenya and their subsequent flight to America. Since the novel draws its title from the continuing sense of exile experienced by each of the three main protagonists in this new-age love triangle, perhaps some reference to Africa and India was unavoidable. That it should have become so detailed as to burden the narrative and slow its pace as it hurtles towards its terrible and tragic denouement is unfortunate. Also unfortunate, is the author's tendency towards purple prose which can be occasionally jarring in its cleverness. Dhalla would do well to curb his desire to demonstrate his flair for words, and deft use of a Thesaurus, and instead concentrate on what comes naturally to him: the depiction of men and women grappling with notions of sexual orientation. Dhalla is at his best when he portrays the hurt and confusion of Pooja, the wife who discovers in the most shocking way that her husband of over two decades is gay and her terror at “confronting” him: “She would not make a scene. She would not let them dishonour themselves in this way despite what he had done. She would remain strong, elegant, magnanimous.”
On being “discovered”, the husband's relief mingled with guilt is real and believable because Dhalla refrains from the verbal callisthenics that mar his more effusive accounts: “He wished he could lie to her, it would be so easy to just deny it all, and she would probably even welcome the deception, but nothing came out of his mouth and the silence served as his truth, his admission that after all the years of running, here was something they wouldn't be able to escape. There was nothing they could do now to camouflage this with the routine of their lives and the charade of marriage. No matter how hard they tried, she would always see the transgressor in his eyes and his love for her, however real, would always carry the taint of larceny.”
Way too many
While Pooja and Rahul Kapoor (both Indians from Kenya) and Atif from Mumbai have made their home in Los Angeles, their lost selves back home continue to haunt them. The dipping back and forth, between the past and the present, between continents could have been saved for another novel.
The delving into a lived sense of exile and alienation that the Mombassa-born Dhalla has no doubt experienced at first hand, as well as his love for Hindi film lyrics, Hindu mythology and the Sufi lore attributed to Rumi seems tacked on to please the pantheon of western critics and extraneous to the story per se .
I do wish Dhalla had stuck to telling the story as it is: a love story between a gay couple as it unspools before a disbelieving wife. The Exiles could, quite easily, have taken off from where Dhalla's debut novel Ode to Lata left, and become the definitive novel describing the Asian gay experience. It is a pity it doesn't.
Rakhshanda Jalil blogs at www.hindustaniawaaz-rakhshanda.blogspot.com
