When a book is endorsed by someone like the late Khushwant Singh, one is naturally curious. The book in question opens with a body on a railway line, and a journalist and a policeman sniffing round the scene. But, as we turn the pages, the book turns out to be more than a ‘whodunit’.
Bhaichand Patel’s Mothers Lovers and Other Strangers is Ravi’s story. We meet Ravi as a successful music composer in Bollywood living in Pali Hill and seemingly having everything going for him, including a rich and beautiful fiancée and connexions in the right places. But it was not always so. The reader is told of his past, of how his rustic and idyllic childhood ended cruelly when he watched his mother climb into a truck in the early hours of the morning, the devastating poverty that his father and he endure in the subsequent days, and his eventual escape to the magic of Mumbai. Success does not come on a platter; it’s an arduous and slow climb during which he has to give up many things including some memories. He moves from Dharavi to Juhu, and changes careers from the staffer at a restaurant to the student of a music maestro.
Ravi’s guru demands from him more than just the loyalty of a disciple, which Ravi has no scruples in giving. It earns him crucial advantages over the other disciples. It’s this attitude of ready compromise that takes him up the ladder. And it’s just not with Ravi, but many of the people we meet epitomise the compromise that’s life.
Bhaichand Patel is no stranger to writing about Bollywood. He has three non-fiction books in his repertoire, one of which is about Bollywood superstars. He is also a known columnist, and perhaps it’s this way with words that strips Mothers Lovers and Other Strangers of the trials of a debut fiction work. It’s not easy writing about flawed people, and the book is full of such persons, beginning with Ravi himself. Ambition seems to be Ravi’s hamartia, as with most of the Bollywood characters we meet. And, yes, there’s a skeleton in the cupboard too.
Patel’s prose is subtle, simple, and visual, with no embellishments; yet it makes us hold our breath with what seems unobtrusive detail.
See how he brings richness into a bleak milieu with no hope of opulence. ‘ After her bath, Radha squatted on the mud floor by the cottage door, let her dark, waist-length hair loose, and slowly oiled it in the morning light. The richly scented amla oil was her only indulgence. She poured a few drops at a time into her palm and rubbed it into her hair with both hands, then took her two-sided comb from a box and ran it through her hair in long strokes from the root to the tips. Sometimes she liked to fling her hair over her forehead and rub it in front of her. The comb was part of her modest trousseau, hand-carved out of sandalwood, now with some of its teeth broken and its sweet fragrance lost long ago, but it still served its purpose. ’
Patel’s character-sketches are deft, and stay with you. It’s this precision that affords the reader’s continued engagement with the array of protagonists that march through the various phases of Ravi’s life... Dolly, Sandhya, Radha, Kokilaben, and Sharmaji, Malik, Sethji. The pathos in Ravi’s life is not the sort where violins play soulful notes in the background, but a tragedy scene in a new wave film; it broods in a silence that grips your arm and asks ‘Why didn’t you help?’
The only jarring note was the epilogue, where the author wraps up the loose threads in the narration. It reminded one of those final scenes of a film, which comes after ‘seven years later’. The grand old man was right; this is indeed ‘a moving story, elegantly told’.
Mothers Lovers and Other Strangers;Bhaichand Patel, Pan Macmillan, Rs.299.
