It was a telegram that brought Nikunj to the graveyard on a scorching day. He was there to attend the funeral of his first love, Saira. Until the day he ripped open the funeral invite, he had fantasised about accidentally running into her in a crowded train. Even getting off with her on a faraway station, where nobody knew them, where they could start a life of their own. Nikunj — now a husband, a father, balding with a noticeable paunch — longed for his youth and for Saira.
Gulab reads like a 1970s Bollywood film, which would be enacted with precision by perhaps Amol Palekar and Vidya Sinha. Humble characters, two-dimensional characteristics and, like the front cover of the book, all conversations constrained to black and white.
Though tagged as a ghost story, there is nothing illusory about the life of the dead in here. It is as real as the one we inhabit. As Nikunj paces about staring at the names scribbled in the grey of the tombstones, we are hauled into his youth and into their meet-cutes. Hurried meetings behind the water tank at school, saving his pocket money to visit her at the boarding school. She wearing a burkha , sitting by his side, facing the sea and listlessly munching peanuts. All this, till an earthquake tore them apart. After having searched for years in vain he moved on and got married to another woman of whom we perceive nothing.
The entire novella of 180 pages is set in the course of the day when Nikunj arrives in search of her funeral only to realise that two other men are planting flowers and fighting over the same burial spot. Confusion paves way to the mysterious truth; of how a dead woman went on to love several men.
Zaidi tries to unshackle the idea that people are irreplaceable. That no matter how convincingly you move on, you still ache for the unfulfilled. A Bollywood rendition of Freud’s lines, “When the original object of an instinctual desire becomes lost in consequence of repression, it is often replaced by an endless series of substitute objects, none of which ever give full satisfaction”
Nikunj never stopped wanting Saira. Through terse monologues, we learn that Saira was too good to be a human in any case. We see her through Nikunj and through the eyes of the men who loved her; all of whom she chose to abandon. Annie Zaidi’s Gulab is about living in a parallel reality. It is a hurried tale, a quick read that cursorily delves into existentialism. Towards the end of the book Zaidi acknowledges that she first got the idea for the book from her college magazine. Somewhere, it still reads like college fiction blown out of proportion.
Gulab;Annie Zaidi, HarperCollins, Rs.350.
