We’re all so absorbed by the idea of love. That’s not to say we’re somehow misguided or deluded. Love, unfortunately, is what makes us tick. But it happens to be in short supply, at least in the places that we are told to look for it. Of course, we wouldn’t be able to function in the real world without the bulwark of knowing we love something, or that something loves us back. But where does romance—read building castles in thin Himalayan air—come into it?
If you’ve ever wrestled with the question of what love is, and what use it has for you, then read the two novellas of Jaina Sanga’s Tourist Season . What this book does really well is to prop up the question of ‘what love means’, and then ends up answering it inadvertently. Indulge me and imagine you’re a moth. Sanga takes you, the moth, through the roughage of your pupa, proffers you a luminous flame, extinguishes it, and then reminds you that moths only chase flames because they think it’s the moon.
You are given two protagonists, one for each novella: Ramchander, an Uttarakhandi small retailer, and Girnar Chabria, a Gujarati mythology professor. Ramchander and Girnar are both introverts, each dangerously straddling their marital expiry date. They’re hypocritical little buggers, really. They feel, by nature, too vulnerable to take refuge in anything but their respective familiar and humble livelihoods. And yet, they dare to fantasise. So, when fantasy walks into their departmental store or forms a shapely silhouette against the doorway of a derelict shack they ambled into, they are smitten. These protagonists will fall so pathetically in love and so fast, it would come across as crazy if not for the time constraints of a short novella.
Can love ever be found in a person? Is love to be found in the constancy of the river, the backdrop to all the book’s scenes? Is love in letting nature embraceyou? Can it be the frigid Himalayan pond you dive into? Can it be the mountain you feel breathing or the monkey’s mock salute?
