Sometimes you know what a book is all about. At other times, you haven’t the faintest idea until the very end, when you know you need to decide — at least for yourself — whether you like it or not. She Will Build Him a City is like that. The title intrigues and leads to questions like ‘Who is she?’, ‘Who is the him that she is will build a city for?’ and ‘What time and place is this story set in that she can build a city for him?’ But start reading and what comes through strongest is a disjointed narrative, leaping as it does from story to story, albeit with admirable linguistic facility, and you are not sure what is going on and whether you should continue.
The city that ‘she’ may or may not build ‘him’ is the chaotic, messy, uncontrolled and incredibly frightening Delhi, with construction swallowing its trees, malls flattening flowers and the Metro work killing the grass. The stories run parallel, the tracks never seeming to meet to provide some kind of resolution. Perhaps that is the story of the city itself, symbolised by the slowly growing spider web network of transport systems, the Metro, the bewildering spirals of roadways and flyovers and the thriving subculture of workers, vendors, passers-by and other human and animal detritus. The stories have the same dark tone. There is a happy evenness of mood —on the whole miserable and disturbing — with few highs and lows.
It all begins with Orphan, the baby, wrapped in a thin blood-red towel, abandoned on the doorstep of Little House. Sitting in a garbage heap, a street dog watches, perhaps to make sure that the infant is not attacked by her various hungry cousins. The child is discovered in the morning and taken in, fed, cleaned, protected, and shown off for possible adoption. The woman, a politician who wants to take home a baby, chooses a ‘challenged’ child instead of this perfect one. A boy who has Down’s syndrome and is fated to live for just a few short years. Is she trying to show her public that she is all heart? Or does she really want to give a disadvantaged human being a better life, for however brief a time? Or does she have some other plan?
Another story has a woman living out a secluded and rather claustrophobic existence for her daughter, who transitions rapidly from babyhood to middle age. It is her voice — disturbingly dispassionate at times, laden with pain at others — that is heard, a constant monologue that grates very quickly. And then there is the rich doctor who decides to play do-gooder to a woman and her daughter. He drives them somewhere… Along the way that the book roams, a killer emerges. He is first seen in the last Metro from the centre of the city, his intention turning over and over in his mind. Gradually, his violent visions reflected in the devastating changes in the city and its infrastructure, his imaginings becoming hideous reality.
The jigsaw that is She Will Build Him a City never quite comes together, presumably intentionally. The fragments float closer and then, just when you start to believe that there will be a coherent whole, they fly apart. Maybe it is an apt metaphor for the city itself, a city that has so many colours and moods that capturing all of them in one frame is impossible.
