Much of Maithreyi Karnoor’s novel Sylvia is the kind of breezy prose you can run through in one go. A silent hero arrives in a nameless Goan village, builds a house, makes friends with a neighbour, mulls over his past and secrets. Cajetan Pereira is likeable, calm, and reliable. His not-gay relationship with handsome young Lakshminarayan, Lakshmi for short, is the kind of bond one would like to have in real life. Into this duet enters Sylvia, daughter of his long-estranged brother. She spends some weeks with Cajetan and Lakshmi and then moves on.
(Stay up to date on new book releases, reviews, and more with The Hindu On Books newsletter. Subscribe here. )
So far so fluent. The novel indeed looks like the “accomplished debut” we are promised. But what happened after that? Perhaps some publisher looked at these pages and said, no, you must put in more, we can’t sell such a short book. The first third of the book certainly contains more decor and snakes than we really need, but it shows stylistic unity and control.
In the chapters that follow, characters are tangled like the vegetation that lies between Cajetan’s and Lakshmi’s houses. It is not easy to trace the branch to the root, or to discover whether a vine has embedded itself into a tree or is simply going around on its way to the sky.
Sylvia reappears often in those chapters — as a secondary character, in a passing remark, or even in the form of her hand-me-down kurtas . The writing sometimes gets careless, but we do have a few intriguing people. Bhagirathi, who seems shyly enamoured with her professor but marries his son. Young Reshma, who steals water from passing tankers to wash her hair with.
These characters also cross over from one narrative to another, taking on greater depth. But over time, we feel as if we were watching a train leave the station. The passengers in the first few windows are three-dimensional, and we can understand the families and baggage they leave behind. As the train speeds up, the faces blur into confusion.
Yet, when we look for Cajetan and Lakshmi again we are not just yearning for the familiar. Karnoor possesses craft enough to have made them real. Her next work may be the one to watch for.
The writer is author of Three Seasons: Notes from a Country Year.
Sylvia: Distant Avuncular Ends; Maithreyi Karnoor, Tranquebar, ₹499
