Jhill mill delights and ba boom joys

Ask a Bollywood producer in this age of multiplexes and she would swear that the filmi formula will bring in monies if it touched the right chords. So it is for Indian fiction —stories that span generations and follow a deliberate pace to unspool the saga of an Indian family, the shrewd matriarchs and patriarchs, siblings and rivalries, great passions and profound disappointments. The setting helps introduce and moor the characters to a specific region; local colour and customs, rituals and norms, regional cadences are added to prop the tale. The city helps serve as an added dimension to the family and its main character, often a rebel who will cross established norms.

That makes the Chennai-based poet and dancer Tishani Doshi’s first work of fiction, The Pleasure Seekers, a fictional lithograph on yet another modern Indian family. It is 1968, the Beatles are singing in London, but in central Madras where the prosperous Jain and Gujarati community lives, the family of Patels is nodding to a haloed monk’s wisdom, saluting vegetarianism, avoiding drinking and pleasures of the heart and body. Not the first-born Babo Patel who flies to England to fall headlong in love with a Welsh beauty, Sian Jones, and lead a life seeking love and pleasure from his wife and family.

Doshi has dedicated the novel to her parents, whom she fondly calls the original pleasure seekers, because The Pleasure Seekers is a story born of some old letters Doshi had found locked in a box. Her mother is the Welsh woman who left her land and flew miles across to marry her father, a Gujarati Jain she met at work in London, and who lived a life of an Indian wife, following local family customs and norms, and brought up her daughters. Doshi reportedly was awed by the power of her parents’ love, especially her mother’s, that had brought her to Madras and the novel reads more like a tribute to the enormous affection her parents shared overcoming cultural disparities. The novel is really a story of two worlds, the nagging question of home and alienation, of heat and snow, of desire and duty. Doshi has inherited these challenges and she writes the story of four generations of the family with humour, candour and empathy.

Doshi’s first collection, Countries of the Body, won the Forward Poetry Prize and you can find resonances of a poet’s rhythm in her language, lending the narrative a lightness of touch and delight. Her endearing humour and droll asides add wit to the quaintness of the characters’ lives. Doshi uses words to suit her whim and with Salman Rushdie’s gushing blurb on the jacket of the book, it’s no surprise that her language is lucid. Its patois dance to a gentle rhythm with references to “sometimes summers” is perhaps an echo of Richard Wilbur’s poem Praise in Summer and idiosyncratic allusions like ba ba booms and jhill mills and sha bing and sha bang. Though by the second half of the book the references stop being cute and sonorous; and the red garoli lizards and peacock feathers lose their exotic imagery with the sheer weight of reiteration. The second half of the book that records the ageing and crumbling of the former generation is real and painful as is the hope and promise held out by the younger generation of Patel daughters.

Doshi’s story also ticks off the social and political landmarks of the times since the 1960s to the present, including assassinations of Indira and Rajiv Gandhi, MGR’s death, the Bhopal gas tragedy and the Gujarat earthquake. Madras remains the ugly, nondescript city, receding into the background while Anjar and other Gujarat landscapes come alive in Doshi’s supple language and imageries. At the centre of the ancestral home in Gujarat resides the Patel family matriarch Ba, who has magical propensities to smell people and moods. She is a luminous figure in her dark saris, long silver hair and khol-lined eyes — wise, agile and alert with flaming senses, her home a haven for the characters to heal and rest in the company of the local women. It reminded me more of Skills, the centre by the beach in Madras where Doshi’s dance guru, the fierce and awesome Gujarati dame Chandralekha lived.

The book is a sumptuous production save the printer’s devils. Doshi’s book is about manners and cultures, of searches and discoveries of the heart and body, of families and individuals, charming and quaint. We’ve read this one before, but it offers the familiar delights of seeking pleasure and magic of holding on to it.

THE PLEASURE SEEKERS
Tishani Doshi
Bloomsbury/Penguin
316 pages; Rs 499