Love, interrupted

If I Could Tell You is a rather modest title for a book that makes no pretence of doing anything else. You could have your own point of view on whether something so essentially personal, with no real context or history, should stretch to 200 pages between two hard covers, but there’s no doubting the sincerity of intent. “Me at my most truthful and unadorned,” the unnamed narrator says, as he weaves a lyrical tale of his life in a series of letters to his daughter.

One of the cover blurbs calls it a “moving account of two forms of creation, fatherhood and authorship, and the joy and heartbreak inherent in each one of them”. This tale is a fairly simple one, and moves back and forth in time, the events flaking open like a pastry envelope.

The two central motifs are love and loss. And the two are intermingled, just as the purest pleasure is quite indistinguishable from pain. In no way are these singular experiences: every parent remembers the first sight of their child, every parent thinks their child is the best and brightest, every parent feels the ache of too much love, and therefore being, as the author presciently says, “continually vulnerable.”

This parent is no different. “ A father’s life is split between the joy of watching his child and the anxiety for the passing of every moment”. He, who could not experience such a love from his parents, who died in an air crash when he was  three, tries to distil everything into a near obsessive love for this girl child, his shona, his jaanina.

The narrative’s intensity, the fact that he “looks and looks” at her, creates in him a heightened sense of everything, whether it is the “intractable, inverted comma of hair that keeps falling over her forehead”, the mundane act of waiting at the school gate — “a box-like, concrete structure, when school gave [sic] over, its doors spat out, like bullets from an airgun, hundreds of children, of varying degrees of precocity”, the old banisters with “ a couple of the railings missing like teeth that had fallen out” — the fact that his first rejection letter from a publisher “had a jagged tear at the top”.

The word pictures are a distinguishing characteristic of Bhattacharya’s style and in the end it is that, rather than the flimsy plot, which carries the reader through the book — his childhood in Calcutta and “resolutely squalid”  Bombay, his meeting and marriage to Oishi’s mother, an earlier fleeting encounter with a woman , a kindred spirit, in London, the disintegration of his marriage, the rejections from publishers, financial losses from the stock market crash, a re-encounter with the kindred spirit that ends in a tawdry and rather disappointing conclusion.

So is it his love for Oishi, the one thing he can count on, the one thing he is sure of, the one thing that requires no context or history, that sustains him rather than Oishi herself? I’m inclined to think the former. To my mind this is a book that can be enjoyed, not for the tale itself, but for the evocative and intimate way of its telling. Whether that would be enough to forgive what can fairly be called an indulgence, is a point of debate. And when he tells his daughter, “Somehow there seems to be in you a sense of feeling thwarted, of being adrift, and the continual yearning for change, for something else, is an attempt to find the centre…” he could well be talking about himself.