Where two worlds collide
| How about the six-digit dollar advance Lavanya Sankaran got when she finally decided to go with Dial Press, an imprint of Random House? |
| Or should I detail the fulsome praise and superlatives critics are laying on The Red Carpet and its debutant author? |
| Perhaps I should begin by conceding that the advance and the applause are deserved""although perhaps not as "richly" as they have appear to have been heaped on Sankaran. |
| The investment banker-turned-writer has written eight stories that are, in turn, tender, wry and moving. But to call it a collection of short stories is to do The Red Carpet an injustice. |
| This is a guidebook to Bangalore, a commentary on the evolution (nay, mutation) of life in the metro, and the celebration of a city. |
| Unfortunately, it's also about the generation gap and all those cultural cliches at whose altar a writer must prostrate herself if she is to be successful in the US. |
| "Bombay this" is about Ramu, a software professional who makes an appearance in two other stories. For all his trendy goatee and club memberships, when Ramu decides to marry, he does it the old-fashioned way: he asks his mother ("Connubial Pimp") to find a suitable girl. |
| He's already got someone in mind""Ashwini, a recent import who hasn't yet gotten over her Bombay hangover. Even as Ramu is irritated by her "Bombay this" and "Bombay that", he finds himself growing fascinated by her superficiality. |
| His thoughts are in turmoil: should he approach Ashwini directly or "Was it, in fact, better to just trust to the mothers; repose faith in the Great Indian Marriage Machinery?" |
| Rangappa the driver in "The Red Carpet" is also full of doubt. He is convinced that his employer presents a Lax Moral Outlook. |
| She dresses in scanty outfits, curses and smokes, and lives separately from her mother-in-law. But it is difficult for Rangappa to reconcile the loose-living Mrs Choudhary with the ideal employer that she is otherwise. |
| She pays him well, doesn't raise her voice at him and even his meals are catered for. The differences between traditional and modern, which finds an echo in comparisons between old and new Bangalore, are stark. |
| Rangappa is the only earning member in a family of six; his employer gives away brand new clothes. After he gets this new job, Rangappa (his employer decides she will call him Raju) eats chicken for the first time in years; his employer shops, parties and goes pub crawling. |
| The two lives segue when "May-dum" decides to visit Raju at his home. As Rangappa and his family make frenetic arrangements to prepare for the visit "" buying ghee, painting the walls a bright pink and purging the main room of all signs of human habitation "" May-dum also rearranges herself. |
| She dons a decorous salwar-kameez, talks politely and respectfully to his father, eats and drinks enough to signify her pleasure with the food, and instructs Raju to come to her for any help. |
| Then she saunters back to her old life, and Rangappa is more confused""and happy""than ever. |
| Not all the stories are as finely crafted. "Mysore Coffee" is the story of Sita, traumatised by her father's suicide twenty-three years ago, and obsessed with news reports of a socialite who killed herself in Delhi. |
| So, when a slick, on-the-make colleague (Ramu, incidentally, from "Bombay This") appropriates her ideas at work, Sita's thoughts naturally turn to hara-kiri. |
| Then she remembers a feuding couple she had seen during a trip to the US, and her feelings of loss and helplessness begin to change. |
| Filled with righteous anger and a resolve to give back as good as she got, she steps back from the brink "" literally. |
| "Alphabet Soup" pays obeisance to that old stereotype, the ABCD (American Born Confused Desi) who comes to India to be true to herself. Priya leaves Chicago to stay with relatives in Bangalore, to discover herself and be a Brown in a Brown Country. |
| As she lives through every cliche""a cousin who dresses demurely in front of elders, and just as quickly sheds the kurta for the tank top hidden underneath; the girl who's dating a Muslim on the sly but is fluent in the Gayatri Mantra""the Truth dawns on her. |
| India, she realises, is a "maddening mixture of ancient values and modern pop culture, of great wisdoms and blank ignorance." She, and a few thousand others before her. |
| Ultimately, though, The Red Carpet is not about the characters in the stories. It's about Bangalore, the city where Sankaran grew up and where she now lives (after some years of studying and working in the US). |
| Sankaran's clearly a bit doubtful about the new Bangalore. Her heart, as her stories, revels in the old, flower-bedecked, Fiat- and Bajaj-driving Bangalore of her childhood. |
| The BPO-ed version doesn't quite meet her approval. The censure shows up as an unexpected viciousness in her writing: "...the fabled Electronic City that had attached itself like a pimple to Bangalore's bum." |
| Or, not as clever, but no less wicked: "See the software lads. See the software lads shrug off their stock options. (No, no. I'm still a simple saaru-soru rasam-and-rice guy at heart.) |
| See the software lads morph their inner walter mitty into alfred dolittle (I swear, da, it was just a little bit of blooming luck). See them stab each other in the back trying to prove that they too can please-kindly-adjust, the mantra that the city uses to exact merciless compromise from all of its denizens." |
| There's an uneasy calm about the Bangalore Sankaran inhabits: two distinct worlds collide there, and while that's always deserving of a story, it's not always a happy one. |
| The Red Carpet |
| Lavanya Sankaran Headline Review Price: Rs 295 Pages: 215 |