|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Secrets & Lies JAISHREE MISRA admits that she’s not writing to win a Booker’s Prize. Her novels fall neither in the realm of pulp fiction nor does she expect high critical acclaim for them. "My books are not very literary," she says, "but if you really must categorise them, I would call my kind of writing quality commercial fiction." Her role models are writers like Maeve Binchy, Joanna Trollope and Marion Keys, woman authors who write immensely popular books in England and Ireland. That they are also best-selling authors is, of course, something to be considered.
"I try to be consciously different in all my books. Since I have written about weddings, divorces, bereavement and human relationships and fictionalised history, I thought friendship would be a nice subject to write on." And that’s what Secrets & Lies is about. It is a book that celebrates female friendship, following four women who live seemingly glamorous lives in London and Bombay but who are haunted by a dark secret from their school days in Delhi. The book is a sisterhood novel, with very strongly etched out female characters and extremely shadowy male ones. It’s the story of four friends based in London and one in Bombay, and explores their friendships, their lives and motivations. Misra does not propound feminism per se, but she does explore the feminist as well as the non-feminine side of the women protagonists’ character and their attempts to resolve that conflict within themselves. The novel starts with a letter sent out by Mrs Lamb, the headmistress of St Jude, an elitist school in Delhi, to four of her students, Anita, Zeba, Bubbles and Sam, to revisit the school. The girls, students of St Jude in the early 90s, were the cr`E8me de la cr`E8me in school, everyone wanted to be friends with them, to be seen with them and impress them. They were the charmed circle until the arrival of the beautiful, intelligent and totally hate-worthy Lily D’Souza, who threatens each of the girls’ superiority in some way or another. Lily is found dead, bleeding on the grounds of St Jude, on the night of the school prom in mysterious circumstances. It’s the dark secret that the four girls carry in their hearts, the unresolved issue that impacts the lives of each one of them. Cut to the present. Fifteen years later, Anita, Sam and Bubbles are in London, while Zeba is the regaining queen of Bollywood in India. Bubbles is the wife of a millionaire businessman, the slave of an exacting mother-in-law and bullied by a wilful daughter. Bubbles seemingly has it all, the dream life that any girl would want, but is unhappy and under confident. Sam is the trophy wife of a corporate lawyer and has a dysfunctional marriage. Anita, the intellectually superior one of the group, has a job as a journalist in the BBC where she has to slog it out each day and has trouble keeping a man in her life. The action keeps shifting from the present day to their schooldays. Misra manages the transition with ease. The women remain fast friends in spite of varied lifestyles and fundamentally being quite different from one another. That’s the charming part of the book. However, the un-charming part of the book is the lovemaking scene between Anita and Hugh—definitely up for the bad sex award. The pace of the novel flags somewhat at times, the endeavour to impress upon the reader that the women are from the uppermost strata of society is sometimes a little too forced, with brands and designer names being thrown in unnecessarily. The end is a little tame. Still, the book is charming to go through. It doesn’t challenge or excite, but is a comfortable book that you can read over a week or on a journey.
|
||
|
|
||
In fact, Secrets
& Lies has already sold more than 8,000 copies
in Britain and is Misra’s fifth book, all of which are bestsellers.
Her first book, Ancient Promises, was, she says, in the form of
an explanation to her second husband, her childhood sweetheart, about
the choices that she had to make and the reasons that she made them.
This was followed by Accidents like Love & Marriage, which
she says still makes her cringe, and Afterwards. Her most
controversial book Rani is the story of the rebel queen of
Jhansi and her secret love affair with a British agent Richard Ellis.
The book was banned in Uttar Pradesh. Ironically, however, the film
rights were subsequently sold to a Bollywood company.