Short Takes
Karma, colonial India and Bollywood
Reviewed by Randeep Wadehra

Starstruck
by Rajal Pitroda
Harper Collins. Pages: 306. Rs. 199

Sapna Shah is an intern with an entertainment magazine in New York. A Bollywood fan, she often goes into trance while watching the dream-weaving movies. One day, to her great joy, she is given an assignment – her first – to do a story on Bollywood, for which she has to come to Mumbai where Nasha Kapoor, a journalist, is supposed to put her in touch with the movers and shakers of tinsel town. However, when she reaches Mumbai, she finds that she is on her own but manages to break into the charmed circle of top stars, directors and producers. Her American accent proves to be more than a passport to this rarefied echelon of Mumbai society; it becomes her talisman that fetches her unexpected and lucrative job offers as well as protects her against perils that are capable of destroying lesser mortals.

Happening Bollywood personalities like producers Gautam Gupta and Imran Moody, and heartthrob Aradhana Roy, become Sapna’s friends, as do many others. Soon she is offered a job to market Gupta’s latest production in America and the rest of the West. Just when she begins to think that life is a beautiful dream, intrigue, murder and the underworld unleash a nightmare.

This novel has several fascinating features. Firstly, although Bollywood is its subject matter, the usual elements like casting couch and sexploitation etc have been avoided. Even where marital infidelity and adultery is portrayed, the author has successfully kept sleaze and smut out of the narrative. Sapna’s heartbreak has been handled with finesse. The ending is kept short. The narrative leaves quite a bit to the readers’ imagination even as it keeps them involved till the end. This novel is truly different.

The Spell of the Flying Foxes
by Sylvia Dyer
Penguin Books. Pages: 254. Rs. 299

Situated on the Indo-Nepal border, Dhang is a nondescript dwelling on the foothills of Himalayas in Bihar’s Champaran district. Its soil is extremely fertile thanks to the alluvial deposits from river Baghmati that flows through it. This is where an Englishman, Alfred Augustus Tripe, decided to settle down and take up indigo farming in the late nineteenth century. As a consequence, an entire village cropped up near the farmland which housed domestics, farmhands and others needed to do various chores. Tripe married an Indian and thus laid the foundation of an Anglo-Indian family that spanned more than five generations – from colonial to free India.

Structured as a novel, this autobiographical family saga gives us glimpses of the social, economic and political scene of colonial India, viz., picnics and shikar etc. Casteism, untouchability and superstition feature in the narrative with the same prominence as rebellion against the orthodoxy in the person of a Brahmin dacoit; racism is hardly mentioned. Family intrigues, too, keep the reader engrossed. After one has finished reading this book, what lingers in the memory is the manner in which the family’s fortunes change after 1942, when the anti-British sentiment grips the subcontinent. If you like family sagas, this one is certainly for you.

Serendipity, Fate & Karma
by Anshu Pathak
Diamond Books. Pages: pages: 158. Rs. 100

Devansh Baruah from Dibrugarh, India, is an architect who meets a stunning young woman in Cairo, Egypt. Her name is Natajsha Kristian from Dalarna, Sweden. She is, basically, a free spirit who does painting, plays piano or dances the salsa – depending upon her whim. The two fall in love but eventually go their separate ways. Devansh marries Runa, his childhood sweetheart. However, decades later, Devansh and Natajsha meet again – she a spiritually evolved person, and he an extremely dissatisfied and distressed husband. The story meanders through the labyrinth of previous births, the theory of karma etc.

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