Way through drama of life
Ravia Gupta


Two Pronouns and a Verb
By Kiran Khalap
Amaryllis. Pages 220. Rs 295 

All love is not equal and has many definitions, but one must take the responsibility of their definition of love, they both knew this, but neither of them had the wherewithal to break the deadlock. They walked along, guided by their compass of memories, racial, familial and individual.

This is the tale of Arjun, Dhruv and Eva who dig the past with some urgency to uncover warm laughter. They chance upon an occasional splinter of a heartbreak and their hurriedness was in stark contrast to their current life streams. They were all trapped in a ‘deadly’ triangle of love and anger.

Inspired by the Mahabharata, wherein all the characters were complex human beings, but Arjun was more so, as he was never certain of his superiority of skill and believed Karna was better. He was never certain of Draupadi’s love despite the fact that she told him that he was the most handsome. He was never certain that he must lead in the war. Besides, he was never even certain that Lord Krishna believed in him and he was the chosen one. Two Pronouns and a Verb too is a story romantically perfumed between two childhood friends —Arjun, the doubter and Dhruv, the believer — who were connected to Eva and she was torn between the two but needed their love to survive.

Different people react to the same things differently. Dhruv, on one hand, wished to bend the universe to his beliefs, while Arjun on the other hand wished to interrogate himself till the universe was revealed within himself. Dhruv, who wanted to fight the powerful exploiting the powerless, discovered that he too was guilty of that same sin and with time understood that all villains were not human beings, some villains were grindstones of circumstances. He acted as a verb and lived\ up to his fame as an unshakeable namesake to the mythological character. Arjun wrestled his way to find clarity that embedded within every image was a foreboding of a visitation of mischief and a warning that married life was not an unshakeable bond but a malleable, pliant work-in-progress and Eva a "child of air and space", was angry with herself in the whole affair to use "I love you" for more than one person.

The author is not only bold enough to have taken a chance with the title which is strangely different, but also ensured that his characters, who play a drama of life, "fight it out’ to answer the most difficult existential question "Who am I?" While Dhruv was made to struggle with his anger, Arjun was made to struggle with his self-doubt and free-spirited Eva was made to work towards attaining faith.

Khalap finally is able to explain through this hard-hitting novel that one can’t change the system with muscles and anger. One can’t change it with money and love. One can only change it by ‘tricking’ them at their own game. He agrees that there may be struggle on its path towards truth, which is through experience and not through ideas.

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