|
|
On the surface, it’s about this schoolteacher Ben, a diligent,
middle-class, middle everything Englishman with an
inconsequential past, a rather drab present, a passion for
tennis and gourmet cooking, and an unfaithful Indian wife.
Priya, a broadcast journalist, is bright, fiery and terminally
chaotic, comes from a long line of ‘Hindu’ freedom fighters
and lawyers, has an interesting past and keeps weaving herself
an interesting present from the dribs and drabs of available
life. Their son Whacka is a spoilt, badly behaved brat. The
book, pegged on Whacka’s third birthday, is steeped in the
domestic distress of the couple caused by a crack in their
relationship that no amount of lovemaking or counselling can
cement. And as the novel groans towards the climax, at the messy
birthday party with boisterous kids, uncomfortable parents,
curious relatives and friends, a gloomy clown who arrives late,
chucks food at the kids and tries to entertain them by beating
Ben incessantly with a balloon, at that party — knitted with
as much understated humour as the preparatory sweat and tears of
Ben and Priya — we are relieved to get a confirmation that the
book is indeed a satire.
That’s when the
pompous Indian author Jehan is encouraged to hold forth on
writing books, much to the consternation of Ben, who has been
passed over as a food writer for the Enquirer, and has
been labouring over a book on East-West fusion cooking for two
years. "When Ben was feeling particularly bitter he put
Jehan’s success down to the fashion for Indian writers in
English. He couldn’t help deluding himself that had he the
right name and the required style, he too might sell 100,000
copies." Whatever the reason, Jehan was a picture of
success with his several books and luxurious lifestyle and
beautiful psychoanalyst wife. And over Ben’s biryani,
they have the kind of discussion that is inevitable when a
writer is surrounded by non-writers and wannabe writers with
intellectual pretensions. Everybody has an opinion about
writing, and airs it.
In certain ways,
this ambitious book is largely about the structure that breeds
fashionable, if exotic, writers in English. Vakil touches upon
the many elements, including the soft disdain that old-school
Indian writers like Mohini, "who still lived in the time
before large advances and book tours", feel towards this
new breed of Indian writers in English. However, probably the
only clear allusion to a real author is when someone asks Jehan
whether he was like the writer who said "that she could
never change anything because it would be like breathing the
same breath twice." Jehan, pompous though he is portrayed
to be, comes across as much humbler than Arundhati Roy — whose
quote that was — when he admits that like most writers he
needs to revise endlessly to get it right.
And slowly, the
ironies unfold. Good novels, says somebody, are more interesting
than life because they cut out inconsequential encounters. This
is immediately rubbished by another, who believes that "no
novel is as interesting as life". You see why this book has
a Reality TV format.
"What I can’t
be doing with are novels about the trials and tribulations of
middle-class north London couples," the guest continues.
"We’ve had enough of those to last us fifty years.
Whingeing double-income liberal parents, please let us have no
more of their banal utterances." Vakil’s novel is about
the trials and tribulations of a middle-class, north-London,
double-income couple, Ben and Priya.
"Do you
think, Jehan, that all the characters novelists invent are like
our dreams, versions of ourselves`85?" asks another guest.
We don’t get a clear reply from the writer. But by now it is
pretty clear that the author has put bits and pieces of himself
in a number of characters in this book. Ben, like Vakil, is a
schoolteacher. Priya, like Vakil, was born in Mumbai and grew up
in India before moving to England. Arun Sengupta, like Vakil, is
an Indian writer in English, "a well-known member of the
new breed" who "kept getting shortlisted for
prizes" (Vakil’s Beach Boy won the Betty Trask
Award and was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award).
Of course, Sengupta could just as well be any other Indian
writer in English, or a fusion of many such. As could Jehan, who
is writing a book on self-gratification. Like Vakil.
For finally, that
is what One Day is about. It opens with a description of
Priya’s self-gratification as Ben reads The Inner Game of
Tennis next to her. This faintly funny stretch is ripe for
the Worst Sex Writing award, and it’s a wonder that one gets
past it to the real story. The novel takes the clich`E9d
middle-class, north-London couple, or the clich`E9d
Oxford-educated, mixed-race, liberal, fin de siecle
couple, and shows how their trials and tribulations are so like
playing with oneself. And how their problems, their fears, their
self-centred struggle seem such an indulgence as they continue
to fondle old wounds and wallow in frustration. And how writing
about all this, for an audience that shares the same
self-absorbed values and lifestyle, lives in that invisibly
labelled world, frantically navigates those London roads or the
Tube stations that Vakil spells out in such painstaking detail,
is itself an exercise in self-gratification. One Day may
well be the book that Jehan is writing. And as you ride the
gentle fugues, you can hear Vakil’s laughter.
|
ARDASHIR
Vakil’s One Day is a bit like Reality TV with an
inside-the-mind camera. You follow the movements, thoughts,
memories, fears and desires of Ben Tennyson and Priya Patnaik in
gruelling detail for one whole day. Never have 24 hours of someone
else’s life seemed so fatiguing. "Thanks for sharing, mate,
but I have problems of my own," you want to snap. "I do
not wish to share your traffic stress in minute detail as you wind
your way through scores of London streets, naming each and tipping
me off on what you see and what you feel. I do not wish to know your
seating plan, accompanied by a map, for students in class 10 BT in
C-14, unless you plan to murder one of them and expect me to guess
which seats the murderer could have occupied/hidden behind/leapt
over before and after the act. And I certainly do not wish to share
your pathetic perennial whining about your domestic discord, your
dreary sexual fantasies or the lowdown on how and why you lost some
tennis match. Get a grip."
