Sunday, July 27, 2003		Books

All the elements of love
Priyanka Singh

Olivia and Jai
by Rebecca Ryman. Penguin, New Delhi. Pages 644. Rs 495.

OVERWEENING love, betrayal and hatred form the elements of Olivia and Jai, written under a pseudonym. Set in colonial Calcutta of the pre-independence era, the book is a gripping love saga of Olivia O’Rourke, a spirited in-your- face American, and Jai Raventhorne, half-breed, lowly bastard son of Sir Joshua Templewood, a fact that is concealed till the very end of the book.

Olivia’s stay with her aunt Lady Bridget, Sir Joshua’s wife, in Calcutta is intended to last a year, during which she is expected to find a suitable English husband for herself. Yearning for her homeland, she is fated to meet and love the much-abhorred Jai with an aura of "disturbing magnetism" and a successful trader in competition with wary British rivals. They defy conventions to come together only to fall apart as enemies.

Blind with a simmering rage and so starkly "out of tune with the majority," Jai embarks on a soul-less journey with a singular objective of destroying Sir Joshua and his family for the sufferings inflicted on his mother, a native tribal, and causing her to die a broken-hearted opium addict when she was all of 25.

The novel is well-structured and picks up pace with Olivia getting pregnant and Jai deciding to give the final blow by "eloping" with his half-sister to bring disgrace to the family, but not before writing to Olivia to trust him. The letter never reaches her and she ends up getting married to Freddie Birkhurst, a "prized buffoon" but most eligible for he is heir to a 17th century seat in Suffolk in England. Around this time she steels herself against Jai and both become sworn enemies, only to be reunited on the eve of her departure to America.

Though each of the characters is well crafted and the story line interesting, the novel reads like an expanded Mills and Boons—a reluctant love that grows in spite of itself to turn into hatred and finally transcends the "self " by overcoming scorn and the sundry. Olivia and Jai, particularly, are archetypal MB characters; both are equally headstrong, intense and uncaring of opinion.

Since love tales are never out of vogue, the book at no stage becomes a drag and for a first attempt, the novel is remarkably appealing.