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A drawback of the book is that undue importance has been
assigned to certain situations. Amar’s ill-health and his
parent’s worry for him, is of course a matter of concern,
"The knowledge of death was a very big responsibility to
shove on such a young boy. Adults who had lived a full life were
afraid of death; a 12-year old must be petrified and outraged at
the injustice." But the grimness associated with Prakash’s
re-entry on the scene seems a bit excessive. Especially since
Amulya Malladi hastens to describe, time and again, the loving
relationship between Anjali and Sandeep, and compare it, time
and again, with the lack of love in Anjali’s previous
marriage.
Also, Malladi
tends to fall into the most deadly trap that an author can get
ensnared in — she assumes a moral position and does not let
the reader judge for himself and does not even let the
protagonist speak for himself. The characters are black and
white. The shades of grey that inject the life-force into
characters that will otherwise remain lifeless, are sadly
missing.
Thus, Anjali
emerges as this extremely strong woman, an adjusting, loving and
self-sacrificing wife, a good teacher and a good mother. Sandeep
is the sensitive, new-age man who is also strong and silent into
the bargain. "It was our daily ritual — Sandeep sat and
talked to me while I cooked, and he helped me with the dishes
when I was done. Komal always objected to allowing the man of
the house to soil his house cleaning pots and pans, but Sandeep
and I both ignored her`85Sandeep was definitely not the average
Indian male who thought helping his wife in the kitchen was
below his dignity."
Then we come to
Prakash, a perplexing person, who gets married in order to cover
his peccadilloes with other women, married or unmarried. One
wonders why, if sex is the driving force behind Prakash’s
"life of immorality", is he not interested in his
pretty and willing wife? The colour and parties that are a part
of Army life, don’t really have much of a role to play in the
plot. "Not once did I stop to think why I should want to
marry an Army officer, or what I would be getting into. I didn’t
want to look at the parties and the places I thought I would be
going to`85.an army officer seemed glamorous and polished`85I
wanted a man who was elegant, like the men in the suit ads on
television". She does hasten to explain later, "Life
in the army was a series of parties, just as I had imagined it
would be. The parties were boring – I had not counted on
that".
However, the book
does give a fair account of the far-reaching effects of the
Bhopal gas leak and the horrors that it left in its trail. It
forces the reader to focus on the effect of the enormous tragedy
on the individual. Such an account is always more poignant than
the reports of mass destruction in newspaper, for when one
acknowledges the presence of a person, one is forced to look at
his grief and desperation as well and that is not as easy to ‘skim
over’ as an impersonal report might be. So when Anjali accuses
Prakash "The gas`85remember? I breathed in that gas and
then a few years later I had my son. The doctor didn’t tell me
that any child I had could be harmed because of the gas`85.You
left me there to die but I lived. All I have is chronic asthma
while my son has a whole gamut of diseases", the reader is
forced, at least momentarily, to remember and regret the lives
that have been affected.
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THE
first thought that comes to the mind as one finishes reading A
Breath of Fresh Air, is "nice book!" Certainly, as
light reading goes, the book is an easily palatable one with all the
ingredients that would ideally be prescribed to write a ‘good
story’ thrown in for good measure. These would include a couple of
well-etched characters, a plot that moves forward and backward in
time, a villain of sorts who finds reformation of sorts in the end.
However, it is not the kind of book that leaves an indelible
impression on the reader’s mind. A impression that might bring the
essence of the book to mind perhaps six months later.
