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IS life just a series of accidents and coincidences or a beautiful tapestry each weave of which unfolds a sublime plan? Is man a master of his destiny or a slave of past karma?
The multi-level narrative is racy in parts, with its ordinary surface level persona and the sublime undercurrents keeping the reader riveted to those chapters. Badrinath excels in painting scenes with words. Whether it is the excitement and hectic activity of an Indian wedding, the well-plastered chinks of a joint family or of a marriage or the life in Madras, with its queues for water tanker, shops and markets or beaches, all are portrayed beautifully and simplistically by Badrinath. But then there are times when the narrative drags, as the author tries to give a voice to the subtle undercurrents of spiritual dilemma as Harihar gets gyan on karma and destiny from his boss Mahadevan towards the end of the book. As the dialogue meanders from Krishna’s karma sermon to Schopenhauer’s power of "will", one wonders how Harihar can get an instant soul makeover from Mahadevan’s words. In the similar vein, the author’s bid to add twists and turns to the plot add artificiality to the whole tale. Elements like the CBF fraud, Sarla’s sudden luck in the share market, Harihar’s dalliance during his daughter’s wedding, and the murder of the pawnbroker seem concocted and author takes little pain to convince the readers about these making one stretch the limits of credulity to go on. Characters of Harihar’s wife Sarla, daughter Meeta, too, are typecast — the unexciting, untidy and sometimes careless wife and an obedient daughter. And then there is the author’s unabashed effort to give a clean chit to her protagonist, to give Harihar his thousand chances as the four days of incessant rain in the end hint at the Deluge and the birth of a new life, a new world as Harihar, the man of thousand chances get purged of guilt — guilt of stealing a valuable antique and of not doing enough to trace his son. But she has very deftly woven the numismatic element into the tale and the detailed stories of different coins are engrossing as the author uses the art and spirituality connect to link the past with the present. The underlying contrasts and comparisons are striking as one sees a subtle hint. An antique is lost, a theft which no one discovers, this is just like Harihar forgets his principles to steal Jehangir’s gold coin and no one in his family or friend circle comes to know of this convoluted side of his character. The loss of the coin is discovered only when a bigger theft takes place in the museum making one wonder if Harihar’s indiscretion would also be revealed in a larger context one day.
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In her second novel, Man
of a Thousand Chances, Tulsi Badrinath enters this tricky territory
vacillating between existential and fatalistic philosophies. Harihar
Arora, a second-generation North Indian museum curator in Madras is
Badrinath’s ordinary, honest and principled protagonist who steals an
antique gold coin from the museum to get some cash for his daughter’s
wedding. Harihar finds himself in a bind when he first finds that he has
lost all sources of redeeming the coin due to a fraud money fund and
later when the pawnbroker, to whom he had pawned the coin, tells him
that he had melted the coin.