Love And Longing In Bombay (1998) - Plot & Excerpts
I bought Chandra's immense novel Sacred Games a little while ago. While it looks to be wonderful, I've been a bit intimidated by the sheer size of the thing. So this collection of five stories -- one short novel plus four in the novelette/novella range -- seemed a reasonable means of warming myself up to Chandra's work, as it were. The five pieces are called "Dharma", "Shakti", "Kama", "Artha" and "Shanti". Shamefully I had to look up the meanings of these terms; I'll give shorthand versions, which are not intended as formal definitions, as I discuss the tales. Each has a frame, of greater or lesser perfunctoriness, in which it's claimed the tale is one recounted to the author by a retired civil servant called Subramaniam; in one instance ("Artha") there's a further layer, in that the tale is one told to Subramaniam that he's now in turn recounting; and in the final story, "Shanti", the master storyteller proves himself to be the central character, who is a teller of and listener to tales . . . Do you get the impression this collection is all about Story? Yes, and it's quite a lot about Bombay as well, seemingly an attempt to give this city -- which is an omnipresent, often broodingly dangerous backdrop and sometimes almost an active participant -- the same sort of mythopoeic status as a New York or a Paris. I'm not competent to judge whether Chakra's attempt (if indeed this was his intention) is successful. I do know that I'm a lot more interested in Bombay than I used to be. The centrepiece of the collection is the short novel, "Kama" (sensual pleasure). On the surface it's a mystery story, as a cop tries to track down the killer of what seems at first to be a traditional middle-class family's ultra-respectable father. Of course, the truth proves to be very much other than this, as the seedy revelations come tumbling out in typical police-procedural style. But, as they do so, the tale morphs subtly into one about central cop Sartaj's own need to reevaluate himself and what he stands for: Does he really want to be the all-too-easily-bribable, occasionally torturing cop he's somehow become over the years? Is his sense of alienation from those around him really to do with his adherence to a minority religion or is that just an excuse? Is his reluctance to let his estranged wife finally go by signing the divorce papers born from love or just from possessiveness? And so on. In the end, the solution that's offered to the murder mystery is actually the solution to Satraj's own existential maze. This may offend the occasional mystery-reading purist, but the volte face -- the pulling of the rug from under our preconceptions -- is actually pretty delicious. (Besides, the straightforward solution is actually there as well, if you think about it for a moment.) Incidentally, this tale does contain one of the longest Truly Hot passages I've read in a while: for fear of corrupting y'all and sending Donald Wildmon into apoplexy, wild horses wouldn't induce me to divulge such information as: pp118-25 of the 1998 Back Bay paperback edition. "Artha" (the urge to seek material wealth) is the longest of the remaining stories, and is another significant piece of work. On the one hand it recounts how the principals of a startup software company try to work out why the accounting system that's their first major business installation keeps losing the trifling sum of 20 rupees and 20 paise (about halfway through the tale I glanced again at the meaning of the term artha and began chuckling). On the other, it's a very moving and involving love story, as the narrator is drawn into a world of thugs and gangsters in search of the boyfriend who seemingly abruptly dumped him. "Dharma" (righteous duty) is a good ghost story, in which a stiff military officer is forced to dredge up memories of his childhood. "Shakti" (divine female creative power) is a highly entertaining satire, if perhaps a bit slight, of Bombay high society, with two social divas duking it out in a publicly undeclared war; the irony here is that one of them is actually a significant real-world achiever and clearly of very considerable intelligence, but that this is ignored as irrelevant by all and sundry, herself included. "Shanti" (inner peace), in which Subramaniam discovers his soulmate and as an envoi our narrator discovers Bombay, is a complex little ants' nest of stories that I hugely enjoyed reading and unpicking at the time yet discovered afterwards was the least affecting of the five pieces. All in all: Golly! As Pam will tell you, for the couple of days when my leisure time was obsessively devoted to reading this book, I was good for very little else. Sacred Games's 900 big pages no longer look nearly so intimidating. In fact, when I finish the anthology I'm currently reading there's every chance that . . .
Five short stories about life in modern (20th century) India are intertwined by the same narrator as he sits in a bar with friends. Each story has an element of mystery, though not all are solved conclusively. However, all are as vivid and colorful as the front cover of this book. Chandra makes the ordinary and everyday come brilliantly alive. It doesn’t even matter if you recognize or understand completely the Indian words sprinkled throughout; somehow, you just know (or can imagine) what they mean. “Dharma” and “Shakti” (the first two stories) were my favorites. The others I’m a little more ambivalent about, but the settings were still beautiful. A fascinating, intriguing journey. Favorite quotes: “Some people meet their ghosts, and some don’t. But we’re all haunted by them.” – Subramaniam “Kaimal looked at him consideringly, and Sartaj could see the beginnings of distaste. This was familiar: the policeman’s assumption of grief and deceit hidden in every happiness was frightening in its simplicity. It implicated everyone.” “She had been working for one of the new cable TV companies for almost a year, so her new friends were all models and account executives and what she called ‘personalities,’ and sometimes they were so hip I couldn’t understand what they were saying to each other.”
What do You think about Love And Longing In Bombay (1998)?
A loose-knit set of narratives about narrative. A too sure of himself main narrator bumps into an old storyteller whose tales open up the main narrator to a wider sense of the world, of possibility and, most of all, to the city in which the tales are set: Bombay. All in all, a love letter to the city, one that bids fair to challenge Rushdie's work for biggest homer. Some tales are better than others. "Dharma" is a wonderful, bittersweet story of duty and sacrifice that doubles as a ghost story with a truly surprising ending. "Shakti" is a clever morality tale about status, wealth and what money finally cannot buy. It feels just a little predictable at times and not quite at the level of the opener. "Kama" is a pretty steamy murder mystery boxed up with a cop getting a divorce but still having hot sex with the ex fantasy. Demands careful reading because the mystery and the love story are connected and Chandra doesn't spell things out. Very fine. "Artha" is perhaps the weakest tale in the lot--it is still good but doesn't feel up the level of the others. Again, as most of these stories are, this one tells two intertwined tales--one the story of the travails of a computer company startup, the other the woes of the gay second fiddle to the female owner of said startup. The end waxes lyrical however. The final story is a fine fable told by the old storyteller to the main narrator (who happens to have cold feet with regard to his own paramour, Ayesha) about how the old man and his wife came together. It is fantastic, a story ending a set of stories about stories, explaining that it was story that brought the storyteller and his wife together in the first place. Chandra is sly here, implying that the story itself may be just another tale woven by the teller to entertain and educate the main narrator. True or not, it has its desired effect, as the main narrator heads off into the night to find and win his Ayesha and celebrate a new life together in a city of stories, a city filled with names that are themselves invitation to fabling. This is high-order stuff and Chandra pulls most of it brilliantly.
—Nelson
Here's a real good writer. All the stories contained in this book are well-drawn, its characters deeply sketched. There is nothing shallow here, and the joy of the language is immense. I liked the way Chandra has linked the different genera by a frame story: all the tales are told by a retired old man, who whiles away his time in a dingy bar off Sasoon Docks in Bombay. In fact, the tales could have taken place in any city in India, but it just happens to be Bombay, the muse of urban Indian writers.I liked "Shakti" the best, a tale of feuding business families and how marriage can sometimes connect dynasties. What works in these stories is a deep human understanding that goes beyond the petty psychology some writers strive on. Consider this passage where the focus is on the central character Shiela, one of the controlling figures of the story, whose elegance and quiet confidence made me think of her as someone who looked like an aged Leela Naidu:"She already understood that getting what you wanted from the world meant that your own struggles became grubby and irrelevant to your children, which was as it should be, that was after all why you gave them what you didn't have."Another interesting tale is "Kama" which describes the ordeal an inspector Satraj Singh goes through to solve an apparent suicide of a Gujarati Merchant. Satraj Singh would later go one to have a book of his own in Sacred Games, and it is not difficult to see why. He is a full-blown character with layers of Indian everyman, and that makes him a very human detective, whose flaws we may forgive in the course of time we spend with him.I don't think I will read Sacred Games soon, if at all. But I must admit that Vikram Chandra is a stylist one should learn from. This book should suffice if you want to read only one book by him.
—Jigar Brahmbhatt
I first read this book in the Philippines and promptly took it out of hte library when I returned. I don't usually re-read books or short storis, but I've actually read this oee a few times. It sticks with me. I think its the deliciousness of hte characterers and hwo I feel as though I've been to Bomay and knows its landmarks and mood after reading these stories. The first one about the ghost in the old home is not my favourtie, but the Sikh detective, the computer software syspense tale, the social climbers,made a particular impression. I think its becuase the whole cocneit is a young man at loose ends goes to a bar where an old man tells him sotries and each story has multiple characters each also telling a story, so that the reader, like the young listener forgets that its a story within a story. I'm posting this reviw because the author Vkraam Chandra has just come out with a new novel based on the characters in one of these stories and I'm lookng forward to sinking myself into it.
—Jen
