BOOK: We Weren't Lovers Like That


Navtej Sarna

On finishing Navtej Sarna’s slim novel We Weren’t Lovers Like That, one may get a feeling that over-the-top existentialism is god’s revenge on those hailing today’s below-the-bottom cleverness. But before the reader reaches for the bottle of uppers on the top rack of the bathroom cabinet, he will be forced to acknowledge that Sarna’s story of unadulterated despair has its memorable moments. The novel starts with the 41-year-old Aftab Chandra leaving Delhi and the wreckage of his life behind as he boards the Dehradun-bound Shatabdi Express. “And the odour that rises from this ageing, bloated world sickens me. I have had enough of its meandering deceptions, of its wayward promises. Taking this train seems one way of getting my own back,” he ruminates on the train. More than 200 pages later, we realise that the real journey is not from Delhi to Dehradun via Saharanpur, Roorkee and Haridwar, but the one that Aftab takes back and forth in time, almost masochistically describing how he lost his pleasures and gained his sorrows.


The final push — and for our Werther-like hero, the only real push — comes when his wife, Mina, finally leaves him for a mutual friend, Rajiv. Aftab is devastated, stops going to office and when he does return to work weeks later, the world is marked by this betrayal. As the Shatabdi rides the rails, Sarna’s protagonist rides through his flashbacks.


We are firmly in Indian Middle-Class Angst Central. Whether it be Aftab fantasising about reversing the roles with his boss and writing a quarterly report on his performance (“Direction — downwards. Utility — zilch. Sociability — negligible.”), or his disgust at being suckered into buying a treadmill (“The loneliness of the long distance runner ... is nothing compared to the loneliness of a diabetic on a treadmill), or his general but impotent ‘class-rage’ (“I must have been the only man in that party who did not possess a Mont Blanc pen”), our born-again-misanthrope lets it rip with his litany of woes.
This tumbling along with Aftab can be tiresome business. But what makes Sarna’s book float is his talent for description — of emotions, things or places. The pleasure the reader gets while reading about Aftab’s recollections of preparing for the civil services exams and how he felt after discovering that he had flunked them is that of confirmation. Yes, says the reader, that’s how it looks like, that’s how it feels like in that situation. One also ‘agrees’ with the writer when he describes Connaught Place (“too many parked cars and too many cars on the road), Bombay Central (“silent long trains sleeping in straight lines liek monster caterpillars preparing for an invasion”), the feeling after your spouse confirms that she has been unfaithful (“Something was scalding my eyes”) and despair (“The battle was lost before it had begun).


On reading We Weren’t Lovers Like That, one is left with the feeling of seeing a block of lead with intricate carvings etched on its surface. You try to recall the fine, detailed chisel-work, but you fail. It’s probably because a rope tied to the block has become entangled to your feet and you have no inclination to think of the fine etchings that you saw. All you can feel is the weight of the block. Bureau Report