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Waiting at despair central
BOOK:We Weren`t Lovers Like That AUTHOR:Navtej Sarna
BOOK:We Weren't Lovers Like That
AUTHOR: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.
The reader gets to know after a point that the victim Aftab was once on the other side of the fence: he had dumped a girl because his family had not approved of the match (the girl was unaware that he had marriage on his mind). This girl, Rohini, becomes a phantom-like muse to his outpourings of “disaffection, defeat, their strange defiance against their world and mine” and as he resumes contact with her (who has also upped and left her husband) over the e-mail, he becomes more and more convinced — and depressed over the fact that — “it could so easily have been otherwise”.
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).
Bureau Report
AUTHOR: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.
The reader gets to know after a point that the victim Aftab was once on the other side of the fence: he had dumped a girl because his family had not approved of the match (the girl was unaware that he had marriage on his mind). This girl, Rohini, becomes a phantom-like muse to his outpourings of “disaffection, defeat, their strange defiance against their world and mine” and as he resumes contact with her (who has also upped and left her husband) over the e-mail, he becomes more and more convinced — and depressed over the fact that — “it could so easily have been otherwise”.
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).
Bureau Report