Delhi: Anything Goes
Author: Anita Kumar
Publisher: Om Books, Rs250
This is a story of four women who move away to different continents. When they reunite after years, they witness a sea change in one another. It’s hilarious and hard-hitting, writes ANUBHAV PRADHAN
Some books are written well, some badly, and some, even though they are passable, suffer unfavourably due to instant and inevitable comparison with more illustrious contemporaries and predecessors. Anita Kumar’s debut fictional novel, Delhi: Anything Goes, belongs to the last category, coming as it does on the heels of Rana Dasgupta’s Capital: A Portrait of Twenty-First Century Delhi; Dasgupta has dealt so deftly and comprehensively with the variety of urbanscapes and cultures of the Indian capital that anything which appears now will, to a discerning reader, immediately seem a snip and paste out of the vast and varied canvas which he has already painted in Capital.
It will, of course, be unjust to compare, no matter how inevitable the comparison, so to do Ms Kumar justice, it must be said that the text does manage to convey a pervasive sense of hollowness and individualisation which characterises much life in contemporary Delhi. The novel is self-professedly on “Delhi’s darker side”, and it does portray the many layers of self-seeking hedonism and hypocrisy which mark its denizens’ interactions with each other, and with their own selves. Its focal point is the celebrations of the 25th wedding anniversary of Reema and Sandy Mehra, the über rich industrialist couple integrally part of Delhi’s extremely privileged, so-called high-society. Reema Mehra plans 25 parties to mark 25 years of her marriage, and arranges for her three childhood friends to be with her for these celebrations. However, as the festivities unfold, Zoya, Reema’s friend and our narrator, discovers that the Delhi society has become corrupt and perverse to the core: people marry only for money or for lust; infidelity, alcoholism and drug-abuse is universal; and divorces are common. Even her friend Reema’s marriage is just a farcical setup of convenience: both Sandy and Reema regularly indulge in adulterous relationships, and, as Zoya gradually realises, their anniversary celebrations are nothing more than a social performance. Admittedly, towards the novel’s closure, both Reema and Sandy are brought closer to each other after their elder son’s recovery from coma after a drug-induced car accident, but even that reconciliation is left open-ended and ambiguous as both partners are shown dancing with their respective extra-marital partners.
Throughout, therefore, the novel does manage to evoke a sense of cultural and personal loss and extensive hedonism, and manages to justify its title as well — ‘anything goes’, which is presented as a very rough, literal translation of the Hindustani motto sab chalta hai. It falters, however, on many other scores, like its claim to represent the core of Delhi — as Ranjana Sengupta, Sam Miller and Rana Dasgupta have shown us — gets automatically countered by its engagement with only the core of extremely rich and privileged Delhi, obsolete and restrictive, so the text’s positioning of one very small, albeit very powerful, section of Delhi’s population as its core cannot but appear problematic. Moreover, as the narrator, and her journalist friend Natasha, deliberate upon social ills and dangers to the future generations, their perspective cannot but appear remarkably blinkered, and the rationale that as the guests of a very rich family they had no opportunity to engage with realities outside the ambit of their hosts’ life and lifestyle too does not hold because both of them were, as the narrator reminds us often, born and brought up in Delhi and lived in it for a considerable period of their young and adult lives. Of course, since this shared, common past is accessed through heavily tinted prisms of nostalgia, Delhi of the last few decades of the previous century comes across as an innocent, pure, ‘genuine’ city in comparison to today’s Delhi, and so contemporary ills seem all the more magnified and monstrous. Zoya and Natasha feel awkward and out-of-place in the promiscuity of Delhi, and keep harking back to the Delhi they left, but the reader cannot but wonder if the rich and leisured in london and New York, the cities which both now call home, are any less inclined to recklessness and promiscuity as they are in Delhi, or if Delhi at the turn of the millennium, with the fresh wounds of Jessica lal and Priyadarshini Mattoo, was any less dark and dangerous.
In other words, the text suffers to some extent both in terms of contextualisation and characterisation; it attempts, and almost succeeds, in giving depth to the hollowness of its characters’ lives, but the words they speak are too simple and make them appear too naive. The reader is also denied satisfaction on account of awkward narration and average editing which leaves a little more to be desired from the author and the publisher. Not much fiction exists in English on the many layers and lives of contemporary Delhi, so while Kumar must be commended for attempting to fill a glaring lacuna, her text’s inability to successfully rise to its own requirements makes one hope that her next foray into the complex and demanding world of fiction will do greater justice to the ideas and characters she chooses to portray.
The reviewer is an Assistant Professor of English, Bharati College, Delhi University