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BOOKS
Travelling
Light
Every
woman's discovery of the world-and herself
By
Anuradha
Roy
GETTING
THERE BY MANJULA PADMANABHAN
PICADOR
Price:
Rs.195
Pages:
330 |
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Damn!
I should have written this book. I've thought so many of the same thoughts.
Suicide at 30? Yes. Those 30 years consumed by wanderlust-and other lusts?
Yes, yes, yes. This woman in her 20s, sharing a flat in Bombay with quirky
housemates, trying to eke out a living illustrating books between bouts
of insane dieting and intense self-examination in mental and real mirrors:
she could have been me, or any of my friends; she's the young, cosmopolitan,
modern, urban, Everywoman.
What sets
Manjula Padmanabhan apart from all of us is the effervescent accuracy
of her storytelling. She can make a spoonful of soft-boiled egg "a
mound of undercooked bird embryo" fascinating. She can analyse the
quotidian entertainingly, illuminating it with wry wit and perceptiveness.
Her eye slides from a balding man with "a rumour of hair" to
the "Manhattan skyline" of cosmetic bottles on her friend's
dressing table, and then stops at her own pathetically weak-willed dieting
self: "A papaya-flavoured jellyfish in an ocean swarming with slender,
efficient, vertebrate life forms."
As the slender
and efficient folks go about their daily lives, Manjula's weight diminishes
in inverse proportion to her bewilderment. She thinks herself a feminist,
she diets, she has a contented, practical, play-scrabble relationship
with a boyfriend she intends never to marry out of principle. And, of
course, she will never fall in love. But when the author meets Piet, a
Dutch Jon Voigt in search of his soul, she finds they are "unable
to contain ... conversations soaked up in the course of several years
worth of collecting".
It is brave
of Manjula to confess succumbing to the charms of this stereotypical European
out to find his kundalini in a Mumbai bylane with the help of a
guru who began as a bidi seller. Who can take a relationship with such
a character seriously? Manjula cannot. She thinks she feels compelled
to follow Piet to his home in Holland because of her need to "take
a vacation from (her) life", to step outside her own skin and "wait
skinless", to see who she eventually becomes.
To this
end, she hatches an elaborate travel plan that takes her, mainly on her
sister's money, first to the US, and then to Piet in Europe. Inverting
the stereotypical European journey to India she finds that her destination
in the end is her own self, something she discovers by betraying not just
her boyfriend, but also many of her long-cherished principles.
"US
nationals> aliens>", says the sign at Kennedy Airport in New
York, in a terse description of Manjula's condition, permanently out of
sync. Whether it is her brother who wants her to marry and live like everyone
else, or her roommate Sujaya who wants her to be tidy, or jingoistic Indians
in America who want her to say all is wonderful back home, she disappoints
each one of them. The alien's sense of unease, discomfort and bewilderment
is exploited not only to great comic effect, it is also an entertaining
device for social comment.
Manjula
is continually surprised by life, a surprise she conveys with a new-minted
sense of immediacy from her perch at the crossroads between autobiography,
travelogue and fiction. The Onassis Award she won for a play some years
ago could be given to her again for the dialogue here, written with a
musician's ear for picking out rhythms and accents, and mimicking them.
The hugely
comic first half of the book gives way to a more introspective, straighter
second half. At one point it feels alarmingly like it will slide into
becoming a sad love story but, some tender moments aside, it is rescued
by the author's sense of irony. If young men in India found their Catcher
in the Rye in English, August, here it is for Indian women:
honestly self-centred rather than politically correct, and much cleverer
than Bridget Jones.
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The
Government should encash at least a part of its stake in LIC and GIC before
its too late, suggests INDIA TODAY associate Editor V. Shankar Aiyar
in 
