Rupa Bajwa's second novel, Tell Me A Story, unfolds through a series of details painstakingly put together.
It is a fact that right from the circumstances of birth and all the way until death, our lives are a composite of many details: caste, region, language, social hierarchy, education, etc.
Life also resides somewhere between the details, in the cracks, so to speak, and it is this amorphous, intangible matter that a novelist tries to capture.
The stream of details must also evoke the substance of life hidden between them, helping build the larger story, otherwise they only document or catalogue a character's daily routine. Disappointingly, in this book, Rupa works mainly with the obvious, though here and there is a superb use of the telling detail.
Rupa begins with the story of Rani, who lives with her father Dheeraj and brother Mahesh's family in cramped surroundings. Money is tight and Rani, a school dropout, contributes to the family's finances by working at a beauty parlour.
Scene after scene is narrated at a monotonous pace, her day at the parlour, her interaction with Dheeraj who was laid off unceremoniously and visibly wilts before our eyes, the soul-sapping work at a power loom that enables Mahesh to provide for his family, his wife Neelam's attempts to manage the household expenses within a meagre budget and their naughty son Bittu's antics.
The tenuous peace at home is gradually lost as events, forced and unconvincing rather than organic, make them even more in need of money than before, and her father's death results in precipitating Rani's flight from home.
This marks a shift in the focus of the book. We follow Rani to Delhi where we encounter writer Sadhna, "don't call me memsaab", and the maid Vina.
Rani, not a servant, accepts the position of household help so as to support herself and is exposed to the brittle, shallow nature of Delhi society. Through Sadhna's memories, we trace her rapid rise as a novelist and sudden exposure to fame and success, her inability to deal with the realities of the publishing world, her subsequent withdrawal and resurgence.
While Sadhna is intended to be the role model, the memsaab who rejects her natural birthright of memsaabdom for compassion and kindness, the fact is that there are many such Sadhnas who co-exist with the 'couldn't-care-less' memsaabs, such as Vaishali.
While Sadhna's gesture of insisting that her maids use the same crockery as she does is intended to point to her stellar qualities, the fact that she does it in someone else's house, entrusted to her care, detracts from that munificent gesture.
Though we are presented with a steady accretion of facts, the book does not give us any fresh insight into life as we know it. That there is tremendous disparity on earth between human lives is not something new. That children go hungry every day is a cruel fact.
The random way in which one twin's life unfolds differently from the other's is the stuff of literature. That the rich in India routinely waste money at restaurants, money that would feed a poor family for months, is a daily reality.
While her heart is in the right place, Rupa's immaturity as a writer, her lack of a world-view that integrates these problems of existence, lets the reader down. She works with familiar facts but is unable to transform them by illuminating the unseen connections.
While Rupa tells her story in simple sentences, her attempt at transparent storytelling is marred by awkward phrases such as "the chilly November evening did not need a fan", "sad shrivel", "finishing touches on the woman's makeup", "her appetite had been going down", "moved at the pain" which occur throughout the book.
In the end, Rani asserts her skills as a beautician, the exploited working to beautify the face of the ugly exploiter, but one does not greet this news with the sense of despair that perhaps the writer intended one to feel. "It's easier to start stories than to end them," declares Rani, leaving the disappointed reader a victim of her inadequacy.
It is a fact that right from the circumstances of birth and all the way until death, our lives are a composite of many details: caste, region, language, social hierarchy, education, etc.
Life also resides somewhere between the details, in the cracks, so to speak, and it is this amorphous, intangible matter that a novelist tries to capture.
The stream of details must also evoke the substance of life hidden between them, helping build the larger story, otherwise they only document or catalogue a character's daily routine. Disappointingly, in this book, Rupa works mainly with the obvious, though here and there is a superb use of the telling detail.
Rupa begins with the story of Rani, who lives with her father Dheeraj and brother Mahesh's family in cramped surroundings. Money is tight and Rani, a school dropout, contributes to the family's finances by working at a beauty parlour.
Scene after scene is narrated at a monotonous pace, her day at the parlour, her interaction with Dheeraj who was laid off unceremoniously and visibly wilts before our eyes, the soul-sapping work at a power loom that enables Mahesh to provide for his family, his wife Neelam's attempts to manage the household expenses within a meagre budget and their naughty son Bittu's antics.
The tenuous peace at home is gradually lost as events, forced and unconvincing rather than organic, make them even more in need of money than before, and her father's death results in precipitating Rani's flight from home.
This marks a shift in the focus of the book. We follow Rani to Delhi where we encounter writer Sadhna, "don't call me memsaab", and the maid Vina.
Rani, not a servant, accepts the position of household help so as to support herself and is exposed to the brittle, shallow nature of Delhi society. Through Sadhna's memories, we trace her rapid rise as a novelist and sudden exposure to fame and success, her inability to deal with the realities of the publishing world, her subsequent withdrawal and resurgence.
While Sadhna is intended to be the role model, the memsaab who rejects her natural birthright of memsaabdom for compassion and kindness, the fact is that there are many such Sadhnas who co-exist with the 'couldn't-care-less' memsaabs, such as Vaishali.
While Sadhna's gesture of insisting that her maids use the same crockery as she does is intended to point to her stellar qualities, the fact that she does it in someone else's house, entrusted to her care, detracts from that munificent gesture.
Though we are presented with a steady accretion of facts, the book does not give us any fresh insight into life as we know it. That there is tremendous disparity on earth between human lives is not something new. That children go hungry every day is a cruel fact.
The random way in which one twin's life unfolds differently from the other's is the stuff of literature. That the rich in India routinely waste money at restaurants, money that would feed a poor family for months, is a daily reality.
While her heart is in the right place, Rupa's immaturity as a writer, her lack of a world-view that integrates these problems of existence, lets the reader down. She works with familiar facts but is unable to transform them by illuminating the unseen connections.
While Rupa tells her story in simple sentences, her attempt at transparent storytelling is marred by awkward phrases such as "the chilly November evening did not need a fan", "sad shrivel", "finishing touches on the woman's makeup", "her appetite had been going down", "moved at the pain" which occur throughout the book.
In the end, Rani asserts her skills as a beautician, the exploited working to beautify the face of the ugly exploiter, but one does not greet this news with the sense of despair that perhaps the writer intended one to feel. "It's easier to start stories than to end them," declares Rani, leaving the disappointed reader a victim of her inadequacy.