Garam Masala!. Review on Impressionist, The - Hari Kunzru

I picked up this book from the library on a 3 week loan 9 weeks before I was to leave Bombay – forever! I never touched the book for the first term, got it extended and returned it untouched! However, the fascination caused by the hype surrounding this book made me ask for a re-issue, and this time, I started reading it. At first, I found it a stereotype masala story.

The story is conveniently set in the pre-independence India, when the colonial phirangs thought of the place as a holiday home across the ocean. It started with Forrester Sahib, a forest officer – his profession seeming eponymous to his name – moved on to Amrita and a flooded sweaty night with Forrester, then to Amrita’s marriage with Pt Razdan, and stopped at Pran Nath Razdan, Amrita’s son. But if you think Pran Nath Razdan is supposed to be The Impressionist of the novel, then you’re awfully wrong! Man, how can a writer be so ruthlessly insensitive about his own creation, his own characters? Hari Kunzru gets Pran Nath Razdan thrown out of the house once Pandit Razdan discovers the ‘un-belonging’ of his son to him, and dies of shock.

Once the ‘all English looking not-so English sounding’ princeling Pran is out on the streets, free to beg, nobody pays heed to him, except an other beggar who guides him to a brothel which supplies eunuchs to the Nawabs of India. From this place on, Pran’s life turns out to be interestingly fast and versatile – from a eunuch – Rukhsana, to a Bombay punter Pretty Bobby to an all English reincarnation of Jonathan P Bridgeman. Jonathan P Bridgeman can be a set standard in order to measure how English you can be!

The story here takes a romantic twist, when Astarte Chapel enters Jonathan’s Oxford University – Barabbas College life. It swirls around in the air for a while with the help of the grapevine and Astarte’s specialty flirting imported straight from Paris. Astarte Chapel leaves Jonathan poorly heart bled when she stabs him with the news that she loves a black man called Sweety, and that she can not think of living with an Englishman all her life! Jonathan now feels a complete lack of the purpose of his existence, and his life goes berserk!

Kunzru ends the novel poorly stranding out Jonathan on a camel somewhere around Fotseland in Africa, in one of his inexplicable, new masala reincarnations. Undoubtedly, then novel is not at all predictable, even when it reaches its end, but it lacks the smoothness in linking the characters and events, and the incongruous blocks manage to fit in together only roughly.

A good read, if you have enough time, but it would take a while for the story to grow on you. Moreover, it also leaves the reader a little lost, because when you start liking Pran, sympathize with him, Rukhsana comes in, and later Pretty Bobby and so on. The heartbreaking ceremony of Jonathan Bridgeman is the most likeable event of the novel, no matter however bad I sound!

Try it, you might just like it! Good to see, nice to hold…:-)