A BOOK VERY MUCH LIKE TINDER
Sharma’s new book require the reader to suspend all disbelief
Abody is found hanging from the tree in the garden of an old age home in Goa and it gives the bored residents something to do. The premise is a good one and with a series of publications behind her, Bulbul Sharma’s book promises to be a good airport read. And then it turns into one of those bizarre Tinder-date type experiences, which looking back makes you wonder why you went through with it. Tinder sets out a perfectly straightforward premise. It is an unfussy dating app and if you hook up with someone on it you can expect a good, clean onenight stand with no complications. The book is in that space or at least that is how it’s presented. And then like a man who knows nothing about foreplay but artlessly drops his clothes and expects you to be impressed just by the fact of his existence, Bulbul Sharma presents a cast of characters that do nothing to your imagination. The most cliched in the book are the two Russian characters, Yuri and Olga. You don’t know much about them except that they do drugs, are mixed up with the mafia and dream of getting rich or getting laid or both. “Olga… had to wash her hands at least twenty times a day. She was afraid of catching an infection in India if her hands became dirty,” Sharma writes. To round off, she adds – “Once she got this idiot to marry her, she could flee to England and she would not have to wash her hands any more.”
The back story of the other Russian is more entertaining mostly because of the adjectives: “The war had ended long ago, taking his father and uncles in its cruel, bloodthirsty jaws, but the people of Russia were still starving. Yuri’s mother had brought him and his younger brother to the old hut that had once belonged to her parents, who were both dead – killed by bandits who had stormed the country, looting and murdering people. They thought they would starve to death, but suddenly everything became alright…”
By this point, you decide to read the book out of basic politeness to yourself for having bought it. I urge you to power on as you would if you were watching any Rajnikant film. Suspension of disbelief has the ability to transport you out of any emotional state and on this, the book does deliver.
My favourite scenario appears at the end of the book: “Before she hit the ground she threw a handful of chilli powder in the air. It made a rainbow of red, orange and crimson as it flew in an arc over the car. Her head hit the ground…” Here’s another: “‘Oh! Good. He is alive.’ Prema pulled his toe again. ‘Have some amla juice, Yuri.’ ”
And then for the aficionados, there is the romantic-bizarre. This one makes me envious because it can only happen in Sharma’s magic-real prose. “The trees smiled down at them and the frogs croaked suddenly, as if they were offering congratulations.” Some of the descriptions will produce a sensory potpourri unlike anything on or off Tinder. “The little van hiccupped, breaking the afternoon silence.” And also, this. “When we brown people die you can tell at once but one can never be sure with these foreigners.” There are many precious moments where you feel like Sharma must have been inspired by Keats’s Ode to A Nightingale and lines such as, “beaded bubbles winking at the brim.” What she wrote instead was: “A chandelier with pieces of shining glass leaves winked at her from the ceiling.” There are moments in the first half, where Sharma starts an interesting thought on the macabre way in which a murder brings purpose back into some lives. If only she had rounded off her characters and not reduced Goa to cliches and little nuggets of Wikipedia-type inserts of information, this could have been a gripping book. Now, it is entertaining for the wrong reasons as, “life shimmered in front of her like a mountain.” Bulbul Sharma may never have been on Tinder. But I have and I can absolutely swear that this is what it feels like. A bit shimmery with a few grunts thrown in.