OF BOMBAY AND KARACHI
Set in 1991, Tanya Tania, an epistolatory novel featuring girls growing up in uncertain times, is a moving read about a “bullshit people”
THE YEAR IS 1991.
Boys in Tanya Talati’s class in Karachi are getting death threats. Her brother has been packed off to their grandparents’ house in Murree after someone came knocking at 3 am and left his weekly schedule scribbled on a sheet of paper, by the hour, by the day, with the doorman. In Bombay, Tania Ghosh finds that exciting because all that is happening in India is a cross-country chariot race by “a guy called Advani”.
“...he says we should stop apologising for being Hindu. He’s got a point, why should we apologise for being Hindu? I’m not going to. Except I’ve never actually heard anyone apologise for being Hindu,” she writes to Tanya.
Tanya and Tania are born into privilege. Tanya lives in Clifton in Karachi and Tania in Breach Candy in Bombay. Their mothers went to Wellesley College together. Tanya, who is half-American, is nursing a sports injury and on her mother’s suggestion decides to write to Tania. About life in school, about the American colleges she would be applying to, and if life in Bombay is anything like in the movies. Tania isn’t ambitious – at least not in the sense of making it to Harvard. She is brash, outspoken, impulsive, emotional - “a stupid, kind heart” who doesn’t believe in the “the crappy stuff” that the poor can’t be “cool”. But her life is neatly divided into those who bore and those who don’t.
To kill the loneliness of their lives, they confide in each other, the stories of shame and pride, the stories of love and hate, the stories of ambition and drudgery, the sto- ries of people – the other-halves across who are just as sane or insane. The same “bullshit people”. The two end up exchanging 67 letters between February 1991 and December 1992 - baring their hearts till Tania’s parents’ dining table fights - what Akbar did right to what Aurangzeb did wrong - spill onto the streets of India and culminate in the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. It’s a traumatic time for both girls. Tania is no longer the most popular girl in school, her boyfriend has told everyone he has had sex with her, she has announced to her mother that she doesn’t want to study in America. And Tanya, in between taking care of her mother who now cries all the time, has to worry about depleting family finances, worry about getting a full scholarship to America.
It is difficult not to get affected by the girls’ letters - written in long hand, from a time when it took an average of 10 days to get letters across the border, on stolen leaves from a father’s letterhead, or on the back of grocery lists. Tania’s brashness hits hard. She can’t understand why her parents are constantly fighting over the BJP being good or bad for the business community when their own daughter’s life is being destroyed in school - “Stupid BJP, stupid Congress, my parents should have them for children.”
Antara Ganguli’s novel is full of spunk. She succeeds in capturing the unlikely friendship between two girls divided by borders, killing stereotypes with panache. Somewhere in there, this is a story of hope. Of a future. Of peace. Ganguli says so in her acknowledgements, “Thank you Bombay and Karachi for being the beautiful, ugly, horror-ridden, life-giving cities that you are, stubbornly holding on to the banks of the grey Arabian, promising everything, giving everything and taking everything. No riot will destroy you and no one idea will overpower you. Here’s to you and here’s to the children who grow up in you.” After turning the last page, you worry about what becomes of the girls. But you know they will fare well because they share the same gene pool. Of a “bullshit people”. Lamat R Hasan is an independent journalist. She lives in Delhi.