?The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance,? Aristotle once said. And Tishani Doshi seems quite an artist, as her debut novel, The Pleasure Seekers, dwells in the thoughts and inward reflections of its characters and not just in the external. This semi-fictional family saga, inspired by the not-less-than-miraculous love story of Doshi?s parents, her Welsh mother and her Gujarati father, is a thoroughly pleasant, gentle and certainly pleasurable tribute to their lives and, of course, hers. The narrative is about Babo, a young man from Madras, and a gorgeous Welsh girl named Sian, the love of his life whom he meets in 1968 London. And thus ensues a bitter-sweet, and, indeed, a spicy tale of relationships and the hybrid Welsh-Gujju family, assimilating to satisfaction three decades and characters from four generations in just a little over 300 pages.
With bubbling humour under the surface, Doshi presents a canvas splashed with vivid colours of love, joy, cross-country relationships, childhood, growing up and the life of a family through the constant movement of time. Doshi?s love for the arts is reflected in the way she chooses to tell the story. Pristine metaphors, scenic and detailed description of 20th century Madras, Babo?s native village Ganga Bazar in Gujarat or the Welsh village of Nercwys and the thing that beats it all, the sheer simplicity of storytelling. The narrative reflects child-like innocence and honesty and elements of poetry from this award-winning poet?from ‘the house of orange and black gates’ to the ‘flying Fiat’ and from ‘sha-bing sha-bangs’ to the ‘tha-ra-rum-pum-pums’. Doshi charms the reader as she breezes with utmost ease in the skin of one character from that of another, regardless of colour, creed, generation and gender.
The book’s strength comes from the kind of space it provides to all characters and not just Babo and Sian. Babo’s grumpy father Prem Kumar and mother Trishala, younger brother Chhotu or his two sisters Meenal and Dolly and, of course, Babo and Sian’s daughters Mayuri and Bean?each character gets the space it rightfully deserves, with pages altogether devoted to their minds and hearts and the things they mull over. One character indispensable to the story is that of Babo’s grandmother Ba, who lives in the village of Ganga Bazar in Gujarat, with peacock feathers and red garoli lizards dotting the compound of her house. She is the anchor of the family, a loving, positive and mystical source of wisdom that is timeless and beyond conventions, a little too good to believe and digest. She can smell the arrival of any of her family members from far away, be it Babo’s ‘rain cloud and bakul smell’, or Bean’s smell of ‘spices and lolly ice, brass, sex, blood’. In terms of longevity of life, Ba gives a certain other Ba of Indian television a run for her money. However, while TV’s Ba was used more as a showpiece in a ridiculously stretched family soap, Doshi’s Ba has significant bearing on the narrative’s progression. She personifies that often romanticised, old, full-of-wisdom, central member of the great Indian parivar.
However, while the story attempts to take a close look at love, marriage, family and all that around it, somehow, the more tense moments and uneasy intricacies of marriage are conspicuous by their absence. It might be due to Doshi’s romanticism and fixation with her parents’ romance or her non-access to that domain of their lives, but it renders a sense of incomplete harmony. The other fixation in the story, if one may call it, is the on and off linking of instances in the story to events of national importance, for instance political assassinations. Except for the 2001 Bhuj earthquake that is crucial for the climax, others hardly have even an ounce of significance to the narrative.
While these links appear to be interesting in the early portions, repeated use of this ‘tool’ lends an irritant to the book. Also, while one can’t determine the extent of inspiration Doshi draws from her life and that of her family, the story seems to be a mix of how-it-really-was and how-it-should-have-been. But these considerations have to be confessed as retrospective afterthoughts. The Pleasure Seekers has pleasure written all over it?for the writer and for the reader.