Not many of those who read Babyji would have forgotten the vivid textual imagery or its 16-year old protagonist, Delhi schoolgirl Anamika Sharma. Abha Dawesar, in whose novels the cities have played probably as important a role as any character, returns to the city in Family Values. This is her first novel that is releasing in India before anywhere else. ?The need has been greater, Delhi is such a palpable character in the novel,? she says.
The novel is a harsh, unblinkered look at a Delhi family seen through the eyes of a young boy. ?It was hard for me to write this book. The palette of this book is black, white and grey. Stylistically it was a challenge.? Dawesar has shorn her text of any of the ?writer?s tricks,? building her tale within the microcosm of a family. There are no character names?The boy, Cousin, Mr Six Fingers, Mrs Cowdung, Sugar Mills, SSS, Psoriasis, Flunkie Junkie is what you have to get used to. There are hardly any descriptions. The language is terse, direct. ?To somehow handicap myself and keep connecting to the crux was really necessary.? Family is the prism through which she looks at the city and nation.
?All corruption stems from the love of one?s own, and we must not forget that.? ?We have a tendency to glorify things that are near to us. We have to go towards a direction where we do not have to flatter ourselves but progress to a deeper standard. We have to question all these things.?
And she admits that given that Indians are ?not a people with a revolutionary mindset, the resolution will be slow. The main danger is not that it is going to be slow but it may not be steady. There are already pockets in this country that are rocked by civil unrest and it might grow.?
This author, also an artist and photographer says ?it is hard to do anything else when I am writing. Art is less cerebral, and gives more immediate pleasure.? She is on to her next novel, where history and science play prominent roles. It will be based on all three of the locales she knows best ? Delhi, Paris and New York.
Flunkie Junkie shows up at Mother?s morning clinic when the boy is at school. Even in the haze of diacetylmorphine that suffuses every cell of his body he has the sense to remember that his father?s brother?s wife is a doctor. A female doctor. A female doctor who practices alone out of her hospital ward home in the morning hours… Flunkie Junkie even thinks to come towards the end of the morning clinic when it is likely that the young lady might be alone minus the brat who will be at school, but also, hopefully, minus too many hangers-on in the wheezing chamber waiting to consult her about their inane problems. His, on the other hand, are pressing.