?I guess there are all kinds of love stories,? Karan told Zaira now. She smiled in the liquid darkness. ?And the most important ones are also incredibly difficult.?
For those expecting a love story in our troubled times, they are spot on. Only the love is the opposite of straightforward, and the troubles are unending like Bombay?s monsoon rains. Justice, love, relationships, choices, the defiance of much of the norms that have come to define upper crust civil life in India, Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi?s second novel, The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay, comes nearly five years after the much feted The Last Song of Dusk. And overtly reflects causes that have affected the author meanwhile, perhaps more in the life around him.
Lost Flamingoes retains many of the qualities that made the earlier novel such a discussed one. The text is often purple, but has sublime sentences along the way that can lift your day. The descriptions are rich, detailed. ?She would lie with her head on his lap and tell him what she had seen in Chor Bazaar: the black kittens in the elephant howdah, the pewter vermilion holder for new brides, the brass monkey with its long tail curling in the air like a question mark.? Here too the voice is personal and the city is a markedly strong character. ?Seeking neither redress or truth, Karan only wanted to be touched briefly by the unhappiness that had made Malik so inanely cruel? In the end, he thought, the only justice we seek is justice for ourselves.?
But there is a greater passion here, a rage that ?goes through him like an aria.? There is love in the novel, amply, but it is suffused with a sense of loss. ?A youthful extravagance? is how the author had described his first novel. Well, this novel ?is inspired, in part, by a range of events discussed extensively in the print media, films and on television.? So around the young lives of Karan, an emerging star photographer, Samar, a pianist who spurned fame in his 20s ? he had started performing publicly before he reached his teens, Zaira, the leading lady of Bollywood, and Rhea, a potter-when-not-just-a- wife, whose love for Karan is hesitant ? unravel a series of events that have shaken civil life in India. There?s the Jessica Lal murder, transplanted to a new city, the justice trial system, right wing extremism, prejudices of heterosexuality, the interplay of sex and politics, the collision of the public and the private? There is a sense of political failure. The terror attacks would probably have figured too if he hadn?t finished writing by then. The replicas are uncanny, and Shanghvi is likely to lose some friends ? but probably they weren?t close to start with! There are some people who appear in the beginning, and are built up as if they would play important roles, but most disappear forever.
There is an attempt to relook at relationships. To see if meaningful ones can exist outside marriage. Our generation is learning that friendships will be a way of making life more meaningful, he said recently. On the downside, the protagonists? backgrounds are almost insertions in the novel, and for a reader familiar with the incidents, Leo?s supposedly passioned retelling of what afflicts Bombay, what Zaira refers to as ?Leo?s Modern India 101 lecture, is a monologue at once too long, too simplistic.
On the other hand, Bombay is undoubtedly the star. ?Where does anyone go from Bombay?? Rhea and Karan ponder at a point. The gaze is that of a photographer who seeks to chronicle Bombay ? an ?epic record of Bombay?, and it is no surprise that the search for beauty is omnipresent. The city he brings alive is the city of the aesthete. It acknowledges the presence of glass towers and clunky bars, but meanders lovingly through old mansions, ramshackle bazaars, Banganga, Prithvi Caf?, Kanheri Caves, Dadar bridge, the Worli Seaface? and of course the flamingoes of Sewri, drawn inexorably to the city and finding their own space in the teeming millions.
Banganga
Literally, Ganga created out of an arrow, supposedly shot by Laksman to quench his brother Ram?s thirst. Today the area has water tank surrounded by the Walkeshwar Temple Complex in Malabar Hill. What Karan can probably see is the temple from his rented accommodation, a rectangular pool structure surrounded by steps on all four sides and hundreds of people thronging the sweet water tank at most hours of the day. Home now also to the Banganga Festival, it is a cultural hub and fount for those trying to escape the city?s rampant material culture.
