Felines Too Can Be Fun

The back cover is entirely taken up with a large photograph of seven assorted holy menwith the author, centre-stage, strumming her acoustic guitar. The ash-smeared sadhu toher right looks suitably perplexed. The overall effect is Snow White and Seven Dwarfs onMTV Unplugged, leading you to expect the worst of the stories inside. The dippy, trippynaivete of the cover penetrates as far as the dedication and the opening poem but,thankfully, no further, and the writing itself is shot through with a welcome wry humour.

In The Visa , the snobbery and back-stabbing of the ladies’ weekly cardparty is wickedly and wittily dissected. For Ritu, one of the main characters, the cardparty is a social minefield, but "without going there, there was no way to find outwhich family was on the up and which down, where the best-dressed ladies were shopping,whose children had gotten into Modern School, and so on". When her husband announcesthat she’s to accompany him to the US for a conference, she’s thrown into aturmoil: it’s a snakes-and-ladders game where she can either shoot up the socialladder or slither to the bottom — everything rests on her getting a visa. "Thething (sic) people did to get a visa! The stories they invented, the bribes, and then theinterminable wait at the embassy, and the interview! A ghastly ordeal, having one’sentire life plucked apart by a foreigner, no less... Ritu trembled to think of it."

The ‘foreigner’ doing the plucking in this is Maura Moynihan herself,daughter of Daniel Moynihan, former US ambassador to India. Her life here clearly provided rich pickings for her cast of characters: the Shanti Path brigade of expats and visa-stampers, the Amrika returned and greencard wannabes, the five-star jet- setters, the kitty party felines and their fatcat husbands, and, not least, the servants upon whose labour this entire merry-go-round twirls.

The clash of those two circles — servants and their masters and their mistresses — is the subject of the second story, A Good Job in Delhi , in which Hari, a well-meaning servant, works for Bob Thompson who in turn works at the World Bank. The sudden invasion of Hari’s small, but ordered world, by the whirl of sexual activity and tunity which characterises Bob’s, throws him into a of confusion. Pulled and pushed by desire and duty; one minute, ally, the next, subordinate — it is by no means a smooth rite of passage. Moynihan manages to portray the ‘servant class’ in this tricky transition with sympathy and clear-sightedness, nor does she flinch from describing the potential harm wreaked by well-meaning white liberals.

The one-upmanship of Ritu and her Delhi kittycats is no more cut-throat than thatdisplayed by the followers of a charismatic but dying guru in Masterji . Rich,vain, unhappy, American Lucy joins other sundry firangs , plus a pair of preeningIndian royals, in their quest for enlightenment and to be Masterji’s ‘chosen one’. It’s not easy for a writer to capture the rapture of genuine spiritual feeling without becoming either mawkish or glib. Treading where even literary heavyweights like Anita Desai have come a cropper, Moynihan’s light-footedness carries her across.

Unlike many new writers who enter literary marathons before they can toddle, Moynihanhas, sensibly, set herself modest aims and she achieves them with considerable grace.