A story in search of a director, a novel crying out to become a film.
The venerable Bhaichand Patel’s first novel displays both grand romanticism and sorrowful fatalism. Here is the essential Indian tale of a small-town boy who makes good in Bollywood, climbing to vertiginous heights in the music industry, only to have the past catch up with him in vengeful retribution.
In the course of his hero Ravi’s encounters with the good, the bad and the ugly, Patel graphs the crosshairs of Indian society. The Bollywood dream machine is fuelled by sex, money and power, and the minuet of seduction and betrayal is played out at every step of the plot. The style has the texture and metaphor of a cinema hoarding, in that it is direct and vigorous and carries the subtexts of other scripts and stories, of the Katha Sarit Sagar of Indian cinematic narrative. The novel is also an evocative portrayal of the backend of the music industry, a subject the author knows and understands.
In a village in Himachal, by the banks of a fast-flowing river, the ill-starred hero, Ravi, is abandoned as a child by his beautiful mother, Radha. His leprosy-stricken father is left to fend for himself and his young son. The two have to grovel and beg for survival, until the terminally ill father is taken away to a hospice. A kindly schoolteacher and his wife adopt Ravi, but he runs away and begins a new life in Mumbai, crawling from the Dharavi slums to a beach house in Juhu, and determinedly onwards and upwards to a palatial mansion in south Mumbai. Every step of this journey is fuelled by the cold calculus of ambition.
There is a sense of crafted timelessness to this well-told tale. It carries the plaintive cadence of an old filmi song, perhaps from the black-and-white era. The femme fatales too have a charming retro appeal. Be it the voluptuous Radha, the sultry Dolly Rai, or the sleekly seductive Sandhya, all Bhaichand Patel’s women characters have a sterling Savita Bhabhi quality which sustains the Eastman color mood of mythic fantasy.
Mothers, Lovers and Other Strangers is a story in search of a director, a novel crying out to become a film. I hope to see it on the big screen, if not a pirated DVD, someday soon.