Beware of fresh authors
There is a second rule, only valid for NRI writers suffering from homesick weekends. If your unique rites of passage piece is about Ma's idli-sambhar and Aunty Ginni's nubile 17-year-old daughter, stop right there. Pick up your wallet, go to the corner Bangladeshi takeway for some korma-roti and find yourself a girlfriend. Please, please don't write a book about it.
Jaideep Prabhu is 29, grew up in Bangalore, is a Roman Catholic, lives and works in Europe and this is his first novel. Now take a deep breath and get ready to look surprised. His hero Jawahar Shastri is 25, works in Banglalore, is a Roman Catholic and lives at home with a wheelchair-bound mother and a government servant father who grunts behind his newspaper. He broods about his failure to love his parents, questions his religion and stares at girls.
The book has an odd, old-fashioned feel. It reads like those 1950s novels by Indian authors where they filled the pages with endless, exhausting details of life in quaint colonial India. As if sentimental trivia could compensate for lack of substance. So we have four pages about taking a scooter rickshaw to the railway station, two pages about bathing with Lifebuoy soap, a few more about eating chow mein. For all the mountain of minutiae, no true portrait of Jawahar's life reality emerges.