Awful place, no?" Madhavi Iyer tells her baby as they drive into Delhi. Sagarika Ghose's The Gin Drinkers paints the city vividly as it tells of its "liquid colonialism". The warp of its violent history is woven into the woof of contemporary academia, equally cut-throat because knowledge is power. And if the weak are to be empowered, power must be stolen, literally, from the hands of those who have it. Easier when those manicured hands are wrapped around their gin glasses.
This is the background against which the story unfolds. All too slowly, alas, and with too many of the characters remaining adjectives: sneaky Dhruv, honest Madhavi, aged Pamela, sincere Shantanu, sozzled Anusuya. Mixed-up Uma, foreign-educated, returns to her homeland to find herself still a wanderer. Columbia-based Madhavi returns to make a bid for the post of director at a new foundation. Dhruv, her contemporary and erstwhile lover, is the other contender. Pamela, their beloved teacher and retiring director, must decide. Then there's a child called Tomatokutty, and assorted New Men: Madhavi's much-younger babysitting friend, Deekay, and faraway husband, Peter the Wimp; Uma's too-near but not-quite-boyfriend, Sam; and mysterious Jai Prakash.
The message is relentlessly with us. The struggle for the foundation; the silent kitab chors; and Pamela's final effort to appease a group that has so far only been exploited as raw material, instead of being liberated from this role, freed to interpret their own lives and histories. The harmless, well-meaning helplessness of the academicians, who ought to know more than anyone else that education is the only real liberation. There is a certain naivete about the way Pamela hands over the foundation and its future. What we call overcompensation is perhaps the subtlest way in which privileges are rationalised. It seems like a noblesse oblige on Pamela's part; but Jai Prakash's hesitant English is also contrived, and we see another kind of heady vulgarity replace the old honesty. Ignorance is forgivable, vulgarity forgivable but intellectual hypocrisy unforgivable: these are black-and-white. But the theft of books is a means-and-ends problem: hard to condone, even harder to condemn.
The prose is swift, fresh, often witty, occasionally vicious, nicely contemporary. Very Delhi, with a compelling, restless energy. The observations are terse but telling: Christine's in-your-face activism, Madhavi's brisk mothering, Pamela's exhaustion, her maid's gentle fussing. But the bits of commentary, sometimes insightful, sometimes just truisms, give the prose an uneven quality. And Bhilai's not in Bihar but in Madhya Pradesh; Shravan, coming in July-August, is not Spring.
These are minor faults in an entertaining novel. From distant Mumbai, one can afford to sidestep the cryptic crossword puzzle of characters' real-life identities. Speculative efforts to identify the bindis, big and small, would seem rather an effete indulgence, begging the question: so what?
So, if candy is dandy but liquor quicker, then gin, I'd say, is definitely in, even if my cup doesn't always runneth over.
And, er, breasts quivering "like upright kulfis", is Pretty Bad Sex.
