This novel is anchored in an imagined India that has been left partly feudal and partly republican by the departing British. We are in oil-rich Sheerpur, an independent princely state in Rajasthan, somewhere along Pakistan’s border. Bindy, a young woman raised in an orphanage in the south, arrives to take up employment as the personal assistant to the feisty, foul-mouthed and scheming Princess Riddhima.
She has barely settled down at her job before she is kidnapped and subsequently raped by the heir to the throne. She loses her virginity but takes that in her stride. Bindy is enchanted by the opulence of the palace and the lifestyle of its occupants. At the same time, she is repulsed by the shenanigans of the debauched royalty. Meanwhile, the rapist has cast a spell on Bindy and keeps appearing in her erotic dreams.
There is a subplot involving an expat, Adam Addison, who believes that an ancient order of beautiful yoginis have been recruited to assassinate the crown prince. The pathetic chap is completely out of his depth in these surroundings.
Ahlawat’s masala novel is a heady mix of sex, glamour, decadence, duplicity and intrigues in a land where beds are made of solid gold to help “a wilting problem”. The preposterous plot could have worked if only the author had kept it simple and curbed her display of wordplay and vocabulary. I cannot remember when I last read a book so overloaded with adjectives and adverbs, not to mention convoluted sentences.
One should be supportive of a debutant novelist, but what to say of verbal diarrhoea of this sort: ‘Sudhakar followed in Riddhiraj’s swaggering wake down the shiny marble steps and onto the graveled driveway where various liveried servitors waited behind rows of Rolls Royces and Maybachs plastered liberally with sundry coat of arms.’
