Mixing The 'Moshola'

Tamarind Men, Mango-Coloured Fish, Banana-Flower Dreams - is it just me or is anyone else wondering whether Penguin's authors are permanently hungry? To do Bulbul Sharma justice, there is a reason why she chose this title for a book about several generations of Bengali women: the banana-flower's considered a delicacy in Bengal, but its wonderful flavour is offset by the fact that it's very difficult to prepare.

So the humble banana-flower's doing double duty in the title - it's a reminder of the intricate joys in a woman's life, and of the kind of painstaking, unrewarding labour that only a woman would do willingly. There's also a third, usually unacknowledged, function performed by this kind of title - it's a signal that what's about to be served up is unadulterated exotica.

The contents of Sharma's fourth book and first novel are faithful to the label. The narrative sprawls across several generations, chronicling the fortunes of a Bengali family over the centuries through the eyes of its womenfolk. Some of the narrators - Neelima and her granddaughter Pia among them - are alive; some, like Shamili, Mejo and Sejo, are dead but retain a ghostly interest in the proceedings; one is neither, being a resident of Pia's womb under constant threat of eviction. Each has distinct, and interesting, stories to tell, though the narrative thread is provided by Pia's return to India, pregnant and torn between heading for the nearest abortionist and choosing between two singularly unlovely suitors.

Taking on six generations is an awesome task - in the hands of a Galsworthy or Seth, it would've yielded nothing less than a four-volume saga. But Sharma endeavours to pack everything into 297 pages, with hugely mixed results. The cast of characters is added to at bewildering speed. Shamili's maid Khendi, Mauni Baba, Pareshnath and his yen for nubile boys, the oily-haired yoga master and the effeminate Bobby - the introductions are so brisk that we've barely gotten to know them before the last chapter is upon us. The constant shuttling between narrators leaves the reader in a state of terminal confusion. Over the course of the book, Mejo and Sejo, the bullying elderly aunts, acquire an identity of their own, as do Pia, her unborn baby and to an extent, Neelima. The rest remain a blur.

Reading this book is a lot like being forcibly sucked into a gathering of related Bengali matrons. It's extremely entertaining and the stories are touching, even heartrending - but the noise, the confusion and the impossibility of separating one aunt's tragic tale from another's almost outweigh the pleasures. Sharma's at her best creating small portraits out of telling details, and every so often, it's this gift that breaks through to create pockets of magic.

The scene where Mejo and Sejo pretend to be ghosts, mouthing lines from a classic Bengali collection of fairy tales called Thakurmar Jhuli (Grandmother's Treasury) to scare the child bride Shamili into premature labour, is drawn superbly. The grumbling of Pia's baby every time her mother-to-be throws up is hilarious in patches, as are Monimala's deathbed complaints about the quality of the funeral that's likely to be offered to her. Sharma manages to capture the bewilderment of a child bride, as well as the helpless bumbling of a child groom who knows that he's expected to do something, but hasn't the foggiest idea what it is. The squabbling between the various ghosts is deftly drawn too, a witty echo of the power struggles and cherished grievances that occupied them when they were alive.

Inexorably, Banana-Flower Dreams stumbles towards a theatrical ending, complete with visitations from Devi Mata and ghostly interventions, that's taken straight out of the melodramatic corpus of a jatra. In the end, the title's prophetic. There's a fine dish in here somewhere, delicately spiced, celebrating the exotic in everyday life. But the reader has to work too hard and suffer too much tedium to really enjoy it.