Naked in the Wind – Brinda Charry

It almost seems eerie that I read this book given the recent religious strife in Orissa. It also received the Golden Quill Awards this year. An interesting book, I liked it. Scout’s honour, I was definitely not intrigued by the fact that as a boy I stayed on Campbell Road. It had nothing to do with my being drawn to it.

So the setting for this novel is Campbell Road. Given the clues like The Hindustan Tobacco Factory, Thoms Bakery, Gymkhana Grounds, the Railway Track, Ulsoor Lake among other things this is somewhere in North Bangalore. The locality has a mixed group of residents like Anglo Indians and Tamilians. There is Joe retired from the Railways, his wife Marie and their teacher daughter Kathy. There is the Iyengar family of Shanti, her daughter dentist Priya and her son Vivek who is a techie. Shanti’s mother in law Jamuna and her son Rangan stay in the next street. As in most such localities there are the odd characters like the self appointed morality keeper Daisy Noronha, the wilful maid Rani, the flirtatious fruit vendor Basheer, the crazy vagabond girl Railway Track. Brinda lays the setting very well and any long time Bangalorean will identify with Campbell Road. She also uses real events and instances to give it that sense of realism – the attacks on catholic nuns in Madhya Pradesh, the nalle ba ghost scare, Rajanikant’s movie Dalapati,etc.

The story hinges on one incident – the return of Shanti’s husband Vasu who walked away from his family fifteen years earlier. There is also the arrival of Anand, Vasu’s companion on the stage. This single event changes the lives of all the characters in some way. The opening of the circus is the second significant episode that sets the stage and the setting for the denoument. The narrative is from the perspective of the leading characters, all in first person and are like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle in progress. The good part of this structure is that it aids greatly in characterisation which definitely is Brinda’s strength. Characters that stand out are Kathy who is torn between her Anglo Indian heritage and her need to be accepted as any other Indian, Rani who lives by the carpe diem motto, Priya who cannot love and Shanti who has moments of clarity despite her drugged and imbalanced mental state. Jamuna the practitioner of the dark arts and the transvestite Sapna play out the role of the traditional sutradhar. Despite Vasu’s arrival  being the pivot, he is just a shadow. Anand, Vijay and Rangan are also chimera like throughout the book.

Brinda places the religious conflict between Christians and Hindus as the backdrop and that puts the cordial relations between the residents through severe strain. Her delienation of the Anglo Indian family is extraordinary – almost like Rohinton Mistry’s in-depth portrayal of the Parsis. She shows an admirable grasp of the fears and the insecurities of the community. However in contrast the Iyengar family is not as clearly painted out.

The narrative while interesting is also the undoing of the novel. The nuances of each character’s narrative is not distinct. Whether its the maid Rani, the educated Kathy or the dentist Priya, they all use the same idiom. One of the most jarring instances is when Jamuna explains the etymology of the word ‘terrible’ to Rani. Besides sometimes the narrative gets confusing as at times a particular speaker also describes intimate feelings of another character and this could have been avoided. For instance Sapna describes her foster daughter Aida’s innermost thoughts or Jamuna talks about something that Kathy or Marie is thinking. And this is disconcerting.

My rating two and a half on five.