Between now or never – Review of DANGLE by Sutapa Basu
Thrillers, I had written in some earlier post, are not just about guns and grenades, but about the impact of the battles of minds. The mind creates a thriller if it really wants to… and this is what Sutapa Basu has done in Dangle. She has managed to do what Indian writers haven’t attempted so far as these mind battles were written about in the West. And let me add here that she has cleverly woven a travelogue around it all. So the reader gets to travel from one end of the world to the other because Ipshita ‘spent time and effort to research and develop a unique travel chat. It was a new idea. There were hardly any precedents, so Ipshita had to rely on her instinct and meticulous market survey to fine-tune it.’
What I loved as I read the initial pages was the way Sutapa goes on to prove that India is no less than any other place. She laments that Chicago, where ‘city skyscrapers were of all sizes and shapes. Some rose like monuments while others like the John Hannock Center were like peaked pyramids…’ is just as striking as Delhi as it too ‘has equally fascinating architecture. Its significance dates back to the second century BC. Yet, we do not showcase it in this way. Why not? I must dig into it…’ She does and gives us some fascinating descriptions of our own North-East before letting her protagonist hop to other destinations in the Far East.
The book is as much about the way we travel and also the way our mind travels into the unknown. Dangle is the right choice if you believe that life is so much like living within cubicle within cubicle within cubicle of the self and that what imprisons you is your own mind… because Ipshita is just that. Or is she? She navigates the world with a mind that is just as fond of roving. She sees ‘a burst of stars lit up the sky’ and looks up ‘in wonder. Glittering sparks showered down blinding her. They went out, one by one. Darkness returned. She was alone but not lonely.’ And this is precisely what defines the novel. Read this book and you’ll know what I mean when I say that life is a dialogue between what others hear and what is audible only to you. The book is an emotional convergence of the stubborn intent to look for the right partner with a realisation that is obvious to all but Ipshita… all until ‘her emotions did not stop there. There was a storm raging within her. She was struggling to accept that Adi had become more than “just” a friend.’
As I read the book page after page even I realised how everything simply ‘dangles up there between success and failure’ and that ‘falling down is part of life, but getting up is living. And one is alone through it all. Always. Utterly, utterly alone! Nobody to catch if one falls. Nobody, except oneself…’ To get trapped by the whimsical notions of our mind is more difficult than to get out of them. And we, the readers, travel with Ipshita as her mind stumbles on to one relationship after another… but her subliminal trauma is actually offset by all the beauty and wonder that she gets to see of the real world!
‘In the most unexpected places, I discover a touch of lyric that colours people no matter how drab otherwise their lives may be. It carries the gift of special awareness, makes one sensitive to beauty, passionate about life… exactly what appeals to me.’
Let me hurry up and add here that the novel isn’t a text-book like inquisition into the psychosomatic universe but a tale of a girl discovering the world that lies outside the imagined world. A well-told tale of a mind that traverses the distance between confusion about what is real and what isn’t to a life where the mists have lifted and clarity dawns. A tale that weaves through incidents with expressions and writing prowess that will be remembered and quoted. A tale that expertly informs a reader that ‘serenity can be a treacherous dangle!’ A tale that takes place in the real world as much as it exists in a world created by the mind.
Sounds complex? Well, no, the tale isn’t a complex web of terms that will fox a reader but one that actually pulls attention to how it is for all of us. Even I am forever imagining stories that are not necessarily happening in the real world around me… though Ipshita is a bit different. She finds her mind’s ramblings ‘so riveting that it was difficult to believe that it was not real! She glanced at the tumbled bed for a second and was still. A large wet patch spread across the sheets exactly where her hips had rested.
Oh God! Did I have a wet dream? With Akash?’
The part where Akash enters is like a surreal walk into the zone that we are yet to understand completely and Ipshita realises this and wonders: ‘No! No! No! This is lust… not making love. Where is love in all this? It’s Adi I love! Who is this man? I don’t love him. I don’t even know him! With whom was I losing it all? O God! What have I been doing? I am mad…’
Well, Akash is one of the characters who exists and yet doesn’t in a way and he is the one who even tells her mind that ‘life is always a dangle! Between now or never; between this or that; between being and not being; life is how you see it, do it, take it.’
Does Ipshita finally realise that ‘life is how you see it, do it, take it’ can have more interpretations than what she has been diving into? It is difficult for me to answer this question as such answers are to be realised and cannot really be understood if they are served on a platter. Reading this book just might help you get nearer to them.
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Book details:
Title: DANGLE
Author: Sutapa Basu
Publisher: Readomania
ISBN: 9789385854019
Price: Rs 250/- (in 2016)
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Book review of DANGLE written by Sutapa Basu
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Buy this book here:
AMAZON: Dangle
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Arvind Passey
10 February 2016
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This blog post is inspired by the blogging marathon hosted on IndiBlogger for the launch of the #Fantastico Zica from Tata Motors. You can apply for a test drive of the hatchback Zica today.
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