In perfect symmetry

In perfect symmetry
Review of ‘In the light of darkness’ by Radhika Maira Tabrez

Any book that talks of books is a book I love. Any tale that makes imagination seem real is a tale that must be read. Fiction that touches a chord in your heart is the real fiction. There will obviously be places where a writer may opt for easier ways to express but then if there is symmetry between truth and imaginary truth, those are things that can be explained as a reader’s right to disagree.

‘In the light of darkness’ meanders at an easy pace between relationships that friends, spouses, lovers, and even strangers experience at some time or the other. Radhika Maira Tabrez weaves a tale around Manav, Vidushi, Meera, Susan, Deena, Col Bindra, Suhana, and Arun Thakur in a way that makes reading fiction worthwhile. This is one tale that thinkers may even call some sort of a whitepaper on the way destiny acts. After all, if this were not to be the case, why would Meera, whose ‘father owned business in a town called Pali in Rajasthan, her mother worked in a bank’ land in Bydore to be seen as one who is initially unwilling to even touch moments that belong to her past. The book goes from rejection to leisurely glide through phases where the final outcome is acceptance, is what the author is dealing with. This is far more difficult than it really appears because the characters at either end of these phases are different. To walk a bit deeper into the plot, Susan finds a ‘similarity between her and Meera’s life. They both had made the same mistake; falling for the devil.’ And then there is Matthew who, as we later learn, is Susan’s son, and is struggling with ‘the little flakes all around him befogging his view; and he stood right in the middle, unable to see, unable to move, just waiting for everything to settle down.’ And all the characters who matter must reach Bydore for relationship tangles to be sorted out.

Destiny beckons, as it did way back in the early 1900s when Susan’s grandfather ‘who worked for the British had moved to Bydore’ and I’m sure there must be a trunk-load of ‘stories about the history of Bydore and the Pereiras’ though this is one part that the author has possibly left for some future book. I’d have loved to read a few of those stories and also about ‘the Inglis, the Island’s original tribal inhabitants’ and would not have objected to their being there even allowing the mainstay of the story to continue revolving around Meera and Matthew. This would certainly have made the novel jump a few notches up and into the literary genre.

What isn’t there is as vital as what is there… and the one thing that made me feel restless and fidgety was the unfaltering appearances of words that left me looking for a dictionary. And so words like expiation, evidentiary, menagerie, nemesis, epiphanous, grandiloquence, capitulation, effulgence, asunder, coalesced, mordant, innuendo, juggernaut, senescent, narcissistic, quagmire, harangued, miasma, requiem, cataclysm, catatonic, dysphoria, dolour, and purport are quite unlike the more easily understood words like lucid, ornate, pristine, blithely, charade, mortified, demeanour, excruciating, continuum, altruistic, indiscernible, stoically, taciturn, cacophony, flummoxed, culpability, and humongous… and believe me, they are all there. I guess it is a wonderful experience for a section of readers who are looking forward to improving their vocabulary and so they are indeed fulfilling a role. However, I feel that a pompous sounding word is just an easy escape that an author looks for… but I’m sure there must be better ways to create the right image in the mind of a reader than one word striding in and announcing, ‘Now you must do some work and see how I fit in here!’

This easy escape isn’t only with words because when I read about ‘Ailanthus excelsa trees, more commonly known as the Tree of Heaven’ I was actually expecting more. Unfortunately, I do not have the knowledge of a botanist and I did not have the foggiest idea as to whether this tree is tall or short, and what shape did the leaves have to make people call it a tree of Heaven… and so I had to reach out for Goodle… oops… Google!

Let me add here that Radhika loves playing with words and phrases and so frivoling, snappishly, pertinacity, ‘scarf down two, sometimes three books each weekend‘, the inclusion of attraversiamo, an Italian word that means let’s cross over are simply brilliant.

As I have mentioned earlier, the book refers to the readers a lot of interesting books and this is one little inclusion that will certainly help them. And I was simply joyous when I read that the author endorses the superiority of ‘real’ books over their e-versions because ‘a book somewhere dies, every time you read something on that silly thing of yours… you know that, right?’ I completely agree with the author when she makes one of her characters say that ‘the scent of its senescent paper, feeling the weight of the wisdom it dispenses on one’s palms, running the fingers across the words to let their meaning seep in through one’s skin…’ is what allows us all to remain madly in love with printed books. So what if ‘a tree somewhere dies; quite literally… every time you read things your way’… and come on, we already have researched many other ways to make paper than felling trees. And, by the way, re-planting and re-generating forests are as important to society as demonetisation is to an economy.

The novel reaches out and touches a reader lovingly. For some reason, the tale made me feel that despite all the wrongs in life there is something good on the other side of the spectrum and gives life its perfect symmetry. This feeling of being desired is so much like ‘the characters of his books that would stay up with him all night, when he would be too homesick to sleep. They would snuggle up next to him, to comfort him when the shadows from the trees outside would shift on the walls, scaring him.’ It is nice that Readomania decided to publish this book.

Book details:

Name: In the light of darkness
Author: Radhika Maira Tabrez
Publisher: Readomania
ISBN: 9789385854170
Price: Rs 250/- (in 2017)

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In the light of darkness_Radhika Maira Tabrez. Publisher – Readomania

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Buy this book on Amazon: In the Light of Darkness
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Arvind Passey
10 February 2017