This book tells me that even when ‘every inconvenient truth, every wrinkle has been smothered’, life can twist and turn in ways that can transmute a delicate Murano wine glass into an aluminum bowl in a jail cell… just as it has transformed Kamini Pratap Singh, a ‘girl from the dingy gullies of Varanasi’ to‘learn such blue-blooded mannerisms’ and that she is on the verge of an ambitious political conquest. The book is a thrilling concoction of candid inputs from the world of politics, media, big business, gangsters and criminals, celebrities, and even a national contest to discover a singing sensation… with everything layered in the format of time-release chapters that keep the intrigue alive right up to the last page.
Kanchana Banerjee, while writing Nobody’s Child has created a plot that seems, at first glance, simple enough, but then accelerates into a gradually darkening world of the way things happen in the interstitial spaces of pushy minds that believe they know how to handle life. I believe she does this by giving each character that matters, a chance to narrate the story from their own perspective… and this leads to stunning results that are way beyond a mere creative interpretation of the filth and gore that invariably lurks behind expensive lifestyles. The story is partly about Asavri, a ‘twit from nowhere’ and a ‘dull-as-tap-water girl’ who transforms ‘into a nightingale, singing in a voice that seemed to emanate from somewhere deep inside her’ winning the title of Indian Koel, and then presumably dies in an accident, who finally turns out to be alive! The story is as much about how and why Avniel, ‘the floundering reporter, who didn’t even have a decent column to his name’becomes‘a bestselling author’ or even Monty, a lowly criminal, who tells Asavri how he got his name: ‘Bhai found me in a plastic bag with ‘Monty Fashion’ written on it. He decided to name me after the name on the bag he found me in, tossed in the garbage dump. Nobody wants me’. The story is also about Kamini, ‘the most talked-about MLA in the state assembly; the voice of the ruling party’ who does 107 surya namaskars every day to remain ‘one shapely ass that requires a lot of work to stay that way’ and knows in her mind that ‘men want her and women want to be like her’. These characters, let me admit, effectively manage to create eruptions that shatter more than just a handful of myths about success and fame every time they come across each other… and even when they are far apart, assessing the state they are in. I’d love to assume that these characters knew in their hearts that Kanchana Banerjee could be trusted to make them do everything that will make their story as breathtaking as one can imagine a tale to be. I write this because as a reader even I was, at times, wondering at the uncanny twists and turns in the narrative that left all my conjectures gasping for breath. But then this is exactly the sort of mix that thrillers are made up of.
What is striking about this book is that the author has created characters that are as real as humans and so we have even the vilest characters reaching out to assist… though they are inevitably back to their old ways. The characterization is complete in many ways and the author doesn’t unrealistically force readers to simply hate or helplessly love anyone. After all, Kamini from Kachori Gully whose home ‘was a pigsty. Small, smelly, sunless and, most of all, poor. Everything in life has a smell… poverty has a stench… of sweat, neglected dirty gutters and, worst of all, of failed dreams or the lack of dreams altogether’ is still palpably a woman who could see ‘beneath Asavri’s placidity, I saw a younger me, with an aching desire, characterized by the same hungry look, to win and leave behind the shadows of a past that had given her nothing’. We have Monty, the limping lowly henchman of Bhai, known to sit quietly in a corner ‘when the other men rape the hapless girls they lure into the ring, this suar records it on his mobile and then sells it’ is still someone who keeps ‘a small glass jar and it holds the twig of a money plant’ because it reminds him of Asavri who he believes he loves. Monty even tells her Bhai’s secret recipe of appleseed-poisoning when he tells her not to ‘chew the seeds. They are poisonous… a whole bunch together is deadly cyanide. Bhai taught me that’. Even Avniel who ‘just can’t keep promises’ and is forever ‘forgetting too much, too often’, remembers seemingly forgettable needs of Asavri when he realizes that they may help her get back her confidence to live.
If readers assume that gory crime and scenes where shooting others at point-blank range or barbarically gang-raping and then slashing breasts of women or criminals hacking the bodies of their victims into small pieces to throw in a tank full of acid can only be written by male writers, they will be surprised how well Kanchana has tackled this challenge. The author has converted even intentions to kill into a fine art and one shudders to read how Kamini looks at ‘the juicy fat olive in my Martini struggling to stay afloat that gave me (her) the idea’ of how she would drown her tai from Varanasi. This book, however, is far more than petty crime or petty ambitions… this one is about strong personalities who ‘always believed that everything in life can be fixed. There’s no problem that can’t be fixed.’ The author has indeed written a thriller that pierces deep through the façade of a lot of things that create headlines and the aam junta never gets to know the sordid truth that invariably surround many such high-octane happenings and generally like to believe that ‘high temperatures, sweat and a disaster don’t make a pleasant cocktail’. Indeed, the book isn’t a pleasant cocktail as it reflects the way things can be many times… and this can be rather unnerving.
The other day I saw someone walking with a mug of coffee and someone else bumping into him, spilling the beverage. Now if you assume that coffee spilled because someone bumped into someone, you’re wrong as coffee spilled because there was coffee in the mug! There was every probability of tea spilling… or even beer or plain water. ‘Nobody’s Child’ is clearly about life watching people bump into each other and spilling secrets that they were holding. In this tale the spill includes a lot of skeletons in closets, pretensions, masked intentions, and even nasty designs. Life finds a way… it always does, and in this book it adopts a gripping narrative.
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Details of the book:
Title: Nobody’s Child
Author: Kanchana Banerjee
Publisher: Harper Black
ISBN: 978-93-5357-130-6
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Arvind Passey
09 September 2020
