Review: The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay
Karan Seth, a photographer working in Bombay, decides that he wants to capture the essence of the city through his pictures. He receives the difficult assignment of photographing Samar Arora, a famous pianist who is incredibly private. He becomes friends with Samar and through him, is exposed to an entirely new side of Bombay, one with darkness and secrets, but also the lightness of being and joy of life.
Review:
I really wanted to like this book. I really, really did. I have been
following Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi’s career with interest and always found
him both intelligent and articulate in his guest appearances on television. So,
I tried my best to get into The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay, searching
desperately for a winning turn of phrase, a surprising plot twist, a blurring
of stereotypes. But about half-way into the book I gave up looking for some
redeeming qualities and concentrated on just getting through it.
This is a big book (or does it just seem like that when you’ve struggled for
a week to get through it?) in terms of the themes it attempts to tackle, in the
range and scope of the characters it attempts to flesh out. But it showcases a
very slight talent, one that wasn’t really up to the job of bringing all these
disparate elements together.
Surely, it takes a special sort of skill to take a story that gripped the
imagination of an entire nation ? the Jessica Lal murder trial ? and turn it
into a tale so tedious that is near-impossible to read through to the end.
But in the interest of fair reporting, I did just that. And boy, was it hard
going, wading through all that ungainly over-writing, awkward metaphors, and a
deathly profusion of adjectives. The writing is so bad that if you didn’t know
better you’d think Shanghvi was doing some sort of clever, clever send-up:
“smugness blasted out of her face like a fart”, “reading further would have
been like bathing in vomit”, “Priya had a crusty librarian’s voice, one that
could only be relieved by a dildo”.
And then, there’s the stilted, self-conscious phrasing that ties up the
narrative ? and the reader ? in knots instead of taking the story forward. This
is the moment when Karan, one of the lead protagonists, is handed a picture he
took of Zaira (the Jessica Lal character) in happier times. “Karan picked it
up, a misleading memento from a past that had been nearly perfect; its
splintered existence ridiculed the present moment with a distant, hyena
laughter.” Yeah, right.
There are times when the book resembles nothing more than the work of a
precocious child who has just discovered a thesaurus and can’t resist dipping
into it after each sentence. And then, there are all the sexual metaphors, each
one more cringe-making than the other: “The words escaped the judge’s mouth
involuntarily, like a premature ejaculation.” At one point, Samar, Zaira’s gay
best friend, says about the Indian novel: “It’s like they’ve come gushing from
the almost-a-pussy of a drag queen called Lady Epic.” (No, seriously, I’m not
making this up.)
On one level, this book has everything: homosexuality, murder, the movies,
love, passion, anger, hatred, betrayal, tragedy. But for all that it seems
curiously empty.
It has many ostensibly shocking bits ? the minister who lost his virginity
to a buffalo and still fantasises about that encounter, violent death, a
fleeting reference to anal sex ? but even these lack resonance.
And though every Bombay cliché is firmly in place ? brittle society ladies,
dingy bars, Chor Bazaar, Ban Ganga, the traffic jams at Ganesh Chaturthi, the
riots, hell, even the floods make their requisite appearance at the end ? the
city still resolutely refuses to come alive in the book.
As I ploughed on to the end, I didn’t know what was more depressing: the
fact that all the characters come to such sticky ends; or that you couldn’t
care less what happened to them.
This could have been a cracker of a story, properly told. What a shame it
got lost in all that purple prose.
This article first appeared HERE.
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