Book review: 'Tell Me A Story'

Name Tell Me A Story
Author Rupa Bajwa
Publisher Picador/Pan Macmillan
206 pages
Price: Rs499

 Rupa Bajwa’s second novel comes a good eight years after her first one, The Sari Shop, but the wait has been worth it. In Tell Me A Story, Bajwa continues to stake out what seems to have become her distinctive fictional territory — the everyday social realities of the not-so-underclass in a not-so-small Indian town. While her earlier novel had mapped the aspirations and frustrations of a sari shop attendant in Amritsar, Tell Me… is about Rani, a ninth standard dropout who works in a beauty parlour in Amritsar, threading eyebrows and giving pedicures.

Rani lives in a crumbling home with her ageing father Dheeraj, her brother Mahesh, a power loom worker, his wife Neelam, and their eight-year-old son Bittu.

Rani has a gift of making up stories which she’s somehow not very good at finishing. But her yarns are gripping while they are being spun, oddly contemporary, and more than enough to put Bittu to sleep. Bratty Bittu and her gentle father are the two people she loves most in the world. She is wary of
Neelam, while her brother is too lost in his own broken dreams to spare much time for his sister.

Neelam, the dominant figure in the household, is a study on how a victim becomes a victimiser becomes a victim. Both harassed and embarrassed by their economically constrained circumstances, and forever having to scrimp and save to run the household, she is a bundle of seething resentments.

Rani’s contribution to the household kitty doesn’t amount to much, and neither do her father’s lifetime savings. But what Dheeraj chooses to do with his own hard-earned money shatters the tenuous peace in the family. When the inevitable crisis descends on their dilapidated house in the form of a pipe burst, the family is pushed to the brink, and Rani’s life is never the same again.
The second half of the novel is set in Delhi. Rani joins work as domestic help in a palatial bungalow where Sadhna, a stalled novelist recovering from a fractured leg, lives by herself. But Rani hates her new home, hates Delhi, and chafes at the indignity of being treated as a ‘servant’. The violence to her sense of self inflicted by her changed circumstances is such that she even loses her ability to make up stories.
Delhi’s charmed circle of luxury and consumerist excess leaves Rani bewildered and boiling with resentment. “Rani happened to glance at the bill that still lay in the kitchen for the ‘risotto’! Rs550! Rani stared at the bill unbelievingly. What idiots these women were! And how undeserving! These were the kind of amounts that her father…had been questioned about, harassed about.” Rani will have to work through her rage and sense of loss before she is able to find herself and her stories again.

Besides being a gripping story, Tell Me… is also a scathing commentary on the privileged class that sheds crocodile tears for the “marginalised” while singing praises to the self-same economic process that pushes more and more to the margins.

The satire is at its sharpest in the account of a party in Sadhna’s house. Some real life members of Delhi’s swish set might be distressed to find that some of the caricatures bear too close a resemblance to themselves. Here, just for fun, take a wild guess who print journalist ‘Nina Chowdhary’ might be: “Then came a woman wearing raccoon-like eyeliner, dressed in a Fabindia kurta, a white churidaar and a dozen thin silver bangles. Rani thought she looked inordinately pleased with herself even while doing ordinary things like drinking water or smoothing her hair…”; and later in the course of a conversation, Nina says, “‘What we are trying to do is to concentrate on what the mainstream media avoids’”.

The total cost of this party — organised by a friend of Sadhna’s, for networking purposes — comes to Rs18,500. This was the amount that had become a matter of life and death for Rani’s family, but it was a paltry sum for these friends of her employer’s.

Bajwa does not hold back in describing the hatred and disgust Rani feels for “all the guests who had drifted in casually, relaxed, chatted and left, with no inkling of the dark rooms that souls could get lost in, for as trivial reasons as a bill of Rs18,500.” But after anger, there is understanding, and also compassion, and reconciliation. In her traumatic journey towards self-awareness in an alien city, Rani finds unexpected support from her new employer, who, in turn, finds inspiration in the spirited young woman who has the unique ability to tell a story on demand.

One seldom finds compassion in contemporary Indian English fiction. Cleverness is more common. That explains, partly, the sameness of much that passes for literary fiction these days. It is also why Bajwa’s relatively low-key approach to story-telling is so refreshing. One hopes we won’t have to wait too long before she tells us another story.

G Sampath is an independent writer based in Delhi. He’s reachable at sampath4office@gmail.com