Manju Gupta
Black Bread White Beer, Niven Govinden, Fourth Estate, Pp 185, Rs 350.00
In this fictional work, the story begins with the protagonist Amal seated in a park upon a bench, partly hidden by trees. He is watching a dinghy float by with two men squatting in it, while he is deeply immersed in his thoughts.
He goes to a car park where two Polish guys offer valet service. Though overpriced, they do spotless work. He gets his car polished from one of them, though he remembers his wife Claud would ask him in perpetuity if she ever got wind of his spending spree by joking, “What has happened to my tightwad husband?”
The Pole, while polishing the car, advises Amal to replace his Mini Cooper with a BMW because “it will impress people when you drive to your important meetings.” Amal informs him that the Mini Cooper is his wife Claud’s car in which he has to rush to the hospital, where she is recovering from a miscarriage at 21 days. After that he goes and gets stinking drunk.
Amal’s friend Hari calls to enquire about Claude. Hari has been responsible for bringing Amal and Claud together in the first place. It is he who helped to wean him off those shady night club girls he fruitlessly chased for most of twenties. Amal is forced to admit to himself that Claud was “cleverer, who was on a faster career path and earned more.”
By now Amal is no longer moonstruck as he watches Claud waiting for him, her body’s bagginess giving “her a wizened quality, the double knot tied at the waist making her appear swaddled. Bleached out by sunlight, she is so pale as if to emphasise her blood loss, though the bed curls and the detailed embroidery across the coat breast give her a gothic quality; a vampire in urgent need of food.” He knows she is grieving for something which was not yet a baby and just a cluster of cells, a mere six weeks of growth but which is responsible for an unseen, immeasurable emptiness in her.
One day while out shopping, Claud sees two tartan car blankets available for 25 pound sterling and wants to purchase them. Amal tries to dissuade her from buying them by saying, “Since when have you been into tartan?” Her stinging reply, “It’s not a question of being into. Tartan’s something everyone’s brought up with in Britain,” reminds him of his many perceived inadequacies, including that of being a brown son-in-law in a white gamily and which sits like a redwood tree upon his shoulder. Here the author hastens to add that this is a phenomenon not simply restricted to skin tone. Amal’s other friends, “white skinned and robbed of voice, are also in the same boat: pussy-whipped. Life is good so long as the missus is happy.”
Amal and Claud once had a fight over religion when she told him that his parents wanted their baby to be raised as a Hindu. He told her, “Didn’t you hear them? One God, any God.” But she had shot back, “Read between the lines, Amal. Are you really that stupid? This is about you becoming a Christian. It’s their way of getting back at me.”
It is Hari who points out to Amal that he is a weak, whiny little man, “You are spineless and unable to stand up to your wife.”
In this novel, Amal is caught between his own desires and those of his wife Claud and his in-laws, between whom there is an understated tension at his being an Indian. One day, Amal is forced to visit a village fair in Sussex but he is unable to deal with the festivities based on a pagan fertility ritual. He takes refuge in a church to meditate on life, his parents in India and Catholicism (he had become a Christian to marry Claud). He finds that when Claud gets drunk, she becomes loose limbed and uninhibited and he also discovers that he is able to assert himself when he has had one too many. Finally they both have a reason to look forward to a future together.
(Fourth Estate, HarperCollins Publishers, A-53 Sector 57, Noida, UP-201301).
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