BookNote
Skin Deep
Khademul Islam
A story about two daughters of an interracial marriage during the Raj, Naz and Yasmin, the latter "a spun-sugar fairy, poised for flight," the other the narrator of the story, and as is usually the case in fiction, apparently not as striking but somewhat more likeable. Their father was a "very tall and handsome" Parsi (also "staunchly pro-British") who on a visit to London falls for, and vice versa, Sophie the Englishwoman. The plot's terrain involves Dehra Dun, Delhi and Hyderabad--mind now, the old, pukka Raj-era Hyderabad, when its nawab, "Osman Ali Khan…felt safer with the British in charge..and there was enough colour and pageantry to delight the hearts of the most pleasure-loving people."And that sentence on page 3 sets the tone for the rest of the book. It is really not "about the complexities of human relationships," which is what the book's back cover says, but about the author's barely suppressed love affair with the Raj, with those wonderful days when there were twenty-one gun salutes, terraced cottages in Mussorie, lacy socks, pretty men and radiant, sunlit gardens--the rapt lushness that pervades the whole book made me feel as if I had been hit by a truck laden with flowers. I suppose there is a market for this kind of stuff, but, I have to wonder, where? Inside India? Outside it? Now the good news: I learnt a new word. The characters here don't trim hedges and rose bushes with clippers, like ordinary folks/gardeners do--they do it with 'secateurs!' This is that kind of a book! Khademul Islam is literary editor, The Daily Star.
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Skin Deep by Nergis Dalal; Delhi: Penguin Books; 2005; pp. 301; Rs. 250 |
