Book reivew: When Mira Went Forth And Multiplied

Book: When Mira Went Forth And Multiplied
Shinie Anttony
Rupa
Rs250
212 pages

The only really surprising thing about Shinie Antony’s latest novel is that it took so long to arrive on Indian shelves. The beauty of Antony’s prose is that she is able to write about everyday subjects with a wry, casual humour that dispenses with conventionality.

When Mira Went Forth And Multiplied is a tongue-in-cheek account of your average Indian psycho-girl-next-door. Single, ready to mingle, and frustrated when she hits her mid-thirties without a single romantic speed bump in the long dry road to big-city independence.

Antony’s characterisation of Mira is deliciously true, no heart-shaped face and soulful eyes for Mira, no “bulletproof beauty to slam men cross-eyed into walls.” She is “beefy and burly” has “matted hair that cancelled out the bigness of her breasts.”

Moreover, she has a body that responds with full red alert to a potential partner, complete with, “damp palms, quivering inner thighs, impaired respiration...” Entirely corporal, Mira is a cherry ripe for the picking. When married man Sam arrives from the Mumbai office, determined to have a one-night stand, and meets Mira, its bound to be instant amore.

It is when Sam returns to his wife and switches off his phone that the fun begins. Mira revels in the seven stages of loss with true operatic fervour. Sam, as unlikely a hero as Mira is heroine in this misadventure, struggles to cope with Delta, his quirky, singular, wife. Antony concentrates with black humour on the struggle of these three characters and peppers in a small cast of in-laws that add to the comic effects.

Hell hath no fury like a woman spurned, and Mira is quick to prove this true. The cat is soon out of the bag, and what follows is no small melodrama.

Antony’s treatment keeps it fun and wicked. Her language is exuberant and irreverent, her ironies brief and easy to concede to.

There is more than the occasional overspill of good spirits, however, resulting in a narrative gumminess that tighter editing might have improved on. Gleeful and sad in equal measure, high on spirit, low on sugar, this is the dark chocolate of chick-lit.