Book review: 'Adultery And Other Stories'

Book: Adultery And Other Stories
Farrukh Dhondy
HarperCollins
265 pages
Rs 299

If this book were a sound, it would be the crash of a metal garbage bin lid falling to earth and wobbling on its rim before settling — an instantly recognisable, nerve-flaying sound. That’s the soundtrack to Farrukh Dhondy lifting the lid off human relationships and some of their uglier byproducts.

These seven stories invoke the confrontations between east (read: sub-continent) and west (read: UK, US), between men and women, parents and children, spouses, friends, business partners, the powerful and the devious, the rich and the poor, the rational and the irrational. Any one story merges several or all of these clashes, which can be excitingly complex but also positively exhausting. And all of them have to do with cheating, swindling and other forms of betrayal — sexual, financial, emotional, intellectual, professional. As a bankrupt travel agent confesses to a potential sugar mommy in ‘Jig Jigolo’, “The way to your tight wallet was through your other loose bits.” The word ‘adultery’ applies in both senses, both as sexual infidelity and in the sense of adulteration — phoniness, infidelity to the truth.

In ‘Boogoo’, an Indian filmmaker and his unfaithful wife visit an old friend in India whose penury turns out to be a ploy. In ‘Bollox’, a British man looking to start a family corresponds with an Indian whose cousin has agreed to donate his testicles, but keeps extracting money from the patient. The long title story, ‘Adultery’, is an excruciatingly sensitive portrait of the dynamics between the brilliant but difficult poet Sufi and his wife Joanna.

The story ‘e-mailwallahs’ juxtaposes a conversation between the publishers of the Harry Potter series in India against the letters of a man who sells pirated copies of the book at Mumbai’s traffic lights. An ageing mathematics teacher switches careers in ‘Say Cheese’, creating an exquisite French-style cheese, only for his employer to throw him out for failing to achieve a mediocre processed Kraft. An anti-GM foods activist suffers similar professional disappointment in ‘Short Stem Judas’.

But you won’t find outrage or judgement in these pages. This collection has the temperance of long experience. People approach their adulterous spouses not with quivering hurt and indignation but with the occasionally snide tolerance that rests on an affection much greater than romance. In Boogoo, the narrator says of his wife, “Of course I didn’t want to lose her. She was one of my weaknesses and weaknesses become part of one. Did Achilles cut off his heel?” Lovers are wily enemies and loving is wounding and being wounded; a relationship is as much an addiction to the chink in the other person’s armour as it is to their strengths.

Dhondy leans heavily on stereotyped Indian English, a cheap thrill that swiftly turns to lead. He overuses the epistolary device. He switches points of view often, sometimes jarringly. His writing can be clunky. But he has one sterling quality that carries all other failings, and that is an unflinching, ruthless honesty. If you want to know whence love, and whither, this is a pretty good map.