Book review: 'Origins Of Love'

Origins Of Love
Kishwar Desai
Simon & Schuster
468 pages
Rs350

How wrong could you possibly go with a cigarette-puffing, whisky-swilling, Victoria’s Secret-keeping, pulp-perfect detective heroine? Very, if the lacklustre Origins Of Love is anything to go by. In this sequel to Witness The Night (the first of a promised trilogy), Kishwar Desai takes a perfectly good archetype, throws in some high stakes and ethical drama, and somehow manages to churn out a bore.

Forty-something social worker-turned-investigator Simran Singh is given a case by her friends, Dr Subhash and Dr Anita Pandey, who run a hospital specialising in foetal surrogacy. The hospital caters mostly to a foreign clientele, paying marginalised local women to carry the embryos of gay or infertile heterosexual couples to term. The doctors ask Simran to find out how one of the babies born in their facilities was infected with HIV, despite the strict tests and controls. The circumstances are odd: the parents have died in a car accident shortly after the revelation that their child has HIV and the surrogate mother is missing. Furthermore, since the legalities concerning surrogacy and the import of embryos are yet to be consolidated, a customs officer applies an archaic law meant for livestock to some embryos coming into India and has them confiscated.

Following a name she finds in a document related to the case, Simran heads to London to meet Edward, a freelance sperm donor. Despite knowing he may have deliberately passed on the virus and be responsible for the threatening messages and physical attack Simran suffers, she promptly falls for him with a woolly-headedness that is more irritating than charming. “Why hadn’t he understood that a relationship with me could be hugely enjoyable — because hey, I was such an entertaining person! Anyone should be able to see that,” she wails. It’s the last straw for anyone who hasn’t already thrown the novel at the wall in frustration.

Switching between a countdown of the previous nine months and the present, the novel suffers from poor pacing. It is by no means gripping — at nearly 500 pages, the solution to the mystery of how the baby contracted HIV is evident at least 100 pages before it ends. When it comes to hot topics and subplots, Desai throws everything into the pot: postcolonial guilt, caste, prostitution, petty corruption, skin lightening and other seasonings embellish the surrogacy subject. Some, such as the scheme by two Brahmin politicians to have their embryo carried by a Dalit surrogate in order to create a political dynasty that will appeal across vote banks, are compelling, while others defy belief and taste. The most bizarre is how, after four iterations of a Muslim customs agent being on a “jihad”, it is revealed that he actually has a folder entitled “Jihad Against Surrogacy (JAS)”.

Simran’s superficial progressiveness conceals the conservative political attitude that the novel ultimately presents. If she was less insipid and the supposed feistiness of the character wasn’t limited to trotting out of her vices, this may have worked. She could have complicated the narrative with doubt and provided an alternative perspective that encouraged debate about the ethical dilemmas the novel tackles. But as it stands, Origins of Love bats — with very little nuance — for the anti-stem cell research, anti-surrogacy (and, inferring from its approach to embryos, anti-abortion) lobbies.

Despite appearances to the contrary, Origins of Love is not a thriller, but a socio-political treatise propped up by weak characters.