Book review: 'Tina’s Mouth'

Tina’s Mouth
Keshni Kashyap
Harper Collins
242 pages
Rs499

If anything more trying than reading the diary of a teenage girl, then it’s reading the diary of a teenage girl with pretensions of intellectualism. The first line (“Dear Mr. Jean-Paul Sartre...”) of Tina’s Mouth seems ominous. But that’s a knee-jerk response. It won’t take more than a couple of pages before you’re pulled into Tina’s sharp and entertaining narrative about those standard adolescent worries: infatuation and existentialism.

California-based Tina is writing her comic diary, which an extended letter to Sartre, as part of an assignment for her existential philosophy class. She valiantly attempts to connect her life to Sartre’s philosophies, much like one trying to connect with a pen pal from a foreign country. For example, she christens the bench where she eats lunch alone (because her best friend has abandoned her for cooler friends, smaller clothes and a cute boy) as the “bench of existential solitude”.

A large part of Tina’s Mouth dedicates itself to one of the more useful functions of a mouth — kissing. Tina wants to kiss Neil Andrew Strumminger, the coolest and cutest boy on the block (or at the very least, in Tina’s class). She pursues this goal with steely resilience, fortifying herself with carefully-foraged hints that prove to her that they are “totally meant to be”. It isn’t long before Sartre takes on a more familiar role: the perfect and perfectly silent  confidant.

Neil has a rich and pretty girlfriend who is summarily dismissed via an unexplained break-up. Then he’s free to train his eyes on Tina. He christens her his “kooky Buddhist biking buddy”, though she is neither Buddhist nor particularly kooky. With a careful mix of quotes from Neil Young songs and debates on Buddhism, the deed is done. Tina is kissed and ecstatic. Of course, it all unravels fairly quickly. Tina is plunged into the emotional purgatory of waiting for his phone call, analysing the inflections of a passing “Hi” and dressing up for a party where, humiliatingly, he kisses her and then her friend in quick succession.

Keshni Kashyap documents American high-school caustically using Tina (“Pseudo-intellectual-future-art-school-hipsters!” Tina rails at one point). Mari Araki’s illustrations ensure we don’t miss the fact that Tina is lonely. Her clamouring towards being better than the ‘cool kids’ by hiding behind her smarts will evoke nostalgia in everyone who’s been a teenaged geek. The world of Tina’s parents, who are first-generation Indian-Americans, is skilfully sketched. A visit from her mother’s best friend from Mumbai, a kitty party and a particularly disastrous attempt at an arranged marriage set-up portray the culture clashes subtly and with gentle humour. Add to this a closeted brother and a stoner sister, and you have a story that’s sure to make teenagers feel that for once, someone understands their plight. And instead of the pretentiousness that you’d expect from anyone who finds a friend in Sartre, Tina turns out to be typical, but in an entirely endearing way.