Book review: 'Two pronouns and a verb'

Two pronouns and a verb
Author: Kiran Khalap
Publisher: Amaryllis
Pages: 220
Price: Rs295

An awkward title needn’t necessarily make an awkward book as Kiran Khalap’s latest novel proves. Two Pronouns And A Verb takes a refreshingly straightforward approach to the existential question: “Who am I?” It charges right in, fusing the three components of its title into a trilateral friendship: that between teenagers Dhruv, Arjun and Eva. Dhruv appears to be the verb, and lives up to his fame as an unshakeable namesake to the mythological character — he is all “flow and burn” where Arjun is “store and nurture” and Eva is “child of air and space… third point of the triangle.”

This fatalistic approach to characters and their destinies takes some getting used to. We witness the childhoods of Dhruv and Arjun where playground events serve as indications to their future roles. However, Khalap sets his characters down in a context where to know their natures is de rigeur. They grow up in a Wada in Pune city, under the guidance of Dada, a renowned Ayurvedic physician. Dhruv’s impatience can be explained even by a novice like Dada’s son Arjun, “he gets angry very fast… like all pittaprakruti people.” Skilful in his separation of voices, Khalap takes us through the consciousness of each of the three friends in alternating chapters.

What happens to them seems both inevitable and yet, somehow, like all good plotlines, unpredictable. Dhruv takes on the mother of all battles representing the marginalised and weak as he fights the corrupt and powerful. Arjun takes an arduous physical journey so long and dangerous that, as his mentor remarks, it is hard to figure if it was “inward” or “outward.” Eva grows into a woman with a cause and commitment.

Khalap does not go easy on them, Dhruv must struggle with his anger, just as hard as Arjun must struggle with his self-doubt and Eva must work to achieve faith. At the end, the answer to the question “who am I?” must be achieved “to the right degrees by the chief actors in the drama of life.” It is Khalap’s suggestion in this hard-hitting novel that there are many roads to this answer, but none of them are easy.