No wonder the ‘flamingoes’ got lost

The Lost Flamingoes Of Bombay
Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi
Penguin/Viking
348 pages, Rs 499

My spell check refuses to accept an ‘e’ in the plural of flamingo, but it’s unfair to base a review upon a fight over a published work of fiction and a recalcitrant computer programme. Or one could be philosophical and sigh — this is the least of the reviewer’s worries. Because the worries are many: should one start with the positives so as not to destroy a young writer’s confidence right upfront? Should one end with the positives, so that there is hope? Should one stop this pointlessly faux agonising and get on with it? See, it’s tough.

Inside The Lost Flamingoes Of Bombay there is a kernel of a story, of many stories. The plot appears to hang on a Jessica Lal type murder, where India’s most famous film star is shot dead while playing bartender, by a politician’s son, ostensibly because she refused to give him a drink since the bar had closed. But it is also the story of young photographer Karan Seth who, within seconds of arriving in Bombay from Shimla, becomes best friends with Bombay high society. Like Samar Arora, the brilliant pianist, who for some unknown reason stopped playing and now lives with his writer lover Leo and is a Bombay party fixture. Like Rhea Dalal, rich, beautiful, married and strangely unhappy, with whom Karan has a brief affair.

It is all about a rich, beautiful and brittle Bombay and the enormously talented outsider (Karan) but one of the chief problems is that it tries too hard. The people are too clever, the writing is too clever and sometimes the writing is too much. Everything is described to the reader, to the extent that the magic of reading is stolen from you. Sample this: “As his fingertips touched her cheek and he focussed his inky black eyes on her; tears left her eyes. She felt once again the entire world bursting upon her: a river uncoiled, lions roared, a marigold bloomed, a mass of clouds floated over a delta, orange lava bristled, the sea churned, a cocoon split open and something with green gossamer wings emerged from it.”

Truth be told, nothing that happened before this burst of descriptive prose warranted it. There are too many such bursts in the book.

Besides this too-too-much writing, too much happens — politics, sex (awful and therefore seemingly too much), murder, homosexuals, parties, riots, adultery, marriage, friendship, call centres, Bombay, London, flamingoes (those that are lost), Singapore, teaching and then Bombay and photography. You cannot, in some sense, blame the flamingoes for getting lost in all this. There are some fine touches, but they are buried (lost). The writer needs, perhaps, to pare it down so that the nuggets shine and move on.