Book Review: All The Lives We Never Lived

Book: ALL THE LIVES WE NEVER LIVED
Author: Anuradha Roy
Publisher: Hachette India 
Pages: 336
Price: Rs 460

Myshkin Rozario is gifted with patience. He plants seeds, waters them, tends to them daily, ensures that strays don't destroy the saplings, and waits endlessly for them to grow into fifty-feet tall trees. When these trees are threatened by municipality-approved flyover plans, he leaves everything behind, knocks on doors of strangers asking them to sign petitions, and spends the night beneath one of his trees – waking up to find himself with leaves in his hair and bird poop on his clothes. "They are cutting down all the neem trees I planted on Atkinson Avenue. I had to be with them," he says.

In addition to this patience, Myshkin is blessed with a curious sense of observation, enabling him to recall some things better than others. Even as he pens his long put-off will sixty years later in 1992, for which he often needs to rely on conversations and arguments with his childhood friend Dinu, he recalls the littlest of details with immense ease – faltering here and there, of course. The flowers his mother Gayatri liked to wear in her hair, her most loved colours – jade, emerald, peacock blue and burnt orange – items in his Dada's clinic-cum-antique store, and his professor father Nek Chand Rozario's thought for the day.

Perhaps, this could also be credited to Anuradha Roy's captivating narrative. She has the reader enchanted with All the Lives We Never Lived from the get-go. It is established in the very first words of the book that the story is about many things, but most of all, it is the story of a young boy growing up without a mother – a mother who decides to run away from home when he is just nine years old.

With her ability to incite the reader's curiosity with carefully chosen words, Roy presents a brilliantly crafted novel after 2015's Sleeping on Jupiter, which was nominated for the Man Booker Prize, a novel that piques the reader's interest with every turn of the page.

With equal ease, Roy writes her characters: their passions, eccentricities, yearnings, and pet peeves. Nek Chand is patriotic, pedantic, condescending, patronising – but he comes to realise this only after Gayatri leaves him, but even so, he doesn't mend his ways. His father and Myshkin's grandfather Dr Batty Rozario is ahead of his times – he doesn't put restrictions on his art-loving, "impulsive" daughter-in-law; he is patient and looks after Myshkin in a delicate manner.

Raised with a passion for the arts, Gayatri is yearning to spread her wings, fly, and live, but is held back by her husband who believes these are eccentric "hobbies" for a married woman to nurture. It is Myshkin who describes his parents' relationship with precision: "They were like two people stranded on an island together with no common language."

At its heart, All the Lives We Never Lived discusses complex emotions such as war, nationalism, freedom, love, abandonment, loneliness and nostalgia, with Anuradha unveiling each of these with the expertise of a surgeon. Her storytelling technique deserves the sincerest of adulation from her readers.