'A Beautiful Lie' is Partition novel for young adults

A Beautiful Lie
Irfan Master
Bloomsbury
298 pages
Rs515

A Beautiful Lie by Irfan Master is set in India in 1947 at the time of the Partition.

The main character is Bilal, a boy determined to protect his dying father from the news of Partition, which he knows will break his father’s heart and hasten his impending death. The book also attempts to weave in the horrors of the Partition and the religious rage it caused, against the backdrop of village life in India through the voice of a boy who has to grow up faster than he should.

Master is ambitious with his story but hasn’t, well, mastered his story-telling. So, while the plot is established, it never really grows: Bilal and his friends decide to take the extreme step of hiding the biggest event in India’s history from his father but apart from preventing a few visitors from meeting the dying man and printing a false newspaper, they don’t do much else. At the start of the book, the narrator says, “On 14th August 1947, I learnt that everybody lies but that not all lies are equal...” It’s a too-dramatic line not quite justified by subsequent events.

The writer also falls into the ‘India trap’ — referencing the monsoon, describing markets and vendors, having Bilal recite English poetry by Rabindranath Tagore, placing a cockerel fight and a kathak dance in the middle of the story and Partition strife.

While any book set in India is allowed to have these ‘exotic’ details, this one suffers from a lack of authenticity: In one instance, when the boys are playing a card game on the roof of a house (in a village in the 1940s somewhere in Northern India), one of them holds up a ‘Full house’.

A Beautiful Lie has been positioned as a book for young adults. Children can be pushed to grapple with a complex storyline and should certainly be given the benefit of a true and real voice. Another novel about the Partition through the eyes of a child, Ice-Candy Man, is an example of that. So, while it might have been necessary to keep things simple, it didn’t have to be so simplistic.