Book Review: Saraswati Park

Saraswati Park
Anjali Joseph
Harper Collins
261 pages

For a novel that is terribly and tenderly in love with Bombay and its many moods, Saraswati Park is strangely vague about the location of its eponymous building. Which shouldn’t rankle, except that journeys are key in the book, even the train routes the characters take, and so, knowing where they get off to go home would have been nice.

Anjali Joseph loves her locations and her characters. She writes about them with a fondness and a care that seem almost maternal.

Somewhere close to the beginning, you sense this is the sort of novel where the details are so plentifully described that you are not going to get much by way of a story.

Mohan Karekar, a letter writer who sits outside the GPO, puts other people’s thoughts and feelings into words. He and Lakshmi, his wife of many years, have marital togetherness and comfort, mixed with some friction.

Into the couple’s quiet life enters Ashish, Mohan’s nephew who needs a place to stay for a year. Saraswati Park is about that year in the three shared lives. It is about the adjustments they make, the charades they play, the food they eat, the journeys they make in the city, the love they each secretly feel, the hurt, the anger, the betrayal and the joys of the everyday. Finally, the novel is about each of their inward journeys.

Ashish has two affairs and finally learns how complex love is. Mohan goes from reading books and taking notes in their margins, to actually writing a story thanks to Ashish’s gentle prompting. Rather predictably, it wins a prize.

Lakshmi goes from feeling merely tolerant of the rut her marriage has fallen into, to having an epiphany of sorts about it when her brother dies.

Joseph’s success lies in the life she breathes into these three characters. Sometimes you feel that if you reached out, you could touch the rough-smooth fabric of their lives.

Of the three characters, Ashish is the most successful in terms of the economy and precision with which Joseph writes him. Often however, her craft fails. In the poorly-etched scenes of marital and relationship discords for instance. In the existence of pointless window-dressing-type characters like Yezdi and in the odd fact that Mohan, who seems to live a comfortable middle-class life, is actually an under-employed letter writer by profession.

Though it is refreshing that Joseph steers totally clear of poverty porn (except for the
occasional reference to the beauty of tribals at railway stations), this seems a bit slack.
There is a hasty feeling to the way the last chapters are written. What could happen to this apparent loser of a boy at the end of a coming-of-age novel? Why, he goes to America; his uncle tastes a small measure of literary success; and uncle and aunt seem to have resolved some issues.

Joseph’s craft needs to develop rigour and energy, so that something more than affection and tenderness can colour her treatment of her story.