In the crowded space of Indian English writing, one approaches a book with a nondescript title and a publisher-pushed sleazy cover with trepidation. When the first scenes indicate it is set among India’s latte-drinking, mall-hunting GenY set, it take formidable courage to proceed.
In the case of One Afternoon by Ms. Roma Bansal, while the aforementioned concerns apply, one is glad one did indeed read the tome. The themes explored are unusual, particularly set in the town-city of Ahmedabad, with its uneasy sense of a city that is not yet a city that has not yet shed its smalltownness. The central character, Ria, is from Ahmedabad yet not of it. Her thoughts, aspirations, and finally desires set her apart. Her economic independence is probably as much a contributing factor to her nature, as is the liberal freedom given her by her parents, who have let their children set their own pace and define their own goals.
She is counterpoised by another ‘modern’ woman, her Indian English professor, Radha Chatterjee, who bears hints of a distressed past, a sorrow too great to bear. The two women have an uneasy initial interaction, the younger expressing the casual arrogance that comes easily to those with brains, money, or both. They then develop what D H Lawrence called ‘a queer awareness’, with the full force of the phrase. The relationship is strongly reminiscent of that between Miss Winifred Inger and Ursula in The Rainbow, yet imbued with a very Indian sensibility.
Their love that dares not speak its name is circumscribed by conventions, college life, and Time’s scythe. Ria’s friends, male and female, each represent in their own way, the emergence of GenY, with BPO jobs, the need to be in with the times, and stay on the upward track. Ria’s parents are observed more in the abstract, as stock characters who play their parts and move on with their lives, absent of internal dialogue, despite the various subtexts in the lives of her mother and father – the frequently absent yet doting father, the quietly serving wife.
The male voice or perspective is mostly absent, except in the character of Manav, Ria’s friend, who really does stand by her through thick and thin. There are no patriarchal interventionist figures, no Mellors the groundskeeper, who thinks that “It’s astonishing how Lesbian women are, consciously or unconsciously. Seems to me they’re nearly all Lesbian.” and are willing to violently express “When I’m with a woman who’s really Lesbian, I fairly howl in my soul, wanting to kill her.”
The physical part is gloriously explicit, unabashedly so, and makes the characters more real than if they merely bumped their knees and shuffled to a slow beat. The author fortunately does not take the story down the twists and turns of social and moral opprobrium, goes neither straight nor narrow, choosing instead to move Ria past girlhood into a space where people act, make decisions, and move on.
The book is a good effort, written in Indian English Modern, that unique dialect which makes for disconcerting reading until one lets go of colonial narrative perspectives, and given the significant plot, one is willing to overlook grammatical missteps, which should be properly laid at the doorstep of the publishers.
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