Ek din, pratidin: One Day, a book review

One Day
Ardashir Vakil
Penguin India
Rs 395, 292 pages

In Chapter Twenty One, a character at a party comments, "What I can't be doing with are novels about the trials and tribulations of middle-class north London couples. We've had enough of those to last us fifty years. Whingeing double-income liberal parents, please let us have no more of their banal utterances."
Aha, thinks the unwary reader--who, if he or she has got this far, will recognise an accurate description of One Day right off--condemned out of the mouth of his own creation. No such thing: Vakil, who has already lampooned a very recognisable fellow member of the IWE school and got in several other literary digs, is too canny to be hoist so easily with his own petard. Before embarking on her ruthless denunciation, Jocelyn has already disqualified herself by revealing that she is a naïve and over-opinionated reader: "No novel is ever as interesting as life, never as depressing and never as joyful."
One will never know whether it was this particular piece of intellectual legerdemain that prompted a UK reviewer (the English, having forgotten how to write novels, are now forgetting how to review them) to flounder through three paragraphs of baffled dislike for One Day before discovering to his relief that it was really a satire of itself and therefore a brilliant masterpiece.
One Day attempts to do for present-day, multicultural London what Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway did in a previous era. Its chief conceit, the insistence that a day in the life can be all-revealing and that you can tell the story of an individual, a family, a city even in the span of 24 hours, is a deliberate nod to its more famous predecessor.
On the eve of their son's third birthday, Ben and Priya are struggling to keep their eight-year-old marriage on track, the distance between them neatly captured in an opening sequence where Ben reads a sonorous manual on the inner game of tennis while Priya masturbates beside him. Ben's background is never quite filled in: his father is the kind of man who thinks all subcontinentals are "Pakistans", his sister died mysteriously, and otherwise he's a conservative white man struggling to find a way out of the morass of teaching at a local school. Priya's antecedents are far more clear, as they should be since Vakil's borrowed them wholesale from the Nayantara Sahgal branch of the Nehru family. Together, the couple forms "a voluptuous swirl, a multiracial lolly" in imminent danger of melting into nothingness. Their son, Whacka, provides the glue that holds the marriage together as well as the secret that threatens to tear it apart.
As the day unfolds, Vakil does the literary equivalent of the documentary filmmaker's job: here is the tension-filled landscape of London's schools, this is where Priya does her radio spots on the Southhall Black Sisters, these are the tangles that a couple adrift in a world without servants gets into when they try to organise a party for a three-year-old that will really be appreciated by his friends' parents. It leads up to a final scene, intended to be climactic and cathartic, where the simmering tensions in the adult conversation at the party boil over into a violent domestic argument that leaves Ben and Priya alone together once more.
Unfortunately Vakil, a master at setting the scene, is far less deft at spoken dialogue or even internal monologue-sequence after sequence unravels into what Naipaul once dubbed "chuntering", or falls apart under the weight of its own meaning. Vakil's paeans to London are more successful; his descriptive prose will win him award nominations as surely as the line about "Priya's fingers furling and unfurling her flaps" will garner him a Bad Sex nomination next year.
On the whole, reading One Day is like watching Priya masturbate: you politely applaud the writer's imagination, even welcome the opportunity to get into the heads of his characters, but when it comes to the climax, it does absolutely nothing for you.
(This was first published in Outlook, on April 2, 2003.)