Book review: The Red Carpet

(Published in India Today)

This is what makes reviewing worthwhile. About forty books cross my desk each month. Some are junk. Some are just about bearable. Some are freakishly pretentious. And some are like Siddhartha Deb's Surface, which I'm reading for the second time in a fortnight, and like The Red Carpet...books that make you put aside your "critical sensibilities" and let you savour being a reader. Hmmm, "critical sensibilities". That always sounded like a vile disease to me: I have terminal cancer, you have critical sensibilities.

The Red Carpet
Lavanya Sankaran
Review, Headline Book Publishing
Rs 295, 215 pages


Show me a collection of linked short stories and nine times out of ten I’ll show you a failed novel, with a tenuous theme holding together characters in the same apartment block or city. The tenth time it’s a collection like Lavanya Sankaran’s The Red Carpet , easily one of the most unselfconscious and engaging debuts of the year.

The eight stories of The Red Carpet are set in Bangalore, a city hymned far more often in the pink papers than in contemporary fiction. Sankaran writes about it with unusual fluency and intimacy. She knows every corner and nuance of this world of laidback software millionaires and young affluent couples, Blyton-worshipping schoolgirls and reluctantly marriageable postgraduates, and she writes about it with contagious affection. She could be the poster girl for the emerging generation of writers who’re replacing angst, guilt and confusion with curiosity, confidence and an easy familiarity with the many places they can call home.

Sankaran maps the stories of her characters in the same way we map our lives. Half-forgotten figures emerge fullblown from memory, classmates or colleagues go their different directions and bump into each other years later; some encounters change our lives, some leave our lives untouched. In stories like ‘Two Four Six Eight’ and ‘Mysore Coffee’, where Sankaran explores dark memories—a young girl at the mercy of a scheming ayah, a woman struggling to make sense of her father’s suicide—her deft touch allied to a strong plot creates brilliant fiction. Other stories verge on slightness; ‘Closed Curtains’ and ‘Bombay This’ survive on wry, pithy observations, but they remain muffled, as though someone pressed the Mute button on Sankaran’s prose.

Ramu’s bride-hunting travails are the burden of the first story, ‘Bombay This’; when he pops up as a minor character in ‘Mysore Coffee’, we recognise his cold, ruthless charm immediately. Tara Srinivasan is a passing shadow in one story, a better-drawn cameo in another, and finally gets her own space in ‘Birdie Num-Num’. It can be tricky, bringing this off without forcing the reader to construct elaborate maps in order to figure out who appeared where and why, but for the most part, Sankaran pulls it off.

More than the clash between tradition and modernity, Sankaran is fascinated by the nuances and contrasts, the different degrees of tension that keep the wires humming in a city like Bangalore. Her India, as Swamy in ‘Apple Pie, One by Two’ puts it, is the land of “opportunity and hassle in equal measure”. But Swamy also knows that “the land of dreams” is “always reconfiguring into the one left behind, tinged with regret and wistful desire”. Priya’s parents, in ‘Alphabet Soup’, looked back at India even as they escaped it; Priya looks to India as she tries to escape the land of “Money and McNuggets”—the backward glance is always slightly blurred.

Who is this book written for? For the mothers who extend a grudging acceptance towards their rebellious daughters, for the daughters who shuttle between tank tops and saris with wry exasperation, the boys who grew up in India listening to Jimi Hendrix and the ones who came back from “phoren” to find untraditional brides. It’s for those whose software dollars built the new, crowded Bangalore and those who drive them around, for the ones who have always lived in the city and the ones who’re trying to make a new life there. It’s for anyone who’s lived at home and understood the world abroad, and all those who’ve lived elsewhere and understood the land they left behind; in short, it’s for the reader. Any reader, anywhere.