…The school of infidelity came into existence the day the institution of marriage was invented. Extramarital affairs in the human civilisation are going to continue till the concept of marriage survives. That you desire to be with someone but can’t have him or her in fullness keeps the flame of desire burning. This desire is its own fuel, you see! How do you douse it?
In what always feels a plucky narrative technique, on page one of his new novel, This Love That Feels Right, Ravinder Singh reveals the entire plot up front. A few lines delivered in the voice of his protagonist:
My name is Naina Singhania.
I am twenty-five and I am married.
In my life, marriage happened first and I fell in love later.
The only problem was – I fell in love with a man who’s not my husband.
This is my story…
In her early twenties, Naina Singhania is married off to a suitable boy chosen by her family (“Our fathers were business friends”). Siddharth is a real estate tycoon, “armed with an MBA from a prestigious B-school”, a workaholic “mama’s boy”. You realise, quickly, that he’s not a very attentive husband. He had (oh horror!) postponed their honeymoon for a business deal.
If you, like my friend Aneela, prefer your life references from Bollywood, then this is the point at which you might want to recall the memorable bench conversation in Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehnaa. Shah Rukh Khan urf Dev invites himself to the bench where Rani Mukherji urf Maya, in her crimson wedding finery, is perched, reluctant to give up the quest for a grand love story that she never found, though her marriage to her childhood friend is in a few minutes. Stretching around them on all sides are the rolling plains of England.
“What if I find that great love after marriage, then?’ Maya asks.
“If you don’t go looking for it, you won’t find it,” Dev replies, a curious phrase that lingers in the air, conceals as much as it reveals, and sounds like a warning and, simultaneously, a friend egging you on.
Relationship status: it’s complicated
Naina lives in a gilded cage, overeats and reads romances (though Singh’s key cultural references are to Hollywood films – basically, Unfaithful over Anna Karenina – he promotes reading. “If you are not reading books, you are missing something incredible in your life,” Naina says.) Then, eventually, she joins a fancy gym that is just across the road from her equally fancy apartment, and makes two new friends: Manvika, a successful TV journalist and Aarav, a charming personal trainer (Singh has in fact dedicated the book to his first personal trainer). While Manvika, the independent career woman who is unapologetic about her ménage à trois-like arrangement challenges Naina’s conservative worldview, Aarav brings to her arid love-life a welcome change.
The book traces the rise and denouement of the not unpredictable “it’s complicated” arc that results from this tangle.
Gurgaon
The affair as the central plot point has been used by novelists across the board. While it is the classics that we turn to (think Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Saratchandra’s Charitraheen), popular fiction has dealt with its fallout often enough – and movingly, too (off the top of my head, Nirupama Subramanian’s Intermission, set in a gated colony in Gurgaon comes to mind). What principally emerges from all these narratives, through the specific reactions of the world at large to infidelity, is a piquant sense of time and place. That way, This Love That Feels Right is the perfect anodyne for a certain little pocket of Gurgaon.
Think of the girls with shiny swishy unbelievably straight hair who embark from swank cars and walk aimlessly through malls during the day, busy with their phones, who use their fat add-on credit cards when something strikes their fancy and post pictures on Facebook of kitty party getaways in Dubai. To make their lives easier, their beauty parlours and gyms are now inside these malls. (In fact, there are even pre-schools inside malls to make it easier for the yummy mummies.)
There’s your Naina. You’ve seen her here and there in new India.
The cast of characters is small enough to go with the stretched short story feel of the book. They are all new Indians too. Aarav, a gym trainer, while socially far below the “clients”, makes enough money now, thanks to new India’s obsession with fitness, to be almost upper middle class. Manvika’s job is to vigorously debate issues in TV studios so the global Indian stays abreast with all sides of problematic arguments tearing Bharat apart, while relaxing on their expensive leather recliners.
And, of course, underpinning the half-sterile, half-rajasik world of the glittering new metro, is the GenY of old-school business families, indulging in the biggest Ponzi scheme of all – real estate. That is where Siddharth – and, by extension, Naina’s – wealth comes from, her ability to afford the fancy gym (“No wonder it was called the best gym in entire Gurgaon. Equally high was its membership fee, probably the highest in Gurgaon. But then …everything about it was grand and luxurious”), the fancy salons (“I like coming here primarily for the stylists but for its ambience as well”) and the pure organic food that is sourced from their own farm.
Glamour and progressive politics? Is that a formula?
Though his Gurgaon is all glamour and there is not the mildest whiff of its epic inequality, I cannot help but give full marks to Ravinder Singh for a particular kind of progressive politics, within the self-limiting ambit of late capitalism, of course.
While the gym trainer as hero is not a first in Indian English fiction – Aakash Sharma was the memorable protagonist in Aatish Taseer’s debut literary novel The Temple-goers – there is a certain authenticity to this love story and its idealistic turn. For Naina’s love for Aarav to bear fruit (Aarav doesn’t have a surname, and therefore doesn’t have a caste), Naina must reject her inherited (sterile) identities and embrace the (virile) rajas of the new, more egalitarian if insufferably consumerist, India. It is a tortuous path to self-discovery.
And one begins to sense the powerful appeal of Ravinder Singh’s writing for a whole generation of young people who were born in India after globalisation, bred in an age of the internet, and are now citizens of the twitchy-fingered era of the smartphone. Where their parents fail to provide any context to their experiences, it is popular fiction of this sort that provides both a compass, a consumable compass as it were, and wish fulfilment.
There is also a certain authenticity that reveals something about the multiple layers of acceptability that exist in the world of popular Indian fiction – who is representing whom, and who is reading whom. Examine this sentence:
I noticed his posture when he was doing the mountain climb. Precisely, his “butts”. How easily he had referred to my “butts”. I smiled. It was easy to say all this in the gym.
As I watched Aarav’s butts I realised he too would have watched mine! I bit my lower lip. I suddenly shouted, “Butts up, Aarav…butts up!”
As I smiled (cringing, I must confess) at this bit, I remembered a stray comment in Anuja Chauhan’s first novel The Zoya Factor, where Zoya is worrying about being cool enough for advertising. Whenever she says she is from Karol Bagh…
…the snooty ad-people think Karol Bagh type…a pushy wannabe in a chamkeela salwar-kameez with everything matching-matching. Someone who says “anyways” instead of “anyway”, “grands” instead of “grand” and “butts” instead of butt. (As in: She has no butts, earns twenty grands a month and lives in Karol Bagh. Who does she think she is, anyways?)
— "The Zoya Factor", Anuja Chauhan
Well, “she” might have moved on from matching-matching salwar kameez to matching-matching boob tube and shoes, but she finally has a powerful voice in the fiction that she reads – and writes!
Modern romance – the Indian version
Aziz Ansari’s cult book Modern Romance had pointed out that how in our day and age, the chief debate is between the companionate marriage versus the soulmate marriage. Once upon a time, it was enough to be compatible to live together companionably, raise children and struggle together – now, the expectations of both men and women from marriage has changed. Everyone wants a grand love story.
Once upon a time, a Naina Singhania, bahu of a traditional business family would not have had the opportunity to meet Aarav. Now that things have changed, but of course the contours of relationships will change. Manvika advocates the open marriage as the perfect solution. Naina is more circumspect. Unfortunately, as the jury remain out on this, I just want to share a story from ancient India that arguably tells how the institution of marriage came about.
Svetaketu
The rishi Uddalak and his wife were contemporary intellectuals of the time, and were in what is now called an open marriage. One day, when Uddalak’s son Svetaketu saw his mother leaving with another rishi, he asked his father where the mother was going. The father replied that she was going on “abhishar” – a nuanced concept of a tryst involving, among other things, sex. Svetaketu was consumed by jealousy. (If Freud had encountered this story, there can be no doubt the Oedipus Complex would be called the Svetaketu Complex.) He grew up to be a great sage and re-formulated the laws, prohibiting “adultery”.
The verdict
While popular cinema often resorts to stereotypes, it is refreshing to see that Singh, in his popular (wildly popular, by all accounts) fiction, has attempted to challenge a few of these these stereotypes – class, for instance. Where he falls short is in his prose, which often sounds flat and wooden. Which tells more and shows less, and in itself, does not unsettle the surface of meaning or root around for details that are not obvious in plain sight.
I would have also imagined that Metro Reads would, as a matter of form, offer a page-turning pace; instead, This Love That Feels Right is slow, given to discussion and genuflection, and helpfully offers a great deal of advice on weight management. There is a bit of gym porn too, which is, I suppose, a good thing.
In the final analysis, the book is self-help crossed with romance. And given Ravinder Singh’s guru-like position in the teenybopper demographic, it is interesting to analyse the twinned discourses that emerge from the book. It is safe to assume that he not only reflects (he says in the epilogue and acknowledgements that much of his material is based on his interactions with his readers) what is happening around him, but also packages for consumption a certain narrative that will influence his readers to respond to their own questions in certain ways and therefore create that reality.
Within the format that works for him, he has raised some important questions – and what is refreshing, he has taken a side. Who knows, maybe one day his readers will watch the movie version of Anna Karenina too. I live in hope!
This Love That Feels Right, Ravinder Singh, Penguin Metro Reads.