A Breath of Fresh Air

Caught in the Union Carbide accidental gassing of Bhopal in 1984, Anjali survives. But her marriage to Prakash Mehra, an army officer stationed in Bhopal at the time, does not. Bitter about the fact that her adulterous husband forgot to pick her up at the train station and thus allowed her to be poisoned by the gas, she demands a divorce. Time jump to year 2000, sixteen years later. She is a school teacher in Ooty, is married to Sandeep and has a son, Amar, who suffers from a fatal lung disease as a result of Anjali's inhalation of the poison in Bhopal. Praksash appears now in her life, a brigadier in the army, and married to Indu. Anjali tries to sort out her feelings of anger and bitterness and regret and doubts about her decision to divorce and finally learns to reconcile them in the end.

The characters are well drawn and have distinct personalities. The language, while riddled with cliches, is serviceable. As a first novel it is an ambitious book. It tries to deal with many issues, all very important. The Bhopal tragedy; divorce and the difficult matter of negotiating a remarriage within the Indian society; a child with fatal illness; Hindu-Muslim-Sikh religious hatred and violence; wicked in-laws and cruel parents; Hindu widows.

All of these are important issues. Unfortunately, given equal weight and crammed within a mere 214 pages, the author takes short cuts and gives them all short shrift. Had she kept to one or two issues and dealt with them completely, this could have been a satisfying, even an exciting, novel. She certainly has the capability, which she demonstrates in the way she handles Anjali's predicament of divorce and second marriage.

It is only well into the last few chapters that the book reveals its soul and dilemma, when Anjali wonders if she could not have had it all so much easier had she stayed within the marriage to Prakash, like so many other women who put up with bad marriages. She observes Indu with envy and resentment. Unfortunately the moral dilemmas are too neatly resolved. By the novel's end this reader's sympathy for Anjali's incessant lament over her fate and her son's fatal illness due to Prakash's forgetfulness wore thin and irritation rose as to why this woman, with a wonderful husband, great friendships and a happy marriage, could not move on. While Anjali's suffering and anger in watching her son's struggle with his illness is real, art is more successful when it captures something more than just "normal, human" response to tragedy. It is this larger meaning that is not explored sufficiently in the book although there is a trace of it in the last and final chapter.

Told from three different points of view the reader is filled with curiosity that she is given a window into Prakash's interior. It is presented with some sympathy for a divorced man who does not find it easy either. But his entire thoughts are predictably selfish, cruel although tinged with some conscience at work in a bizarre way. One wonders why we even needed this as we really don't get any fresh insight apart from what Anjali already paints for us.

The characters of Komal and Anjali's parents are mere caricatures, unrelentingly shallow, and are execrable. Perhaps had Malladi wrote this as a short story or even a novella it would have been tighter and effective.