Growing Pains in Bombay
by
Harald Leusmann
Ball State University -- Muncie IN
Review of:
Beach Boy, by Ardashir Vakil. New York: Scribner, 1998. 239
pages.
Copyright © 2000 by Harald Leusmann, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. Copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
- Especially after Salman Rushdie's great success Midnight's Children, there is an increasing number of young, articulate Indian writers who -- like Jeet Thayil and Vikram Chandra in the U.S., Kirpal Singh in Singapore, and Ardashir Vakil in the UK -- make themselves at home in a postcolonial world that has become a village. Equipped with a good education, a willingness to adapt to a new environment and an eloquence to tell original stories, they touch upon aspects frequently associated with postcolonial studies like nationalism or the impact of colonialism on gender roles; and the issues surrounding historiography. In the case of Ardashir Vakil, born in Bombay (Mumbai) in 1962 and currently a teacher in London, one can add to this list the problem of juvenile disorientation and subsequent identity crisis, the problems that shape his debut novel Beach Boy.
- In ever-widening
concentric narrative strands, Vakil presents the Cyrus Readymoney's adolescent growing pains
in the pulsating Indian metropolis of Bombay, a mundane world infiltrated by
Western features. Cyrus stubbornly resists any kind of formal
socialization. He is driven by his senses and knows all
the tricks in the book about how to avoid the fine webs of education. School
is of no interest for him; he rather does what his heart desires: hanging
out with friends, roaming the beaches, and finding out about the best places
for crisp uttapams or cooked hilsa. The body-warm semidarkness of cinemas
has become his home. There he admires actresses on screen wearing heavy
make-up and pink saris; there he has his senses lulled by the sultry
atmosphere, by the heavy smell of bidis the men smoke, by the murmur of
women and the cries of babies silenced by soft breasts. For Cyrus, cinemas
are hiding places from reality and constitute a counter-world with no
demands.
- Vakil, however, goes beyond a simple description of Cyrus' daily life. He
rather, almost unnoticeable, makes his readers aware that the society Cyrus
dwells in is drifting towards a state of disintegration. Cyrus' part in it
and his growing disorientation is told in playful, lightly narrated
episodes. The inevitable crisis manifests itself not in a sudden eruption,
but in a continuous erosion of his existence, presented through a shifting array of personal and domestic episodes. A certain emotional coldness
enters his home; his parents argue more frequently. Cyrus begins to have
dinners at the neighbours, sleeps in their houses, and takes part in their
lives. Innocence makes way for experience. From his home overlooking the
Arabian Sea, Cyrus observes how fishermen bring in a pale, bloated corpse.
His carefree, lazy life in school comes to an abrupt halt when the sadistic
Jesuit principle beats him severely and threatens to expel him from school. Then again he
hears his parents quarrel elaborately and violently
in their bedroom. Finally, the mother moves out into a skyscraper in the
city, while the father -- left alone in the marvelous family home -- suddenly
suffers from a heart attack and dies days later in an American hospital in
Chicago. On a trip to his old neighbourhood, Cyrus makes the acquaintance
of a maharani, whose husband divorced her and who adopted five girls from
villages in Rajasthan. Sometimes screams of pain are heard from her house,
and it is said that she beats her adoptive daughters.
- At this point it becomes obvious that Vakil presents a school of
domestication in which teenage emotions, adolescent feelings, and growing
recognition of one's own sexuality are bound to be suppressed and that a
violent cultivation of carefree, lively youngsters on the verge of
becoming adults is underway. It is important to
recognize that this tale of initiation is told according to Western
standards. Vakil cleverly invents emotionally alternating hot and cold
baths, into which he dunks his protagonist and which constitute a tough
place of socialization. Cyrus' life is characterized by dichotomies:
sensuality and severity, material abundance and disintegration, security and
indifference. He drifts helplessly, without being responsible for his
actions, and without the slightest aim whatsoever.
- Although Vakil seems to have difficulties upholding his easy-flowing prose
towards the end of the novel, and most of the main figures have revealed
their secrets before one reaches the final pages, Beach Boy is a pleasure to
read. The author's strengths lie in the graciously arranged pictures, the
fugitive pieces of observations, and the episodes he can draft with lighting
speed. The snapshots of Bombay are like colorful remembrances in a photo
album. The descriptions of Cyrus' first childlike and nearly unconscious,
but also triumphant, erotic flicker and the almost incestuous initiation
into sexual terrain through the sisterly friend belong to the more virtuoso
manifestations of Vakil's narrative ability. Vakil proves to be a skilled
representative of the younger generation of Indian writers who reside in the
United Kingdom.
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