The bleak-looking cover somewhat sets the tone of events that unfold in "Perfect Eight", journalist Reema Moudgil's literary debut. Dark and depressing, contemporary history and personal romance find their way here along with separation.
A sense of displacement and its accompanying baggage is what the heroine Ira goes through, throughout. Nursing the scars of the Partition through borrowed words and experience, that of her mother's, she also has typical personality issues - insecurity, under-confidence, the deprived feeling of a financially troubled childhood. Too many themes and sub-texts (in too little words), I found the treatment a little too predictable – troubled for the sake of being one.
Patiala, Assam, Bangalore, Ayodhya – the shifts in time and space is a little too rushed for me. While the tea estate backdrop in the earlier part of the novel is lazy and languorous, the movement to the cities is hurried. The mention of the 1992 riots of Ayodhya is there only to lend a contemporary connect, probably for readers born after 1990.
I had started reading this on a flight, dozed off mid-way, picked it up after I landed in Delhi. One hour into the book, the characters had not yet stayed on in my mind, they didn't accompany me in my flight of fancy! The mother-daughter bonding could have become a stronger theme if Moudgil devoted more thought to it.
Unrequited love is what runs for almost 220 pages of the novel, and somewhere toward the end, it becomes semi-unrequited. Moudgil tries hard to make Ira’s love for family-friend-turned-childhood-crush-turned-stranger Samir into an al--consuming affair (metaphorically, not literally!) but the passion falls flat. Much like the characters.
Sometimes, it’s not wrong to judge a book by its cover!
(Reema Moudgil’s Perfect Eight is published by Tranquebar and is priced at Rs 200 )
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