A Himalayan Love Story

A Himalayan Love Story
Namita Gokhale
1996

The blurb describes the novel as a love story set in the Himalayan foothills of Nainital, where a young Parvati is wooed by Mukul, a local boy.  The jacket has heaping praise by an India Today review and the book is published by Penguin India.  Wanting something light but well written, I picked up a battered copy (albeit full price) at a bookshop in SDA market in Delhi.

The writing is indeed graceful and, in many places, lyrical.  The atmosphere of a sleepy Kumaon hill station and small-town Pahari life is beautifully and skillfully rendered.  However the blurb is highly misleading.  Parvati's story, which is the more interesting one, is barely 50 pages, or about a quarter of the book length.  The rest is from Mukul's pov, describing his return many years later to search for his lost youthful romance, after having married and settled in Hong Kong.  (This basic structure reminds me of the Hindi film "Mausam", which was itself based on the novel "The Judas Tree" by A. J. Cronin, and was a critical as well as commercial success.)

The premise has promise in terms of emotional and psychological insight; and Mukul's part is well written.  But what Mukul's part is really about is his alienation from his roots, his guilt at his own success, and the conflicting pulls of nostalgia and cynicism.  It has little to do with his search for Parvati, and in fact when he does finally meet her again the encounter is described in surprisingly wooden and stilted writing.  There is no description of how he sees her, what emotions are stirred in either, and the reader is cheated after 200 pages of waiting.

In fact the romance is incidental to Mukul's story.  As such, the novel makes a reasonably good portrait of the NRI's malaise.  But Mukul himself is an uninspiring vehicle.  Our hero is not only weak-willed and of dubious integrity (which, after all, could make for quite interesting traits in a hero), but is quite boring and unadventurous.  He frequently gets tired and needs to rest in his hotel room after an excursion or after a walk in the hills; makes fiery declarations after which he apologizes profusely; and is easily bullied by those around him.  The conclusion is insipid and it is unclear what he has learned from the journey, if anything.

The book has probably been mis-titled and mis-positioned in order to generate sales, and the services of a good editor would have pared down Mukul's part to about half its current length.  This would have made for a fine novella.  Alternatively, and more ambitiously, developing Parvati's initial 50 pages into twice their length, and bringing back Parvati's pov in a subsequent part or epilogue would have added depth and complexity.  As it stands, the material is too diluted to stand well on its own.

2*
Dec 2014