Reader discretion is needed

Unconvincing characters and a writing style that tells more than it shows — The Cambridge Curry Club doesn’t seem to get anything right.

The Cambridge Curry Club, Saumya Balsari, Blackamber Books, price not stated.

It’s the first paragraph that makes you blink — and then wish you could be rendered temporarily blind so you can be excused from further torture. I give you the opening of The Cambridge Curry Club:

The sly October wind tore through Cambridge, boldly lifting the prim skirt of the Junior Bursar as her court shoes, indignant at a male colleague’s promotion, clicked briskly through a college archway to meet the waiting porters and bedmakers.

The court shoes, apparently, have a life of their own.

Not being amongst God’s chosen few, you are not blinded but go on to find that there is no further mention of the bursar or her male colleague, or her shoes. This is an unexpected reticence on the author’s part, as she has no compunction in upending a boiling cauldron of enough characters to fill a phone directory on the reader’s unprotected head. Just when you think there can’t possibly be any more, a new man, another stereotype, the “rangy American”, then proceeds to spout the most unreal clap-trap in the history of brown girl-white dude lust dialogue when he meets Durga, the hip quotient in the Club. He moves in a stream of consciousness from “A smalltown boy who singed his soul…. I was Icarus…Arizona Turk’s Head,” leaving you dazed and confused.

The Cambridge Curry Club focuses on a group of disparate women in a charity shop called IndiaNeed. We are to think of it as “another in The Number 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency territory” and a “new direction in postcolonial literature”. There’s no need to insult the reader’s intelligence. You know the kind of women already, you’ve met them before in “The Jane Austen Book Club”, “Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants”, “Steel Magnolias”, take your pick. But in this curry of woes that make up lives, there is no nodding your head in empathy, there is only an uncontrollable urge to push the whole lot off a staggeringly perpendicular cliff. Perhaps because the writing is so unsympathetic, so literal, telling not showing. There is no one whom you sit up and notice. Not Mr. Chatterjee, who writes endless letters of complaint over trivialities and watches buxom neighbours reveal their cleavage; not Diana Wellington-Smythe who is as icy as her trysts; not any one of the women at the heart of darkness, IndiaNeed, ranging from hennaed Heera who meets a lost love and loses a closet homosexual husband, to Swarnakumari who will forever remain Indian in England.

Interchangeable

When Balsari introduces someone, she cannot help but give random, seemingly interchangeable details about them. A chance character, Dr. Sridhar, doesn’t escape from being sucked in either, although we do get a rather nice phrase from his wife who tried to commit suicide, failed and recovered “the calm of thin ice”.

There are other redeeming parts. When the elderly father of an English neighbour sees a rangoli as “what appeared to be a ghostly white Nazi swastika shining on the ground”. A war vet, he takes to his bed and can only point a trembling figure at the window when asked for an explanation. At least this is funny, whereas the final fiasco at IndiaNeed with a dead woman as mannequin doesn’t raise a ghost of a smile; one is obviously infected with Balsari’s style at this point. Or with Swarnakumari, who discovers spirituality to cope with her husband’s retirement, “Guru Ma was the equivalent of headphones”.

IndiaSpeak is right on the button, too. Barry says, “…..what do you think, just because you can fool your mother you can do the same with me?” Or the matchmaker’s “I have “n” number of boys lined up”.

Otherwise, there is an engineered serendipity, a facile marriage of words that cloy and annoy. Of Eileen, a maths teacher, who was dismissed after she crossed 60, Balsari writes “A number had been the final betrayal”. When husband Bob confesses he’s gay to Heera, “It was Adam who banished Eve from the Garden of Eden”. Anita who loved erasers and was soon to get busy “erasing a messy divorce”, Vivek who engineered matchboxes was “hardly going to set her alight”, you get the picture.

The author’s intention is clear: “Arre, c’mon….you enjoy this khichdi pot of life bubbling in here, don’t you?” is a line thrown in at IndiaNeed. They may, but we don’t.

You could draw out a character graph of the book but that would be too much work for too little returns.

Durga’s conclusion at the end of the novel is unashamedly cowardly, for instance. She will stay with her boorish husband (although the likelihood of the rangy American taking a role in her life is not entirely discounted). The fact that she thinks passion does not last and “wasn’t marriage about imperfections?” jars. Hell, no. Marriage is love, sublime sex, a meeting of minds and souls, anything less is not worth getting out of bed for. Durga’s pusillanimity is just that. There is nothing new to learn here.

If you are wondering what category this work falls under, I would suggest a new one: Why Bother. As for the readers? There is a boutique an hour from Cambridge whose name says it best: Past Caring.