Reading is therapy and I indulged in a whole lot of it last night! This book seemed like wonderful at the start, infact it was a book club read, and the author so sweet, so softspoken coming down a lineage of refugees who came in after a rather painful partition, the family of the famous Khan Market bookstore Bahrisons, had me literally swooning at my nostalgia of it all. So when I bit into the book I was certain to be swept off my feet. This oral historian going door to door in Lahore and Delhi, talking to the salon girls while getting her nails done at the Lahore Gymkhana, the elitest of them all and listening to stories of a time gone by, then weaving them all into a fiction piece written with such fineness, I did expect a lot. But then the subject, the World War 1, then the World War 2 and the partition adept with a tome of human emotion just felt so very hard to read, imagine the living of it.
The British and their Moutbatten sandwiching India between two Pakistans would be the cruelest thing that the Bristish could have done to their territory, I am not at all impressed by their ruling. The ground reality is so grim even after so many years of the Partition, and the fight for literally no great rhyme or reason is the saddest of it all. The love story that Aanchal Malhotra weaves into the narrative ends with no sweetness at all, just like the Partition and although the settings that she finds in the book could read very pretty, think Paris, Lahore, Kannauj, Amritsar, Delhi and the likes, there is so much sadness of the time that tinges the landscape that there really seems to be no hope. Even the hidden gestures are lost with the overbearing grief in the air. The subject of perfumery is also that of luxury and not of the mere and mortal, yet even the settings add no beauty to the grimness of it all.
While I hope sadness is not the only everlasting thing, looking at the beauty of the world is an art on it’s own and sometimes finding it may require happiness. Thats a definite given. There is no beauty in sadness, like there is no mirth in complaint and no joy in lack. There needs to be happiness for joy, gratefulness for mirth and abundance for joy, that is a given and that is my takeaway from this book. Thank God most countries have nuclear power and World War 3 is unthinkable, forget doable, and thank God that the British rule no countries anymore. That wisdom or even empathy was definitely in lacking! I wonder today, having lived in Delhi, what a great city it really is, embracing all the atrocities of the past, reinventing itself and carrying on as an amalgamation of so many things that it brings together, a cauldron of cultures. The posh colonies of Delhi today were all once refugee camps that saw the worst of human condition, yet grew out of the ashes. While other parts of India never saw what Delhi saw, we cannot even relate down here in the south, my love and respect for Delhi and it’s people is really on the rise, reading this book, that holds first hand account on the happenings in history.
Its a champion for joy, happiness and a lesson of relentlessness in its core!
Vedasri Siddamsetty 