Book Review: The Butterfly Generation

A book review published in Biblio:

Skimming the Surface

The Butterfly Generation: A Personal Journey into the Passions and Follies of India’s Technicolour Youth -- by Palash Krishna Mehrotra. 

Rain Tree/Rupa Publications, New Delhi, 2012, 264 pp., Rs 450

Palash Krishna Mehrotra’s non-fiction debut is described as “part memoir, part travelogue, part social commentary… the first book about New India to be written from an insider’s perspective”.

In the first section, ‘One-on-One’, each chapter is ostensibly a sketch of one of “India’s technicolour youth”. The much-touted “insider’s perspective” seems to serve mainly to assemble a cast of desperately uninteresting characters – bankrupt photographers, girls from “the local theatre scene”, a dancer on her way to the US, even a cosmetic dentist who “makes a bomb decorating the teeth of wealthy white women” – whose only reason to be in the book is that they have all shared narcotic substances with the author. “That week there’s some MDMA floating around at house parties. Aditi and I do some together with a bunch or friends.” Or: “I know Gaurav. We’ve dropped acid together.” Or again: “We’re running out of hash. Prateek calls me saying we need to score.” This is no reason to condemn them or him, but unfortunately these chapters contain zero insights, and there’s only so much of other people tripping that a reader can take. Sample: “The star has given me energy, dollops of it. Also a sexual vibe. Naked exgirlfriends dance in front of my eyes… All they want to do is to make me happy, give me pleasure, massage my cock with their lips.”

Even the sole non-PLU person in here, an auto driver from Dehradun called Nandu, is only known to Mehrotra because he doubles up as a dealer. And so even in this chapter we must spend at least part of the time hanging out with Mehrotra and Nandu as they get stoned. “Nandu passes me the joint and claps his hands excitedly. There’s a tweeting sound from the ceiling every time he claps. It’s something he picked up in a Chinese goods store in Calcutta – the Singing Bird Electric Lantern. It’s quite something.” We get it. A great part of the ‘New India’ is getting stoned. So what?

It doesn’t help that Mehrotra seems content to merely skim the surface of these lives. There’s Anita, 24, for example, a corporate lawyer who “treasures her independence” and lives alone in an apartment in Bombay but – the ‘but’ is implied everywhere in this piece, even if it isn’t articulated – is hunting for “The One” based on her mother’s instructions to settle down. She “lets [him] explore her breasts” but doesn’t want to kiss, she dances raunchily to a Bollywood item song for Mehrotra’s benefit, but wants him to sleep on the couch. One gets the feeling that she would have made for a fascinating chapter, if Mehrotra had only been willing to listen. But he decides that another night on the couch is not for him, and leaves abruptly, leaving the reader, too, with a sense of incompleteness.

When he does stay with someone a little longer – and stops talking about himself – he is capable of making the interesting observation that makes or breaks one’s sense of a character. Captain Andy the pilot, who prefers alcohol, gets a few wryly memorable lines of this sort: “If it’s an expensive cognac he leaves it in his car, making a trip downstairs each time he wants a refill. He drinks expensive liquor and says he can’t afford to share it. Besides, people can’t really tell the difference and it would be wasted on them.” Bits of the chapter on Bombay scriptwriters are fascinating — like the café called Pop Tate’s where they hang out, where the television is always tuned to a 24-hour Bollywood news channel. “What might pass as light entertainment elsewhere is hard news here in Versova, the heart of the Hindi film industry.” But Mehrotra then carries on about Pop Tate’s for three paragraphs.

That’s the thing about this book. Most of the time, Mehrotra seems like he can’t be bothered, either with people or with writing about them in any detail. At other times, he belabours a point so much that you no longer feel it’s the slightest bit insightful, or meanders on endlessly about something he’s already discussed several times. This should not surprise us, perhaps. In a previous avatar, Mehrotra was the sort of journalist who, when he wanted to explain the popular Hindi acronym KLPD (Khade lund pe dhokha) in his column for the news weekly Tehelka, produced a four-line-long piece of doggerel instead: “I was hard and erect/ and ready to flow/the signals were all green/ oops! where did she go?” This stellar piece of poetry is now available to us again, since that Tehelka column has become a chapter in the book, under its ridiculous original title, ‘Inside the Sari’.

This second section of the book – ‘Wide Angle’ – is where Mehrotra really comes into his element, holding forth on pretty much everything he wants to, without feeling the slightest need to back up his throwaway assertions with anything that might be called research. In ‘Inside the Sari’, for example, he’s out to “crack” the “codes” that govern “relationships, sex, the dirty business of love and life” in India. He assures us that reading Indian women’s magazines in English – Femina, Cosmopolitan and Women’s Era – will explain a great deal. While magnanimously granting in one sentence that there are “different magazines, different types of Indian women, multiple codes”, in the next sentence he feels able to airily assert that “Indian women used to sit demurely, legs crossed sideways, whenever they rode pillion on a two-wheeler. Now they sit with their legs confidently astride, toned arms gripping their boyfriend’s sixpack.” Which women? Where in India? Of what class background(s)? How old? None of this matters to Mehrotra, who has already moved on to his next pronouncement – “Yes, the sexual revolution is finally underway in India” – based on a few sentences about condom ads and morning-after pills on primetime TV.

This is followed by yet another unbacked assertion: “homegrown chicklit sells in the thousands”. One may wonder: Which books is he talking about? And why does the selling of chick-lit suggest a sexual revolution? But questions are futile. Mehrotra is up and away, with nearly four pages worth of conversational snippets reproduced from a call-in radio show called ‘Between the Sheets’, and hey presto, end of chapter. A chapter as ridiculous as this can only lead us to the conclusion that none of Mehrotra’s intended readers are Indian women. Oh, you are one? And you want to know how to “crack” the codes that govern Indian men? Well, Mehrotra’s message is clear: for that you don’t need to go to men’s magazines – you have Mehrotra himself.

In another chapter called ‘I Love My McJob: The Birth of India’s English-speaking Working Class’, Mehrotra announces that “the average Indian’s attitude to work has changed”. “In the showrooms of global capitalism”, it seems, there is “a newfound respect for physical labour” and nametags that bear only first names erase all signs of caste so that “centuries of prejudice are instantly wiped out”. The ludicrous wishful thinking of this apart, Mehrotra does not even bother to reconcile one set of observations with another: a few chapters later, in a chapter called ‘Servants of India’, he spends a paragraph telling us that “middle class Indians are generally averse to menial work. If they could, they’d hire toilet attendants to wash their bums. A young banker can’t be seen with a broom; an upwardly mobile young woman can’t be seen doing household chores”. In one of his few useful observations in ‘Inside the Sari’, Mehrotra points to the fictive world of Cosmopolitan which discusses the division of such household chores as washing up and cooking, knowing full well that most Indian readers will go home to a house with a live-in servant. So which is it: is the Indian middle class’ inherent hierarchical-ness alive and well, or has liberalisation freed us all from oppressive structures and nasty things like caste? And if the answer is that it’s complicated, it really would be nice if Mehrotra gave some thought to addressing that complexity, rather than giving us contradictory generalisations.

In the third and final section, ‘Here We Are Now, Entertain Us’, the “insider perspective” essentially seems to justify Mehrotra spending what feels like aeons trawling through his long-drawn and boring memories of growing up in pre-liberalisation India — boring not just because pretty much any upper middle class reader over 30 in India remembers those years of Doordarshan and cassette-buying often in as much detail as Mehrotra does, but because he has almost nothing insightful or new to tell us about that shared experience.

This final section does contain the only chapters that seem like they’re based on a combination of immersion and research: several about the emerging music scene (including such gems as our invention of “sitdown rock ‘n’roll”, and one analysing the emergence of reality TV in India, a reasonably interesting subject except that one must deal with a fresh stream of Mehrotraisms, such as “Rarely will Indian couples interact with each other as individuals. Everything about a person is passed through the filter of Bollywood…”.

This book is especially disappointing because it comes from Mehrotra, who can write taut, thoughtful, even arresting prose when he puts his mind to it. Eunuch Park, his book of short stories, which I happened to review (Biblio, May-June, 2009) did contain glimpses of Mehrotra’s now ceaseless desire to shock and provoke, but it was written with greater empathy and greater attentiveness than he seems to provide a single one of his subjects here. From the lazy, slipshod arguments, flat descriptions and self-indulgence on every page of The Butterfly Generation, one can only conclude that Mehrotra thinks nonfiction needs neither research, nor commitment — nor editing. He has proved himself devastatingly wrong.

Published in the March-April 2012 issue of Biblio

Book Review: Palash Krishna Mehrotra's Eunuch Park

My review for Biblio:

Eunuch Park: Fifteen Stories of Love and Destruction

By Palash Krishna Mehrotra

Penguin Books India, New Delhi, 2009.
185 pp., Rs 250ISBN 978-0-14-309992-5

When I was in Class VIII, I went to a girls’ school in Calcutta, where it seemed to be a fact universally acknowledged that the most daring thing a girl could do was to agree to meet a boy at an Archies Gallery. She could then bring the trophy from this conquest – usually a suitably flowery card with the poor sod’s admiration for her expressed in suitably flowery language – to class, and pass it down the back rows to be giggled at. Sometimes it was the card that came first, and the rendezvous that followed, but Archies was inescapable either way.

This starring role played by the Archies card in adolescent 80s romance has only now begun to be acknowledged in our fictions. Dibakar Banerjee’s Oye Lucky Lucky Oye, arguably last year’s funniest – and bleakest – Hindi film, had a defining scene where the Hindi-speaking loutish gang – of which the young Lucky is part – pins down a padhaaku bachcha on his way to school and insist that he decode for them the mysteries of the greeting card – and why girls like it. Palash Krishna Mehrotra’s book has a story called ‘The Farewell’, which contains an uncannily similar scene. The local dada asks the English-medium schoolboy protagonist to write “some nice poetries” in a card for a girl he wants to woo: “You know how these St. Mary’s girls are: all these English types,” he says, and one can hear a wistful bafflement in the words.

There is, in fact, a great deal of bafflement in the stories that make up Eunuch Park, Mehrotra’s first collection of stories. Love in this world is a complicated game, with rules that are nearly impossible to understand – or at least impossible for men. The women – whether it’s the cocker spaniel-like Divya of ‘The Farewell’ who wants her jilted boyfriend “to pretend I don’t exist”, the frustrated Arpita of ‘Fit of Rage’ who feels her “youth slipping away from [her]”, the relentlessly self-analysing Arundhati in ‘Okhla Basti’ who has realized she “wants different things from life”, or Ashawari, the English (Hons) beauty of ‘Bloody and the Friendship Club’ who needs “time to heal [her]self” – are constantly announcing fully-formed decisions, in letters, emails and staccato monologues to male lovers who never seem to have an inkling of what was coming (and who then seem to spend an inordinately long time getting over it).

One cannot help but wonder at this opacity attributed to women: not just across the barriers of class and language, apparently, does the working of the female mind seem a mystery to men. In the superb ‘Pornography’, set in a boys’ school, Sunil Singh is genuinely puzzled when his colleague Miss Das starts to keep the windows of her classroom shut against his unwanted attentions: “This exercised him a great deal. He wasn’t sure why she was doing this. He hadn’t done or said anything to her.” In ‘The Farewell’, when even the successful exchange of cards and Cadbury’s chocolate fails to get him the girl, the heartbroken protagonist swears off love and becomes “a professional go-between”. Charging a standard rate of two Pepsis for every card passed, he taps into the vast Allahabad market of “schoolboys who had the requisite backing but possessed neither the courage nor the language skills to get their message across”.

This world of the North Indian small town, so deeply divided by gender, class and community that it sometimes seems impossible to see across the gulf, is something to which Mehrotra has clearly given a lot of attention, and the sharp yet sympathetic eye he brings to it gives this collection some of its most successful stories – which also happen to be set in schools and colleges. Mehrotra brings to these tales not just a painfully accurate memory of how it felt to be a student in 80s and 90s North India, but also an acute sense of staffroom dynamics: the entrenched, often unspoken, hierarchies, the factions, the vicious gossip, and the stifling hypocrisies. Interestingly, while Mehrotra has some experience of the inside of a staffroom (he taught at the Doon School for three and a half years), most of the educational settings in the book seem modelled on places where he’s been a student: an Allahabad boys’ school that has just been opened to girls, a college in Delhi with a chapel, a high table and a banyan tree under which the cool students gather, a hall of residence at Oxford.

What works well, particularly in the Allahabad stories, is the use of the school or college as a sort of microcosm, a prism through which the wider world is made visible, combined with an unerring – if utterly depressing – sense that ideas about the world acquired in school can often stay with people for a lifetime. The middle-aged Sunil Singh of ‘Pornography’, for example, who expresses his resentment at having to teach in a missionary school by steadfastly refusing to sing the Lord’s Prayer during assembly, has “heard that Christian girls were fast” – presumably when he was a student – “but had never really had a chance to test this theory. He hadn’t known any Christians before coming here.” In the masterful conclusion to ‘The Farewell’, the school jock turned prosperous businessman, about to marry a “Lucknow girl, my bua’s choice” makes the sort of remark about an ex-classmate that schoolboys probably make about unattainable hot girls – except it’s been twelve years since he finished school.

Very occasionally, Mehrotra lets his characters emerge from the fog of mutual incomprehension and actually see each other, with unexpectedly moving effects. In ‘The Teacher’s Daughter’, the moment of recognition comes when Tripathi finally stops wincing over all the ways in which his life is going to be made more difficult by what his daughter has done, and thinks instead of her: “he went as fast as his scooter could take, weaving in and out of the traffic in a way he hadn’t done since he got married. He was desperate to meet Jyoti. After all, she was his daughter… They needed to talk. They would work something out.” In ‘Pornography’, it is the glimmer of a possibility for identification between students and teacher that somehow humanises both: “Once the boys realized the larger reasons behind Singh’s return they were less resentful. They liked the idea of squinty-eyed Helicopter angling for the new babe in town. His laziness, his ugliness, his vaulting ambition, all served to endear him to the boys. It made him one of them.” A very different sort of moment of recognition occurs in ‘Nobody Wants to Eat My Mangoes’, a deeply affecting – if unutterably bleak – account of an evening in the life of a Gujarati law books salesman hemmed in between his wife and his sisters. The only story set in Bombay, ‘Nobody Wants…’ gets off to a slow start that barely skims the surface of the city, but settles into its skin as it moves into interior spaces, the claustrophobia of both spaces and lives building inexorably towards the distressing climax.

Another set of stories revolves around an upper middle class male protagonist (who, for reasons only sometimes made explicit) hanging out on what the Americans call “the wrong side of the tracks”. The articulation of this predicament is sometimes clunky and literal, as in the story ‘Okhla Basti’: “Angad often wondered what he was doing in a place like this – a place far removed from his own world, the world he was born into and worked in, one with whose rules he bore an instinctive familiarity. Could it be that failing to understand its rules, he was looking for a different world, with different rules?” ‘Okhla Basti’’s self-conscious attempt to create a portrait of otherness is never entirely successful: perhaps because Angad, through whose eyes we see everyone else, is so clearly just passing through. There are too many characters, all hurriedly etched, and none of them really stay with you. In contrast, the more tautly plotted ‘Fit of Rage’ takes a similar cross-class premise – an ex-techie makes friends with a rickshaw-wala and a domestic help – and manages to use it to create an atmosphere that’s simultaneously familiar and unsettling, laying open the shaky certitudes upon which our lives are built.

Several other stories in the book could be said to challenge other kinds of certitudes; they deal with men – it’s always men – exploring their sexuality. But all these stories – ‘Dancing With Men’, ‘Touch and Go’, ‘The Wrist’, ‘The Nick of Time’, ‘Freshers’ Welcome’ – hinge on a single event, a momentary occurrence often fuelled by alcohol or dope, that will in all likelihood lead nowhere. It’s almost as if these incidents are blips on the horizon, illuminating for an instance the possibility of what could possibly be, but never will. These are probably the collection’s most open-ended stories, and the lack of closure with which they leave their characters often seems unsatisfying.

Mehrotra’s sentences are studied, and he delights in the seeming non sequitur: “He has never taken a day off in his entire working career. He never gets diarrhoea.” Or “His legs do not shake, his hands do not fidget. The strongest wind will not ruffle his hair.” There is the occasional cliché – “They did kiss for a while on the carpet but the fire inside Mayank had grown cold” – or overwriting – “Surabhi is sulking. Her sulks are the stuff of legend. There is an insinuating quality to them – they crawl into corners and mingle with dust balls, get lodged in your intestines” – but on the whole, the writing in Eunuch Park has an enviable economy. The insane boredom of a college hostel at night, the desperate gentility of an Allahabad restaurant, the sordid staleness of cheap hotel rooms – all of these are deftly evoked. One may tire of the unending squalor, the oft-repeated doped-out ennui, or the deliberate desire to shock, but there is still plenty here that can get lodged in your intestines.

Published in Biblio VOL. XIV NOS. 5 & 6, May - June 2009.