Alchemy of Desire

A very desirous read. I reached the half mark in the 500+ pages book last night, forcing a sleepy, weary, and guilty me into the wee'st hours of the night. Guilty, why - my end of term exams start tomorrow.

If there's one thing I love about exams, it's how I always manage to dig out a riveting serial, an addictive series of books, or even a single unputdownable book just before they're about to start. And then I make it/them last right until I have the freedom to study anything but course material.

This time, it's Tarun J Tejpal's Alchemy of Desire. The book's less of a tome, and more of a siren call I tells ya. When I casually dumped it into my shopping basket a week ago, I didn't even find the blurb very interesting (I'm a blurbaholic). Someone had been raving about the book sometime back and I decided to give it a shot since my mum was being extra generous with my book budget. What followed since can be hinted at by distorting an age old Bangalorean auto adage - trust a snake and a woman, but never Alchemy of Desire.

I won't get too much into the plot, because I haven't finished the book yet (and unfortunately, this is one of those books that you never want to finish but end up devouring in a primal bookwormy frenzy anyway) but its sensuality is seriously addictive. The narrator is this perfectly faceless being, and I'm happy to leave him at that. It is the worlds that he talks of being embedded in, leaving behind, immersing in, emerging from, and the people that populate it that really catch my attention. It's the narrator's story for sure, but the other characters, particularly his wife Fiza, are never relegated to the background. I keep waiting for the little tidbits he feeds the reader about her, and am happy remaining netted in the barely controlled but exquisitely articulate description of the erotica of love and companionship.

Even the seemingly external narratives he threads in are made tolerable by the inevitable, and constant friction of desire between him and Fizz. Only when he begins to talk longwindedly about politics in a half-baked veteran journalistic way does the prose get tiresome. It almost begins to seem like he is yammering in a hallucinatory state, and I found myself skipping first sentences, then entire paragraphs.

Some way past the half mark, another story begins to creep into his seemingly aimless narrative, and things he'd only hinted at earlier now show promise of being slowly disrobed. Some 300 pages into the book, he finally begins cluing the reader in about himself, and even as my dislike for him grows, I can't pass the room I've kept the book in without literally having to tear my thoughts away from the witchy, luring book.

On a different note, a part of my wants to rush at his journalistic rambles because the Indian decades he speaks of seem so unreal. History that was made just before I was born seems irrelevant, someone else's imagination playing havoc in unwritten history texts. Someday, the generation after mine will read it and I'll still be wondering who those people are, where did they come from, and why I never noticed they were there..?