Rating: (5 out of 5) An inspired novel
Reviewer: Kala Ramesh - Tehelka Review from New Delhi, India
BY ALL LOGICAL considerations, Uday Prakash’s The Girl with the Golden Parasol ought not to work — it appears to have too much plot, too many messages and so much rant that it should be tiresome. But in fact, it works so well that it’s virtually unputdownable: with every page, I was glad I hadn’t read him before, glad for the surprises of a completely unfamiliar writer.

The Girl with the Golden Parasol — with an excellent translation by Jason Grunebaum that won a 2005 PEN USA Translation Fund Award — is a lyrical love story set in an archaic university, amidst all that you would expect of such a setting. It is, as Amit Chaudhuri says, “a paean to the dignity of human desires… a memorable invective against the present state of provincial higher education, the Hindi language, the Brahmin legacy, and the bewildering India in which we now find ourselves.”

The novel is all that because it has several stories going on simultaneously, each one about different aspects of the lives of its characters, but nowhere does the reader feel that there is one “main” story and several “sub” stories. Careful plotting and masterful narration ensure that the readers are swept along by events to witness the full development of each story, but returned to the center where all the stories flow as one.

Thus, the Anjali-Rahul love story, the story of how the Hindi department and Hindi itself are choking on its own caste-generated venom, the story of the students’ suffering and Sapam’s death at the hands of the local thugs, the story of India’s tryst with consumerism and globalisation — all running parallel and with equal intensity — find their logical conclusion in the logic of the whole story.

There are several intriguing things about The Girl with the Golden Parasol, but two stand out. One is an intertextual movement, cross-referencing the story of the novel and that of the author. The other is the character of Kinnu Da, Rahul’s anthropologist uncle who appears as a commentator on several issues raised by the novel. Kinnu Da’s comments give these issues a larger-than-the-story significance but they also tantalize the reader. It appears that he could be a sort of tribute to someone Uday Prakash greatly admired and who, in real life, did the kind of work that Kinnu Da does in the novel.

There is a constant give-and-take between events in the story and familiar events from real time, as well as between real-time events in Rahul’s life and those that he lives out in his mind, which may be realistic and fear-inducing, like the “film loops” that keep him awake at night with their terrifying content, or they might be epiphanically sweet, like the vision of the butterfly and the parasol transforming from one into the other. This swinging between real and imaginary worlds affects the way the reader apprehends time in the story. For though the passage of time, in both the passing of days as well as action, is quite long — and Uday Prakash writes so as to give readers a sense of the intensity of each day — there is also the counter-effect of this intensity flowing into the larger spaces of the whole story.

If one were to name a flaw in this wonderful book, it would be that at times, the emotions of the characters become so densely stormy that the reader, swept headlong by the consummate story-telling, feels an overabundance of air. But to the author’s constant credit, the storm dissipates soon enough and the reader is freed. Uday Prakash’s The Girl with the Golden Parasol is as much a lesson in the craft of storytelling as it is a good read. One is awed by how a book that appears to have so much weighted against it, rises, floats and goes from a piquant start to a dramatic middle and an inspired ending.

From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 5, Issue 21, Dated May 31, 2008