The Red Carpet - Book Review

Read Lavanya Sankaran's The Red Carpet - Bangalore Stories recently. It is a collection of short stories, all of them set in Bangalore.

It is only incidental that the stories take place in Bangalore. They might as well have taken place in any big city of South India, or for that matter, even the North. Most of the stories, except for the title story The Red Carpet itself, are about Tamil Brahmin (Tambram) Iyer families. As such the stories are more about contemporary Tambrams, than about anything to do with Bangalore.

The occasional appearance of Kannada words and phrases in the stories seemed contrived, where as, the Tamil words seemed to blend in nicely. In fact, one of the Kannada phrases was not even grammatically correct. If you belong to an upper middleclass non-Kannadiga family in Bangalore, it is quite possible for you to grow up in Bangalore without really becoming fluent in the local Kannada language.** I suspect the author Lavanya Sankaran might be one of those.

The stories themselves are very well written. They effortlessly pull the reader into the lives of the characters. I found myself empathizing with the hopes and dreams and pains and fears of the characters even before reading through the first page of each story. For me, the most touching story was "Mysore Coffee", about Sita, a working girl who is haunted by childhood memories of her father's suicide. She is brilliant at her work, but not very savvy in communicating with colleagues. As such, others end up taking credit for all her hard work. Although I could empathize with the character Sita, I could never understand how (Spoiler Warning - don't read the rest of this paragraph if you don't want to know what happens at the end of the story) someone would rather think of destroying all their hardwork and even contemplate suicide, than speak up in the office. Strange!

Another great thing about this book was, to read about characters who are so similar to my own self. The state of contemporary Indian literature (and TV, movies) is that, we hardly ever get to read (or watch) about characters who are similar to us - average, young, educated, working people, around the age of 30 (give or take a few years), straddling Indian family traditions and values, the influence of Western cultures and ethics, combined with the unavoidable exposure to the global economy, whether we are living in India or the US or elsewhere. It was a refreshing change to be able to read about such characters in this book. I guess that is a big part of the reason why I could so easily empathize with all the characters.

I found the stories to be sincerely written - nothing pretentious or artificial about them. There was certainly nothing in the stories which seemed to be packaged as exotic Indian fare for the foreign audience. These are the times when many writers and movie-makers are using the Indian themes to target foreign and/or NRI audiences. We should commend Lavanya Sankaran for not succumbing to that trap.

A highly recommended book.



**Yes, it is quite possible to grow up in Bangalore and not really learn Kannada. At home, you'd speak your own mother tongue; at school and work, you'd speak English (and a little Hindi, and even your own mother tongue if ran into others who knew it); with the other essential services people like shopkeepers, etc. you can speak English, Hindi, your own mother tongue (especially if it happens to be Tamil or Telugu) and a smattering of broken Kannada; most of your Kannadiga friends will also be nice enough to talk to you in English, Hindi or your own mother tongue (if they know it), before they attempt to talk to you in Kannada.