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The alchemy of desire by Tarun Tejpal.

Extracts from the book – The alchemy of desire by Tarun Tejpal.
‘Like the earlier one, this manuscript too began well. The opening sentence had floated serenely like a drifting kite into my mind the night of my resignation as we drove up and down Chandigarh’s roads, her hands moving inside my shirt: Each time Abhay rode his throbbing motorcycle through Chandni Chowk’s rustling-bustling streets he felt the entire weight of Indian history riding pillion behind him. He felt everyone from Shahjehan to Queen Victoria to Ghandhi-Nehru-Patel-Azad clinging to him and choking him and demanding him and no matter how nuch he zigged and zagged and swerved and sped he just could not shake them off.
Few thing match the high of quitting a job. To reclaim your life, howsoever briefly. To be – if only for a time – your own master. We rode up and down, letting our hands do what they could, and only when there was nothing more our hands could do, we needed our home to finish what our hands had started, did we turn back.’

These few lines are enough to explain the sheer pleasure of this 500odd page novel. Each and every page flows with lyrical love. Desire – how beautiful is the word desire. Complete yet not complete. Satisfied yet not satisfied. Simple but very complex word. Strands and strands of story with in story weaved together brilliantly, this will leave us in awe, pleasure, nostalgic feel to read it again.

posted by Vinod @ 11:29 AM