The Pleasure Seeker by Tishani Doshi

Posted on: May 03, 2012

The Pleasure Seeker by Tishani Doshi

Previously published in Dawn Books & Authors.

The Pleasure Seekers is really just very flat. Tishani Doshi is much quoted as saying that this is her love letter to her parents, and so perhaps a reader or two may feel a slight twinge of guilt in not enjoying something that clearly has come from the heart, but ultimately it is a bit of a cliché.

 

We spend much time with Babo andSian, whose love affair is what the book is meant to be about. Gujrati boy meets Welsh girl inLondonin the late ‘60s. They fall in love; we don’t really know why. What connects them? What draws them to each other, apart from each others foreignness? It does not matter; because they believe what they have is real and forever. We know this becauseSianis quite willing to drop everything and move toIndia, a country she can hardly imagine, at the behest of her parents-in-law. Why do they want her to move back toMadraswith Babo? What do they think this will achieve? They are not at ease with the idea of their eldest son marrying a foreigner, but allow him marry her as long as they live inIndiafor two years. Why is not enough for them to simply meet her, get to know her and let the young couple go their own way? What do they think will happen in those two years? It’s really very hard to tell. It’s sometimes hard to care about too, because Doshi sails smoothly on from what could be a real conflict, as she does again and again throughout the book.

There is very little conflict at all in The Pleasure Seekers, very little to create dramatic tension or excitement. Doshi introduces Babo and Sian as a young couple who never fight, she moves them to India with very little hullabaloo, they marry and live with his parents quite calmly, have children, make a home for themselves, watch their siblings marry, get older, watch their children grow up and move away…its all just very, very flat. There is no friction in the novel, no real texture or abrasiveness that can catch and hold a readers true attention. Even when the narrative changes tracks and moves to their younger daughter, Bean, who is meant to be conflicted within herself, it is barely with any change in pace or rise in emotion.

Doshi has stated that she relied on her own memory of childhood to write about the young family in Madras, and clearly the gloss of childhood memories has made everything just a little too shiny, too perfect and too temperature controlled. Too many of her characters are perfect – some of them have no flaws at all. Yes, often parents and family are romanticized in literature with the best of intentions, but Doshi takes it too far, because often her characters, who are albeit given many descriptions, become flat and uninteresting simply because they seem so agreeable. They are sad, they are happy, they get old, they get sick and some even die, but no one really ever causes a ruckus. All of this happens at the same narrative pace and often feels aimless, doing nothing to move plot along.

The various threads of the story are held together by the mythic Ba, the paternal grandmother who lives in a home of peacock feathers and red garoli lizards that have held the home together against all forms of natural disasters by leaving their spit on the walls. Her hair turns white overnight, she is almost blind but she can smell people, portents and omens. She is the perfect wise old woman who has all the answers. With her,

Indiais exoticised, particularly the ancestral home where Ba lives.

However, a strong redeeming quality of The Pleasure Seekers is that the book is very readable and not as lengthy as it could have been, given the number of characters whose lives she could have chosen to elaborate upon. Although she continues to introduce new characters late in the book, Doshi does wind up her multigenerational epic in a fairly acceptable length. But she has managed to write up such a frenzy of characters with their intertwining lives that she is unable to finish things off neatly and with good resolution. As with so many current writers, she relies on a technique that is far from contemporary – her god in the machine is an earthquake, an event that draws the family together and helps her settle the dust, but with little satisfaction to the reader.

The Pleasure Seekers has received high praise from the likes of Salman Rushdie, and perhaps there are many readers who will find it an enjoyable saga about a family that comes (quite easily) to terms with any disturbance in their lives. Doshi’s language is sometimes poetic and is often lovingly filled with local terms and familial endearments, but it is just much too smooth to be truly riveting.