THE LAST SONG OF DUSK

A lively debut gives vivid magical-realist form to the necessity of loving others—and the sorrows to which doing so exposes us.

Anglo-Indian author Shanghvi’s warm, witty omniscient narrative voice gets the story off to a dazzling start, as transcendently beautiful Anuradha Patwardhan travels (at a time in the early 1920s) to Bombay for her arranged marriage to impossibly handsome young physician Vardhamaan Gandharva. The couple’s blissful, too-perfect union is blighted by the enmity of Vardhamaan’s ferocious stepmother Divi-bai (accompanied everywhere by her verbally malevolent parrot), and by the accidental early death of their son Mohan (“a child of mythic good looks”)—a misfortune that seems to confirm the sentiments of the melancholy “song of dusk” the Patwardhan women are fated to croon. Shanghvi then shifts to the capsule history of Dariya Mahal, a Bombay seaside mansion whose owner had literally died from loving too much. It’s there that Vardhamaan brings Anuradha following their brief separation after Mohan’s death. Enter Nandini Hariharan, Anuradha’s teenaged distant cousin: a seductively gorgeous self-taught painter whose inherent animality (rumor speaks of her lineal descent from “a woman [who] had mated with a leopard”) makes her sexually irresistible and preternaturally self-assured, and propels her rapid ascent to the highest levels of Bombay’s artistic and social worlds. Meanwhile, Anuradha has borne her second son Shloka, a physically perfect child whose slowness to learn speech ironically foreshadows Vardhamaan’s unexplained withdrawal from her. And Shloka’s growth—into language, loving, and eventual independence—both validates the legacy of Dariya Mahal (itself a virtual character in the novel) and parallels Nandini’s embattled liberation from her own nature. The logic of the narrative and the gorgeous atmospheric and verbal trappings make this wonderful novel as insistently readable as it is – particularly in its moving final pages – immensely satisfying.

Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Hari Kunzru, et al. need to make room on the podium. Booker judges should pay attention too.