Book: INTEMPERANCE: A NOVEL
Author: Sonora Jha
Published by: Penguin
Price: Rs 799
Sonora Jha's book is a coming-of-age story, but not in the way that the reader is used to. It traces the journey of an almost fifty-five-year-old on a quest to find love again through a swayamvar, having married and divorced twice. She married outside her community the first time and outside her race the second; there is thus no overt traditionality involved in the protagonist's life. Yet, her decision to hold a swayamvar — a 'marriage competition', if you will, that is largely attributed to lore in the modern world — the third time around gives a sense of 'going back' to a certain kind of traditional imagination. The act of love here seems to be a choice, a very performative act of choice of garlanding the best suitor, but the understanding is that fate, rather than feat, will end up ministrating.
The treatment of disability also has a unique flavour in the book. There are moments of depth; the handling of the lived experiences of the protagonist as a person with leg-muscle atrophy due to polio is thoughtful. However, the disability is not all-encompassing. For the protagonist, it is her companion; something that moves with her, lives with her, colours her experiences but doesn't taint her spirit. It doesn't define who she is. The houseboat in which she lives, unsteady and whimsical as it is, becomes, ironically, symbolic of her steadiness — in life and in limb.
Jha composes her modern-day tale — the protagonist is a sociology professor in Seattle who writes on masculinity, travels around the world, and is overall an independent and socially mobile American — to follow the epic schema, with flashbacks, curses, digressions to accommodate different storylines, random meetings with god-like beings, and such. But it feels like parts of the plot exist particularly to emphasise this without serving much purpose otherwise. Some supernatural elements are introduced to drive home the point about the interplay between the contemporary and the past. But it is actually the more humane, the everyday parts of the book that shine. Which is why the protagonist's best friend, Cat, emerges as a much more interesting character than, say, the ethereal, philosophically-inclined woman she meets on the bus.
There is a strange current of exoticisation that runs throughout the book. The protagonist seems to perpetually be looking through gold-tinted glasses, turning everything soft, diffused, Ghibliesque. Sometimes, it works; her experience at a dance studio where she finds herself drawn to the rhythm yet is unable to match it due to her injuries makes for a deeply intimate rumination. At other times, it is a tad disconcerting. None of the people she meets seems real, three-dimensional. In that way, the most flesh-and-blood character that emerges from the narrative, apart from the protagonist herself, is Paul, who appears only at the very end of the book. His letter is perhaps the most touching part of Intemperance. Its subtlety truly tempers an otherwise wildly dramatic book. To be fair, the reader had been warned by the title.