TWO PRONOUNS AND A VERB: A NOVEL
By Kiran Khalap,
Amaryllis, Rs 295

“When we read a text, we are either read by the text or we are in the text. Either we tame a text, we ride on it, we roll over it, or we are swallowed up by it, as by a whale”— these are the opening lines of Hélène Cixous’s Reading with Clarice Lispector: Theory and History of Literature. The novel by Kiran Khalap is a ‘whaley’ text, as untameable, billowing, insurmountable as life itself. While reading the text, you will have to be in it, surrender to it and be swallowed.

Two Pronouns and a Verb has three main characters — Arjun, Dhruv and Eva. The relationship among these three propels the novel. The novel segues through four narrative voices. One independent voice, that of the narrator, is accompanied by three others — those of Arjun, Dhruv and Eva.

When the “Prologue: 1998” opens, Dhruv and Arjun are 40-plus-something men, meeting after decades, “retracing their lives in an attempt to meet at the point in the past when they were inseparable”. But that point is elusive, simultaneously a point of convergence and divergence, a point which reserves immense energy, inviting implosions. They are, the narrator says, faced with a “labyrinth, shaped not in space, but in time”. They grope their ways through the labyrinth for the rest of the novel. And this labyrinthine route, of time, of memory, has for its constant point of reference, Eva, “the third star of the constellation of love and destiny”.

Arjun Tambe is the son of an ayurvedic physician. His earliest memories are of the times spent together with his cousin, Dhruv Deshpande, in Pune. Arjun is a dreamer, a poet, a lover of pets. To Dhruv, he is a ‘cry baby’. Their growing years are exciting, but things take a dramatic turn when a girl walks (rather, drops) into their lives. It is one o’clock in the morning. Arjun, led by his pet bitch, Vaghya, comes upon a blonde in his cowshed, emerging from behind the haystack. It is a surreal moment. She is a girl from Dresden who came to India with her mother.

Eva loves Dhruv, and Dhruv, too, swears his love for her. But Dhruv suddenly disappears in Nagpur, nobody knows why. Meanwhile, that fateful thing happens. Eva takes Arjun to Goa on her motorbike, and there, even before they can know it, they are under a maddening, eddying spell of love. When locked in an embrace, Eva says, “The wind pushes against our skin; its salty tongue produces a hundred tiny licks all over my body, arms, inner thighs, nostrils” and Arjun discovers her “female body as a landscape”. Eva says, “All love is not equal, Arrjoon... and I must take responsibility for my definition, you must for yours, D for his.”

Is it then a novel about love, of its different textures and lineaments, going beyond stereotypes? It is so, and much more. Soon the lives, loves and universes of the three are shattered and they fly off like splinters in directions unknown to them. The novel questions the validity of the attempts to define love and life from a single point of view, to fit everything within a single moral framework. It shows that in life and love, so many arrows are in flight, so many movements are now arrested, now released, so many questions are suspended, begging answers. Khalap’s language, incisive and poetically inflected, chases these whizzing, dizzying flights.