Genre: Dystopian/speculative
Publisher: Penguin Viking
Pages: 324
Price: Rs 599/-
Tuesday, April 30, 2024
BOOK REVIEW: Like Being Alive Twice by Dharini Bhaskar
Like Being Alive Twice- a riveting contemporary tale of the intersectionality of class, ethnicity and gender
Dharini Bhaskar’s newly released book, ‘Like Being Alive Twice’ is a tale of contemporary times. It is a book that holds you in thrall as a gifted writer weaves a compelling tale in an innovative way with regard to both its content and form. With little world building and an almost cinematic structuring of scenes, the author pulls the reader into a vortex of compelling events that happen in the lives of the characters as they live it or dream it. The story is told by using the technique of alternating scenes of the real and the imagined in subsequent chapters. As a matter of fact it brings to mind a line from Javed Akhtar’s nazm, “Mujhe hain yaad woh sab kuch, jo kabhi huan hi nahin”!
Set in an unknown country, the book begins with a love story between Poppy (Priyamvada), a Hindu and Tar (Tariq), a Muslim who plan to marry and make a life together. That was the time “when life, sweet and yielding, offered possibilities”. But soon they sense their world turning insidiously dystopian with every passing day. Tar begins having apprehensions and wants to leave the unknown country they live in with Poppy, who refuses to leave. As the main characters try to make sense of their lives in this whirligig of life, holding on to their agency becomes their biggest challenge as circumstances around them start changing irrevocably.
This leads to the unfolding of two concurrent stories emerging out of alternating chapters, as Poppy going through two different coloured doors -yellow and blue- narrates factual developments in one and escapes into a state of wishful imagining of what could have been possible in the other. The story telling with this constant juxtaposing of the real and the imaginary over events of a seven year period, includes Yana and Yuvi , who as a couple become the counterpoints to Poppy and Tar. This layering espouses the pervasive ‘othering’ sentiment that starts impacting the foursome. The dreams of what could have been gets savaged by the intrusion of the system of the Tally cards and scoring of points which compartmentalizes people on the basis of their position of privilege or the lack of it.
As Poppy says,
“I was fighting Yuvi, fighting his world so neatly built- two cubbyholes- us; them.
I was fighting for the world- the wild and shambolic world I almost had with Tar. Almost.”
The story can be read through the prism of intersectionality of class, ethnicity and gender. Wealth, being politically correct and the ablity to reproduce naturally allows Yuvi to attain the ultimate privilege of being able to live in the elitist Baghs. For all the others who don’t quite make it on those arbitrarily decided scores, there are the Bastis and the Duur Mohallas in descending order of relevance, clearly indicating one’s lot in the new alienating world being constructed by powers not to be seen but felt in ominous ways. Soon they realize the ramifications of a world coming into play, that can annihilate intimate relationships and liberal agency in its mechanical estimation of a person’s worth as represented by the new yardsticks of measurements, the Tally cards.
Bhaskar’s story telling is exceptionally nuanced as she pulls in allusions and references from diverse sources. The title of the book is derived from a line from poet Linda Gregg’s poem, The Defeated:
I had warm pumpernickel bread, cheese and chicken.
It is sunny outside. I miss you. My head is tired.
John was nice this morning. Already what I remember
most is the happiness of seeing you. Having tea.
Falling asleep. Waking up with you there awake
in the kitchen. It was like being alive twice.
I’ll try to tell you better when I am stronger.
Similarly, she alludes to a sentence from Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘This Side of Paradise’, ‘It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being’ which leaves its resonance with the reader long after the story has ended
The taut plot, fraught as it is with the depiction of a multiverse reality, has the three mothers of Poppy, Tar and Yuvi appearing in the narrative regularly as foils symbolising the reassuring, the stable and the predictable to balance the imminent ascendancy of the dissonance coming to bear on their lives. How do the characters in the narrative accept or reject this emerging world view is the subtext of the narrative. Either which way there is a price to be paid!
Sabina Pillai
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