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Book Name:The Last Jet Engine Laugh Publisher: Harper Collins India Price: Rs. 395

KOLKATA MON AMOUR

Kolkata, city with an attitude, the armpit of India - it all depends on how you look at it. Of course the Kolkata diehard intellectuals will insist that despite its defects, it is a city to die for. Even the ones who leave Calcutta can't get it out of their veins. Amit Chaudhury - though he's back in the city singing and writing about long dusty roads with rabindransangeet at the end of them. His books are all songs to a poetic Kolkata. Raj Kamal Jha sitting in Delhi and writing about incest in a midnight blue Kolkata.

There's a side to Kolkata that all this poetry and music misses out on. A down to earth side where lovers have no place to go to hold hands. So they resort to the back seat of taxis, after dark, hoping that the driver won't notice - though the hope is usually in vain because the driver shifts his rearview mirror and all the other cars behind get a peep show through the rear windshield of two heads bobbing together. This is the Kolkata that Joshi describes in his book. A Kolkata all the rarer for being seen by a Gujarati who is part of the city but yet not part of the city.

Ruchir's is the neighborhood fiction I own this city kind of Calcutta book. The kind that brings out the aggressive nosy side of the city. It is in part Calcutta attitude with the Benglish, Hinglish English that everyone speaks - and of course, since Ruchir is Gujarati, Ginglish - thrown in to bring out the attitude.

An aggressive Kolkata where a sub section of the people insist on believing that a 123 year old political legend named Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose is still alive and waiting somewhere to return and lead them to victory. Where would he be, where could he have vanished if not in a plane crash - half of Kolkata refuses to accept the plane crash. So Joshi takes a leaf out of Solzenytsin and plonks the old man in a gulag, a prisoner with no name and babblings of Bengali identity. No one recognises him there, though his guards bring in a Bengali to interrogate him. This while Bengal celebrates his birthday and sets off sirens at the time of his birth every 23rd January.

The language of the novel is typical Indian English - something that is certainly not English but a lingua franca peculiar to the subcontinent. Born out of Independence and cultivated by Star TV. In fact, this is a novel that's easy to read for the Indian male who is convinced that 'English is a behnchod limited language' anyway but you have to struggle through it to be recognised as cosmopolitan. That's where the novel stands apart from the other Indian novels in English - because this one is written in the authentic language of India. Refreshing and unforced.

So Paresh Bhatt, the typical Indian male at 70, saddled with the memory of freedom fighting parents and with a daughter out of Top Gun, doing a Tom Cruise number. Paresh has the fashionable 'don't know what to do with my roots' problem since he swings between many cities and many memories. Also a few lovers. This is where the typical Indian woman would sit up and sniff, "Just like an Indian male!" Because his women are there only to be tasted or sensed but have no real existence as woman.

They come and go - not necessarily talking of Michelangelo. Sandy, who surprisingly becomes a social worker - surprisingly because she is undermined by her sexual antics long before we realise that the girl has substance to her. The chapter in which she makes her main entrance was apparently a talking point in Delhi and London because it was a first in dessert sex. Dessert sex? Well, whatever. Sandy merits a jet engine whiney laugh between Paresh and his friend. Teesta Ila Ray. Anna Lang - distinguished by her German accent - why did they really break up? Para seems to know, Paresh seems to regret, but the reasons are lost in wistfulness and a Hemingway murmuring over the handprints that lovers leave behind them. Joshi does Hemingway - there is a streak of that. "Laddish' as someone put it, bad boy memories of women left behind.

Paresh's daughter, Para is the only woman barring his mother that he tries to get to grips with. Para is modern, has her grandmother's fighting spirit, but gets bogged down in the details. She wears diapers while spinning in space. She has detailed air to ground missiles and plays detailed computer games - one of them a death of Diana and Dodi game spun out in an arrondisement in Paris.

Joshi is very good at the details - his descriptions of daily household things, his coffee maker; these ground The Last Jet Engine Laugh in an earthy reality. The novel is in fact held up by the belief that everything matters, that every breakfast, every touch, sound and word relates to the heart of some deep rooted collective unconscious, whether it's Kolkata or Ahmedabad. But the same details that work for Paresh's day to day life, while vividly outlined, make us lose our grasp of Para and, in the end, obscure the father-daughter relationship.

In fact, the relationship between Paresh's parents and Paresh's relationship with his parents is far more well rounded than his relationship with Para, or Anna Lang or any of the other people in the book. Like many other great Indian novels, this book too tries to do the vast canvas cosmopolitan thing. Paresh's parents bring in the freedom struggle with Netaji dovetailing neatly. The only thing that actually holds all these stories together is Paresh. His is the task of linking the generations, of counting his memories - the quintessential midnight's child born out of Rushdie - though he doesn't take his task as seriously.

Several scenes catch the imagination in this quirky debut novel -Paresh's father caught climbing out of a train at Kolkata onto a platform thigh-deep in monsoon water, with a coolie whose hands form dancer's mudras above his head; Para planning her escape from an orbiting spacecraft. Things are noted and described with an artist's touch, as when the ladling of liquid onto a griddle to make dosas summons up the swelling of a mushroom cloud, or a woman's snore "begins its soft argument with the night air".

Paresh leaves Kolkata behind and moves on to other parts of the world, but it is the Kolkata flavour and Paresh's childhood that remain the most memorable parts of the book. Netaji, the Zeros, Para's flights into space are bravura set pieces that are bravely embarked upon and that are entertaining in their own right but they pall in comparison with the city and its bustle as described by Joshi. In fact, in the book, it is probably Kolkata and the Bongs, or the Gujarati Bongs, which have the last jet engine laugh.

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