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Book Name:The Colour of Dawn by Janaki Murali Publisher: Harper Collins India Pages: 198 Price: Rs 195 ISBN: 81-7223-439-2

THE UNSATISFYING COLOUR OF REVENGE

The trouble with reading a lot of books one after the other is that you tend to bracket them. "Oh, this is another one just like the one I read two weeks ago. Same sort of story, but different author." You do it a lot if you are a reviewer and sometime authors do it too, especially if they find a formula that seems to be going down well with readers.

Janaki Murali’s novel is in part psychological drama and in part a story of unrequited love and revenge set against a South Indian background which promptly rings Arundhuti Roy bells even though the comparison is far from fair. The author tells a tale of a woman's struggle to bury a past that threatens to destroy the peace of the present.

The setting of the novel is Bombay years before it became Mumbai, not Kerala, and the way the story is told juxtaposes events following the Partition, compares India's socio-political history with the events in Sita's life. We are told fleetingly about Sita's childhood years, beginning from her birth in the Palghat village and the bleak years that follow as she lives with her father in Bombay, and blossoms into a beautiful young girl who hides a terrible secret. The story begins startlingly when Sita's daughter Sanjna arrives on the scene with her Pakistani husband, disrupting the even tenor of her parent's lives.

What are Sita’s thoughts when her daughter confronts her with her cross border marriage conceived in America? By delving into these thoughts Murali is offering us a world which takes us out of the world we know and yet the characters keep coming back to confront that world in a cognitive way. The interspersing of the past and the present is done smoothly with creditable attention to technique... However, the narrative does not allow us to suspend our disbelief long enough to prevent us from being puzzled by certain questions, which the story does not answer and which perplex once the book is closed. Why does Kunjan need to wait 25 years to realise his revenge on Sita or and why does Sanjna, who seems to be a headstrong girl capable of making her own decisions, insist on a meeting with her mother's obsessed cousin? A meeting that hardly seems necessary. The other unconvincing factor is Sita's panic attacks. These have apparently never been taken seriously by her otherwise caring husband Sami, a doctor, who knew about them all the time.

The issue of a Pakistani husband in a South Indian Brahmin home, which is intended to create a big stir in the family and split it apart, fails to achieve the desired effect despite Kunjan's efforts to publicise the news. Nor is the husband credible as a character in his own right.

The promised saga of revenge does not hold our attention and the new dawn, which we are told about in the prologue, offers us only uncertainty. However, it must be said that the atmosphere and the individual details of the storyline are carefully crafted, while the tone of the narrative is honest because at its heart is a message about a Nation being a family which should rise above petty considerations of revenge..

The author, a journalist, has also written for children and this is perhaps why she can get her message across so clearly and honestly.

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