SUMMER OF THEN: A NOVEL
By Rupleena Bose
Vintage, Rs 699
There are times when one’s words threaten to burst out of oneself, leading to a deluge of thoughts, hurt, feelings, and wonder. Summer of Then is a similar explosion of interiority. From an evening that offers unusually clean air and bright stars to a dawn that is suffocated by disease and miasma, a decade-long story unfolds, full of longing, betrayal, memory, desire, and love. Rupleena Bose’s debut novel has an intriguing, incoherent quality: memories are punctuated by musings, observations tumble into imagination, dialogues abandon their speakers. It is like a diary of conversations in one’s own head, an attempt to narrativise the self.
Bose is talented in extracting the extraordinary out of the mundane. This is particularly prominent in her descriptions of cities and spaces. Themes like identity, belonging and longing keep recurring in relation to cities. Especially compelling is the portrayal of Calcutta — the narrator is not a native, but it turns into something like the proverbial promised land. A cyclic significance is established; the story begins in Calcutta and ends on the cusp of a journey back to the city.
Some characters, however, feel like the means to an end: Nikhil, an obtuse and selfish partner; Zap, a narcissistic paramour; Rhea, the narrator’s benevolent rich friend; Pat,
an escapist, closeted gay man. The two prominent characters that break out of this mould are Dharamdev, Rhea’s aunt’s man Friday, who escapes a life of communal violence, and the narrator’s late grandmother, who was abandoned by her husband and became an art teacher for the post-Partition Nilokheri project. Their stories are considerably independent of the narrator and thus provide respite from a largely narrator-centric account. Bose also manages to weave in snippets of the changing socio-cultural landscape of the India of the 2010s quite seamlessly throughout the narrative, giving the story some additional depth.
