Book review 'Lady Lolita’s Lover': Video, vagrant love and violent revenge
The only way to make clear to you my confusion over Lady Lolita’s Lover by R. Raj Rao, is to sing that song from the Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer film The Sound of Music — “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?” The song, if you recall, featured a bunch of nuns trying to figure out Maria’s character. Is she a flibbertigibbet, a will of the wisp, a clown? Is she a headache or an angel?
If I weren’t so lazy, I’d write a new set of lyrics for that song, featuring a bewildered book reviewer trying to figure out what to make of Lady Lolita’s Lover. How do you solve a problem like this novel? Is it a miracle of substance over style? Is it the most first-draftish of all the published novels I’ve ever read my whole life? Should carbon-fighting, oxygen-providing trees really have been pulped to provide the paper for this book?
Can the book be returned to its editors for drastic rewriting? Does it rate a 10 on a rising scale of headache-inducement from 0 to 10, or only a 9.99999? I dare those nuns from The Sound of Music to try and solve this problem. It’s beyond even the power of the mother superior. But then again, there’s no way I’d let this book get into the hands of any nun, particularly one from The Sound of Music.
Lolita was originally named Lalita, but changed her name because she feels nothing as plebeian as Hindi cinema’s most famous mother-in-law, Lalita Pawar, and Indian advertising’s most famous purveyor of detergent, Lalitaji. But after she marries Aroop, a merchant navy man with an almost inexhaustible salary account, she discovers she does have a taste for the plebeian after all.
Specifically, she wants unlimited sex with an underage video delivery boy named Sandesh. It isn’t hard for her to lure 15-year-old Sandesh into her vast flat in Dadar, where her husband hardly visits and her baby daughter is the responsibility of her housekeeper, Kamalabai. In almost no time, despite the presence of the baby and Kamalabai, Lolita and Sandesh are an item — and Lolita even pays him for the privilege, though the boy hasn’t yet figured out that sex is not necessarily love, and that love can be for sale.
Lolita knows what she’s doing¸ but for Sandesh this is a fantasy come true: Which means he’s living in la-la land. As the years pass, Lolita and Sandesh barely bother to hide their relationship any more, which provokes Kamalabai no end. So, eventually Aroop hears of it, and before Lolita can blink she’s been moved to Goa lock, stock and barrel. Sandesh has been beaten so badly, there’s barely anything left of his face and the video parlour where he worked trashed to nearly nothing.
Lady Lolita’s Lover could be a good story. Somewhere in the mess of writing, it is a good story. But the way it’s written is not worth the paper it’s written on.
Kushalrani Gulab is a freelance editor and writer who dreams of being a sanyasi by the sea
