By Vandana Singh. Grade: D
Boarding House by Vandana Singh
A child has to face the trauma of being separated from her family and left in a boarding house when her parents, siblings leave for Africa for an assignment. The indifference of rich girls in the hostel, the ill-treatment of relations, failure in studies, later as an adult parental anger over refusal to get married, hurt in love, loss of anchor in organized religion, the mistreatment by Indians in America and by Whites, the heroine finally finds love in her Black professors, who are her father figures, in a historically Black University in the US.
*A note for the readers- please take this review with a grain of salt.
The thing that is horrendously wrong with Boarding House is that it lacks a story. Between wanting to write about all the modern universal sufferings of any individual left in a boarding house and wanting to make it sound interesting at the same time (one can only try!), Vandana Singh missed the bus by quite a distance. There are evident errors with the conception, execution, dialogue and sentiment of the work.
The protagonist, Varsha, is a girl of fleeting vividness. During the entire time (maybe besides the beginning) I had trouble figuring out how old she is, for sometimes she is a teenager with all her inevitable chores, and sometimes a 40 year someone, with a sense of vague realization about life. Singh has tried to engage a host of different themes and fails to solidify an underlying understanding of the concept. What the book means, we know not. Varsha has had a tough life, that I’ll give her, nothing more. From facing uncomfortable encounters with friends in the boarding house, to being a social outcast abroad, she has had her share of tough stuff. Ironic it is that what seemed to be a rant against the negative narrow thinking only highlights the protagonist as a woman with no concerns or even remote understanding of the world. Where to her having a boy friend in college was a NO-NO, she almost peevishly longs to marry a man who is already married (mind you, she apparently dated him. Through a few letters. And rejected him for he was a Muslim. Now wants to be his second wife). She even asks a long lost friend (random crush!) for advice! Racism against Indians is an offense but calling them rednecks isn’t being biased? And the incessant rant only because they have accepted their sexuality. Which Varsha hasn’t. Probably won’t. Ever.
The novel is a combination of flashback and real time incidents, but I could never realise when one started and ended. The language is uninterested and one could almost pick it up from any point and feel the same disappointment. The words read off like a 16 year old’s journal entry (kudos, if it was meant to be like that) and Varsha focuses too much on what every other person in the novel goes through but herself. I personally didn’t see much love with the Black professors either, only gushing over the already-married- off the list Ali. The only character worth sympathy is her little sister, who is epileptic and really sick. The generic Hindi words are of little relevance, and their detailed explanation is distracting, to say the least.
I hadn’t wished this to be a rancid lemon peel, but I would go as far as to quote Dorothy Parker, who while reviewing Lucius Beebe’s Shoot if You Must said: “This must be a gift book. That is to say, a book which you wouldn’t take on any other terms.”
