A mythical love tested by tragedy

THE literary world, no less than the world at large, loves nothing more than to anoint its next young rising star. It helps to be photogenic (Zadie Smith), but isn’t required (Jonathan Safran Foer). There was that slight plagiarism problem with Harvard student Kaavya Viswanathan’s highly touted “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life” which was pulled from shelves earlier this spring. And now comes Bombay-born Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi, who has already been hailed by critics as the next Arundhati Roy, or Salman Rushdie, or Vikram Seth, or even Zadie Smith, herself now a veteran of three novels.

Shanghvi’s lyrical fiction debut, “The Last Song of Dusk,” was first published in 2004, when the author was 26, to critical acclaim here and abroad. Now Random House has reissued the novel, a rare but not unheard of event: Thisbe Nissen’s first short story collection, for instance, was published by a university press, then reissued by Anchor Books. She received wide attention and presumably a nice book deal.

“The Last Song of Dusk” marks the debut of a talented writer. Whether he’s an extraordinary one remains to be seen, though this novel is certainly atypical fare. It reads like a modern fairy tale, includes elements of magic realism and explores grand themes of love and loss.

The story centers on the marriage of Anuradha Patwardhan, an astonishingly beautiful Hindu woman from Udaipur, and a charming Bombay doctor, Vardhmaan Gandharva. They marry when she is 21 and he is 27. Shanghvi deliberately casts them as idealized, mythical figures: When Anuradha sings, “even the moon listens,” and Vardhmaan is a “tall, muscular man with broad shoulders and a gallant puff of chest.” Relatives and neighbors marvel over the couple’s firstborn son, Mohan, proclaiming him “more handsome than the handsomest.” He is regarded as a prince, but he is one destined for tragedy. If all this sounds operatic, it is, but Shanghvi is writing in a fabulist tradition, replete with a mischievous part-nymphet, part-leopard-blooded creature named Nandini, and a wicked stepmother-in-law, Divi-bai, and her trash-talking parrot, Zenobia. It is in the sections featuring Divi-bai that the author has the most fun; she is a formidable woman whose reputation precedes her. “Perhaps it was only a vicious rumor that Divi-bai, as a girl of five years in her native Jafrabad, had fed her twin sister to the crocodiles of the river near their house,” he writes.

Vardhmaan settles with his new bride in the family home where his father has died but his stepmother lives on, lording over the household, despising the gorgeous, guileless Anuradha. When Mohan dies in a tragic accident before his third birthday, Divi-bai doesn’t bother hiding her glee at their misfortune, and Anuradha knows they can no longer live under the same roof. She and her husband escape to a house by the sea to recover, and to salvage a great love splintered apart by the loss of the boy.

Just as Shanghvi has a knack for sly humor, he is equally adept at describing grief: “When life didn’t seem to get any better, Anuradha feared that she might misplace her sanity on the circuitous road of mourning.” Her idyllic relationship with Vardhmaan suffers even after the birth of their second son, Shloka. One of the central questions explored in the story is how differently men and women deal with heartbreak and loss; and whether love, however powerful, is strong enough to withstand tragedy.

There is much foreshadowing in the novel, most significantly when Anuradha’s mother advises her before she marries that “in this life, my darling, there is no mercy.” Yet mercy returns unexpectedly toward the conclusion, as Shanghvi writes that there are “mercies in this life so small and humble that they will break you more easily than the cruelties ever could.” Ultimately the characters are left with a sense of fragile hopefulness, dependent on such little mercies to endure. The novel’s title is open to more than one interpretation, but in one passage Anuradha savors the dusk, “when the light never dazzled nor did the darkness alarm,” and this seems to convey her desire for peace, if not a fairy-tale ending.