One Love and the Many Lives of Osip B.

One Love and the Many Lives of Osip B. by C.P. Surendran
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The tale of two dysfunctional youths going their different ways – one towards self-inflicted destruction as a love-lorn psychotic and the other becoming successful as a charlatan. Some irritating mistakes – St Georges is not in Kasauli, but Mussoorie; the Harley Davidson phut phuts and the attempted coup are anachronisms. Challenging temporal boundaries, Khushwant Singh, Arnab Goswami and others make their appearance in thinly disguised avatars.

Arjun rested the short quotation marks of his legs on a footstool. His writing pad had a glass of whiskey stuck in its hollow. He had a paunch, loose and re-arrangeable like a half-filled sack. On the carpet, next to his feet, a blue turban lay expectant of his bald head to roll into it at any moment. He looked up from his writing. He had sharp eyes that trapped the world in their black metal mesh.

There are some brilliant bits e.g., the Delhi summer

It’s a madman’s summer, breeding hostility. The white breathless light of the day is broken the burning yellow of the amaltas, the violet of the jacaranda, the white, red, and orange of the papery bougainvillea, the insane plants drawing blood from Delhi’s summer, shaking their brilliant sap in the face of the sun, trees that betray the killing season, flowering Judases, swaying like torches in the loo from the Rajasthan desert. Each gust is a hornet’s nest. The dust and sand sting your eyes, cake your throat, shred your skin. The sun is a delirium.

A thoroughly disorienting book, jumping between generations and countries.

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