Once Upon a Curfew takes you on a journey back to the early 1970s, where you meet Indu inheriting her grandmother’s four-room flat. This she wants to convert into a library for women or turn it into a sort of House of Books to serve as a lifeboat; a place to paddle one’s own canoe; detox to clean the cobwebs of the mind and open a window to the world. It’s a celebration of knowledge; a shelter from the vagaries of life. Of course, her parents think this will keep her suitably occupied till she marries her fiancé, Rajat, who’s away studying management in London.
The book takes the reader on a journey through a cascade of sunlight over a little garden, with its charming perimeter of bushes. With popular Bollywood songs playing on transistor radios in the background, you could be almost anywhere in the charmed circle of any large city. Along comes Rana, a young lawyer with sparkling wit and a heart of gold. He helps her set up the library; their days light up with playful banter and the many a Rajesh Khanna movie that they watch together. If only life were so easy.
Outside the gates of a nearby park, is a garrulous photographer. (Did someone say something about Peeping Toms growing up to become photographers?) In a scene that seems lifted straight out of a B-grade Bollywood film, she looks lovingly at the man standing besides her. ‘You can take these (prints) from me tomorrow, madame,’ with the photographer happily, assuring them: ‘They will be first class.’
Elsewhere maudlin becomes routine, as if the author were in a hurry to finish her tale by adding fillers with bits and pieces strung. Juxtapose Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s immortal lines—‘Stained, pitted first light, this daybreak, battered by night; this dawn that we all ached for, this is not that one. This is not that dawn, this is not that dawn’—against Partition on the subcontinent in 1947 which was ‘the biggest mass migration of people in the history of the world, till date, and may remain so for a long time.’
Or switch to fast forward, to arrive in the infamous Emergency with policemen brandishing sticks; armed men in cars; a billboard advertising: ‘Sterilisation is the best method of family planning. Incentives: Male – Rs 40, Female – Rs 20.’
Understandably, Rana gets into trouble, even as Rajat decides it’s time to bring Indu to London and settle down. As the going gets tough, Indu must decide not only who, but also what kind of life she shall choose. Read on but only if you enjoy the buzz of a Hindi film song playing in the background.