Truly, Madly, Deeply’ is a coming of age love story by author Faraaz Kazi. The book is about the journey of troubled protagonist Rahul Kapoor as he manoeuvres the complexities of love; feeling the emotion for the first time and pursuing it for requiting. The book alternates between Rahul’s present as a student in America, to his high school years in India, where he was part of a failed love story. Moments in his angst ridden American life transport him via memories to episodes of his trysts with his amour Seema Tandon, his junior in school. These flashbacks build a momentum showing how love can be a bitch, and one can lose everything to this feeling, as an alcoholic or compulsive gambler often throw away their lives. There is a strong Dev Das streak in the protagonist. Betrayals as well as jealousies abound; this happens in the backdrop of high school politics and the protagonist’s luck comes undone. Exaggeration abounds in the narrative. Instances like the use of a honey trap, used right on the premises of a Convent institution to snare the protagonist with the devious aim of winning the school captain’s post by the villain Dev is farfetched.
Similarly, the protagonist’s sex appeal, where girls are swooning and available for him at a drop of a hat despite his anti-social tendencies is unrealistic. It may be realistic in a Bollywood film of the recent crop.
The writing is engrossing and there are plenty of twists along the way. The protagonists’ spiral into a kind of existential angst helps keep readers suspenseful about his plight. However, the writing is insipid. There are moments of tender reflection like when the protagonist confesses his madness:
“Sometimes I wonder whether I am going mad but then I realise I have always been like this. It is just the love for her in my heart that is morphing into the madness and how can I run away from it?” But these themes become repetitive. The Dev Das act becomes exaggerated, and in stages the novel draws unnecessary self importance through a clichéd narrative. Any good prose is about building a succession of good sentences, but many loosely strung descriptions spoils the reader’s absorption into the narrative. Similarly the use of profound bits of poetry amidst the prose fractures the narrative. The poetry often by greats like Yeats is most of the time out of context. In one instance the protagonist is watching a cricket match between India and Pakistan on television in the US which takes him back in memory to his own days of playing cricket at school; an incident where his amour was involved. Lines from Romeo and Juliet: “Young men’s love then lies, not truly in their hearts, But in their eyes,” is interspersed into the narrative, a technique that serves no purpose but to disorient the reader. This is again an attempt by the author to give undue self importance to the writing.
The writer ends it well by not having a conventional hero and heroine getting back together and living happily ever after sort of finale. The protagonist despite much resistance finds himself with another woman, one who loves him deeply and to whose advances he ultimately starts rebuilding his life.
The novel is in the tradition of a soap opera, one which despite its flaws has just enough to tune in to the next episode. It is definitely worth a read.