Anjali Joseph’s fourth novel, Keeping in Touch, begins as an upper middle-class love story of folks in their late 30s: Keteki, a designer, and Ved, a venture capitalist. You meet them at the airport as they await their flights. Ved is on his way to Assam to check out a lightbulb manufacturing unit there. And this is no ordinary lightbulb. It has unusual properties: not incandescent as in a filament, not CFL, not LED but has been categorised as the ‘Everlasting Lucifer’ brand. Ved realises that as he has aged, he has become ‘more brutal but also more sentimental’; he misses his childhood: the feeling of a child being loved, indulged, safe; a feeling he rarely remembered having when even a child tugs at him.
In India, where he had spent a few early years, the feeling became general: ‘here folk were in and out of their childhood, no matter how old they were’. This chance meeting triggers a romance that sees him pursuing Keteki across the wilds of Assam and beyond: a land of hills, forest, a huge river, shimmering metallic in the dusk.
Green fields, ponds, palm trees. He is besotted after a one-night stand, as Keteki heads off to Guwahati and he to London. Fortunately for the reader, they have exchanged phone numbers. Smouldering under the surface of their ‘exciting’ lives is a general feeling of boredom, where even sex is no more than a mere ‘time pass’.
By a series of happenstances, they end up in Guwahati and Jorhat behaving like infatuated teenagers, unable to give words to their love song. As a writer, Joseph breaks quite a few rules. For instance, her characters are ‘local-gone-global’ types, comfortable as they can be in India and abroad. You tread on virgin territory as for the first time, an author casually uses words from a regional language (in this instance, it happens to be Assamese) without making the faintest attempt at trying to explain what they really mean.
They are there and as a reader you have to unravel the meaning, accept them and make a move. The story stretches out the narrow boundaries of magic realism—you will find yourself more grounded in the matter-of-fact world we live in—where Joseph transmutes the ‘sameness of everydayness’ into the extraordinary. You will discover every shower bringing out its own special rainbow.
To me, therein lies the appeal. And for those who tend to judge a book by its cover, they too will not be disappointed. Keeping in Touch is a very old-fashioned love story in a modern time, where the seduction of a 30-something British Asian man by an Assamese woman assumes epic undertones. This is a story well told. It is hard to put the book down after you have read the first few pages. The aftertaste lingers long after the book is done and dusted.