The scenes change like wind swept sand dunes etching new patterns on the landscape every moment. Preparation of a typical South Indian marriage ceremony melts into dark dungeons where in a subdued, sullen prisoner desperately tries to recall his name. The sun lifts its prismatic veil on a lush green vale where two love-torn souls meet to say good bye. Then there are rows and rows of military outfits and the terrain becomes hard and unyielding. The swift movements and panoramic shifts surprisingly do not add to confusion but lends vivacity to style and expression. A Quixotic narrative is Malathi Ramachandran’s unique quotient. I am talking about her debut English novel The Wheel Turned.
She romances with words as though vivifying montages on huge, unexplored frames. At times she enlivens the bland vastness with vivid strokes of a painter’s wand. Her brush has a beguiling charm, her colours are blindingly verdant. In a pellucid style the charmer unfurls designs, schemes and plots which leave the readers spellbound. The story telling takes a serpentine gait as the past mingles with the present and then again gives in to the past in alternate rhythm. The readers are compelled to follow the protagonists in a hypnotic chase. The WheelTurned, in short, makes for extremely compulsive reading.
THE PLOT & THE PROTAGONISTS: Indo-Chinese War of 1962 - Captain Anand, the gallant soldier of the Indian Armed Forces, now an undeclared Prisoner of War in the hands of the Chinese, has lost the count of time in the claustrophobic, grim and gloomy interiors of his closely guarded prison cell. It is his iron grit and determination that prevent the scheming enemies from exacting crucial defence strategies and secrets out of him. His days of excruciating physical torture and maddening mental torment stretch interminably until one night, Ming-Lee, the daughter of the alcoholic jailor, tiptoes into his cell with a bowl of aromatic, tasteful broth. The broth rejuvenates him as much as does her presence. Her child-like innocence and unguarded beauty infuse a pale stream of light into his sombre, luckless days and nights and a ray of brittle hope creeps into his broken heart. But Ming-Lee’s captivating allure recoils as a nebulous face from the past surfaces to haunt Anand’s dreams and a long-forgotten name reverberates in his ears in the stillness of sleepless nights …..Meena…Meena…Meena
The beautiful Meenakshi whose life is nothing but an endless, agonising wait for her husband, who is reported missing while fighting at the borders, spends her days in silent prayer and fervent wish. If only she could will the course of life in her favour! Mounted on a wooden axis is a small Tibetan prayer wheel, her constant companion, which had once brought her and her husband together by its magic spell. Today, as she twirls it in her trembling hands the only vision that fills her mind is that of a tall, dark silhouette, pining miles away in some unfriendly land, lost and lonely.
But there is someone else who yearns for Meenakshi too. Wordlessly, he stands by her side, a strong and steady support. Captain Pradeep Chaudhry has taken an early retirement from the Army and now wants to settle down to a quiet life of farming and estate building in the far away valleys of Pauri. Before leaving for his home land he wants to have a few final words with Meena that may change her fate forever….
The Wheel Turned revolves around these three central characters whirling, swirling and churning them sometimes in the bottomless pit of anguish, sometimes buoying them up on the vessels of snow-white clouds, sometimes playfully, merrily bouncing them on the undulating, blossom bedecked valleys of passionate ardour and sometimes dashing them on pebble strewn, rocky, uneven, jagged paths of sorrow and sufferings– relentlessly pushing and pulling them into the vortex of a stormy existence shattering many a dreams to smithereens and splattering many a pearly teardrops on the tattered and torn sheet of life. But pirouette they will around each other - magnetically drawn yet detracted by their respective orbits in a torrid roller coaster ride.
AUTHOR’S SKILLS: The journey is full of surprises. Where you expect a straight forward bend Malathi takes you through unpredictable twists and turns. The narration breathlessly moves topographically from the serene hills of Dharamsala to the sweltering heat of Coimbatore, from the sanguinary Indo-Chinese borders to the tranquil but austere monastic life of the Tibetan Gompa. Wherever one is, Malathi confidently guides the readers, not one step false, not one end loose. All the more surefooted she is as she enters the domain of the Armed Forces, more so being the daughter of an infantryman herself, she knows this world like the back of her hand. Breathtakingly beautiful are the expansive scenic descriptions suffused with a mystical aura, transporting the readers at times to the rugged Himalayan ranges or gently landing on the spring kissed dales at the foothills or passing by a jumpy, giggly mountain rivers and at other times swaying with the caravans on the colourless muddy tracts of Tibet.
MY WORDS: However, at times the headway is a bit too easy like Anand’s escape from the prison. As a reader I expected a little more elaborate drama… a lacuna….a betrayal….a defeat…..a second attempt perhaps. Likewise the climactic catharsis is too abrupt and short lived It could have been a more gradual transformation, a more detailed and analytical elucidation, probably adding a few more pages to the book? Nonetheless, The Wheel Turned, as I have said in the beginning, is simply unputdownable.
I recommend this novel to all and sundry. My rating will be a 4/5.
Just one word of caution – a sterner eye on editing will definitely be more fruitful.
Ciao