Babyji
by Abha Dawesar
Anchor Books. 356 pages, $13.
SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD Anamika Sharma is an overly earnest, overachieving high school girl in a hurry. As the head prefect at her academically rigorous and slightly progressive high school in Delhi, India, she’s respected by most of her peers and teachers. As if her intense studies in physics and math (along with a summer spent reading Dostoyevsky) weren’t enough, she takes on three lovers in the course of this sometimes entertaining, sometimes exasperating novel. Anamika feels that everything will be fine as long as each lover is given equal time. However, when their lives, and those of her parents, begin to intersect, life gets even more hectic. But somehow there are no scenes of recrimination.
Anamika and her clueless but pleasant Brahmin parents lead a comfortable but far from ostentatious life; Anamika has to explain several times that they don’t have a car and that her father, a paper-pusher in a government ministry, gets around by scooter. Caste differences play an important role in her affairs. The first of her lovers is Tripta, nicknamed India, a sophisticated, elegant, and almost-middle-aged divorcée, and the mother of a small boy—a situation that raises a few eyebrows in the society of late 1980’s Delhi. Always conscious of their age difference, Tripta, who becomes a good friend of Anamika’s mother, declares that “women can’t be gay.” Anamika’s concern for her family’s daily maid, Rani, who’s being abused by her husband, leads the Sharmas to allow Rani to live in Anamika’s room, where she sleeps on the floor. Just a few years Anamika’s senior, Rani is the most sympathetic and eloquent of all the characters, and the age-old social and educational restrictions imposed by the caste system have done nothing to break her spirit. Rani suffers in silence when Anamika cancels plans—usually lunch at home—to go off and dally with Tripta or her classmate, the beautiful Sheela, whom she takes on as her third lover. Sheela, for her part, declares that “two women can’t do it,” suffers through an inept and unwanted sexual encounter with Anamika, but ultimately—and rather unbelievably—falls sway to the latter’s charms, which are not all that readily apparent. At the same time, Anamika is engaging in some sexually-charged bantering and occasional caresses with Adit, the handsome father of a school friend and now a colonel in the army. Adit lends Anamika a copy of Nabokov’s Lolita, hoping the girl will get the message and assume the role of “nymphet.” However, this gesture does not have the desired effect; she refuses to be brought into an affair with this would-be Humbert Humbert. Political crises force their high school to shut down. Parents, teachers, and students have to travel back and forth to each other’s homes to keep up with their studies; bedroom doors are bolted shut by their shifting occupants, lending the story the atmosphere of a French farce. Some of Babyji reads like the unedited, angst-laden outtakes of a teenage girl’s diary, and the author—whose first novel, Miniplanner (2000), centered on a bisexual man and his lovers—sometimes grasps too far for parallels between the principles of physics and Anamika’s love life: this is far from an erotic novel. Babyji’s last page finds Anamika on her way to Harvard (the author’s alma mater) where she will, it is hoped, learn that a little humor will make her life much happier.
