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Between chicklit and serious fiction

By Shobha Sengupta

Amit Varma, in My Friend Sancho, attempts to bridge the gap between light entertaining fluff of the chicklit genre and serious literary fiction. In this straddling between two worlds, his book veers more towards the saleable chicklit rather than literature. This happens because the romance overtakes serious issues at stake. The author raises ugly questions, makes them central to the plot, and then glosses over them in an attempt to be "non-judgmental". An unnatural death and injustice pale into insignificance, and a hard-hitting style is sacrificed at the altar of a feelgood ending.

My Friend Sancho is an easy read, quickly done in three hours. The book is set in Mumbai. The protagonist, Abir Ganguly, introduces himself: "I am 23. I masturbate 11 times a day." (This is used in the blurb on the back cover as a hooking point). The tone is kept light, with Abir given to wisecracks all the time. The object of romance is Muneeza, an untouched sweet 19-year-old girl, whose father is killed at home by policemen who have been tipped off by an informer. She witnesses her father’s death. Abir Ganguly works as a journalist for a tabloid newspaper. On one of his beats as a crime reporter, he is witness to Muneeza’s father’s killing, albeit from outside the house. He is then told by his tabloid to write the stories of both these men — of the man who is killed and of the policeman who killed him. There is little proof of the father’s guilt.

The choice of title is interesting. One supposes the Indian system is such that one would be a Don Quixote to take it on (are we really so hopeless and so helpless?). The daughter of the man killed seems to decide at the end that she is happy being the pragmatic and realistic Sancho, rather than a Don Quixote. Of course one can only presume so, going by the title and the tenor of the book, although the book is left open-ended and the denouement is left to the imagination of the readers. The potential of the book was immense, but has gone untapped. In some ways it reminds one of Tarun Tejpal’s The Story of My Assassins in terms of the Kafkaesque scenario, bungling cops, the system, but My Friend Sancho is a much lazier book — and probably far more saleable. The narrative is entertaining, but never really compelling. The voice-over lizard — speaking for and in place of Abir — is probably the best touch in the book. Varma lightly and subtly touches upon the issue of the girl being Muslim. It does not matter to the protagonist Abir, but to the police it does, and they mention it after the killing as if it was of some import. Abir is unable to tell his savvy and liberal mother that the girl is a Muslim. Varma has got the romance just right and the end, wherein the girl comes on the line to say hello, signifying that a significant relationship is about to begin, is perfect. There are times when My Friend Sancho reads like a blog. In his own real-life blog, author Amit Varma has anticipated several criticisms of the book and attempted to sidestep them.

But even so, the fact remains that the author has skimmed over the real story and not sufficiently plumbed its depths. The end is somewhat abrupt and incomplete. The author appears to have refused to leave his comfort zone and in the process underestimated his reader’s intelligence. The case is not cracked open, and we are left with the uneasy feeling that a man’s unjust death is just not important enough, that the author feels police-related unnatural deaths in India happen all the time, and that the ineptness of the bungling policeman is far less important than the fact of his being an average good man.

Amit Varma is a former journalist. He is in the process of writing his second novel. In it, we hope he will come of age. For Varma has a fluid writing style that does not ever drag. And My Friend Sancho may very well make for a "dhaasu debut" (as fellow author Amitava Kumar puts it), though not a great one.

Shobha Sengupta owns and runs Quill and Canvas, a bookstore-cum-art gallery in Gurgaon