BOOK REVIEW: Until It Rains Again

 Dhruba Hazarika

(Novelist and Short Story Writer)

A book is written for various reasons, something that the author alone knows. But most times, as generally understood from sundry autobiographical notes, writing is mostly to do with an expelling a burden, if one wants to term it that, something that has been pent-up in one's soul and needs an outlet on paper; thoughts and emotions that had been stored and now shared if not for anything else than to tell the world that the author is now free from that burden.

There could be other reasons, of course, for fiction is a broad-enough umbrella. Between imagination and experience, between the art of using grammatically correct sentences and that of portraying a picture with all the vibrant elements that life can offer, fiction treads a rugged, sensitive path, the best of which brooks no nonsense when it comes to presenting a work through powerful craftsmanship.

Until It Rains Again (published by Blue Rose Publishers, New Delhi, London), a debut work by seventeen-year-old Ruchika Bhuyan, is a book that deals with teenage love. Alaina, the main protagonist, meets Myra, a girl year younger than her, while accidentally stepping into the latter's classroom, and nothing is quite the same again. On the other hand, Alaina's brother, Sparsh is in a relationship with another boy.

From the very first chapter the focus is on Alaina's relationship with her fellow students in school and then on to her new-found love for Myra, a passion that leads them to clandestine meetings, to fresh meanings in their understanding of life, of moments that spring from emotions bubbling over with honesty and helplessness. It is love without borders, without frills, raw and elemental in many ways, two girls in a physical-cum-emotional bind that ushers in hitherto unfelt, or un-experienced, intense love and the attendant physicality.

At the same time, Alaina's brother, Sparsh, hardly twelve years old, is in a relationship with another boy. The brother-sister relationship is close and intense, each depending on the other for tackling their parents and society at large in Mumbai, are unconventional expressions of love and sexuality. Alaina's and Sparsh's well-do-to parents remain visible but mostly in the background, a foursome family caught between what we know of as conventional Indian norms and that of accepting new-found customs, behaviour and values in a world that has changed cataclysmically, in almost every sphere of human existence, especially during the last half-a-century.

The events and sequences weave into a plot, not quite complicated, but an interim climax of sorts arrives when Sparsh attempts to commit suicide soon after he is ridiculed by his own mates in a party. From here the story takes a turn which eventually leaves Myra and Alisha subtly drifting in their own respective shores; yet, the story proceeds with a poetry of feelings not quite diminished by the family trauma subsequent to Sparsh's hospitalization.

The narration is palpably fluid, the author's grip over the English language graceful, the stringing of sentences and the choice of words at times so very apt, the thoughts, more often than not, expressed in amply measured tones that the entire exercise verges on a kind of talent not generally found in an author still in her teens. Take, for instance, this sentence: "I had never before had a companion to engage in intellectual conversations with, the ones where there was no discomfiture in talking about abandoned topics like the uncertainty and inevitability of death, or how sex was actually a refutation of intimacy, how racism and misogyny were bootless mindsets of dogmatic individuals and how art was our only space to articulate our perspectives on such matters because the world was too noisy to hear voices like ours." Brilliant.

To write spontaneously comes more easily when the emotions born of experience are genuine and powerful. But writing effective fiction also requires craftsmanship: from dialogues that do not slide to casualness, from scripting sentences befitting the situation, to the fine-tuning of characters in terms of the intensity and the importance of the role given to each, from the refusal to be repetitive when repetition may well dull the storyline, to sequences rolled out without being unnecessarily grandiose, all this and more summing up that state of play, that final hallmark of a writer which goes by the name of style, to craftsmanship itself.

A teenager writing with aplomb about a subject that many often shy away from is an achievement by itself. To frame uncannily brilliant sentences is, again, an indication of the author's huge talent. Still further, to have perceived human nature with a combination of detached thoughts and rapturous passion is a trait that can come only with severe honesty. And fiction, good fiction, no matter what else it may require, is dependent on this as its most potent instrument: honesty of thoughts, pure honesty of thoughts. Indeed, for this reason alone, if not for all the other qualities mentioned, Ruchika Bhuyan remains a truly gifted young writer.