Book Review: The Sea of Innocence by Kishwar Desai

Title: The Sea of Innocence

Author: Kishwar Desai

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Pages: 264

Price: Rs 350

Genre: Fiction / Thriller /Crime / Women issues

Rating: 6/10

Format: Paperback

‘The Sea of Innocence’ is the third book in the trilogy by Kishwar Desai. The first one was ‘Witness the Night’ and the second one was ‘Origins of Love’. The only connections between the three are the main protagonist Simran Singh, and the fact that each one of them deal with a women-centric issue. ‘Witness the Night’ was about female infanticide while ‘Origins of Love’ was about Surrogacy and IVF.

About the Book (from the blurb):

Goa, south India. A beautiful holiday hideaway where hippies and backpackers while away the hours. But beneath the clear blue skies lies a dirty secret…

Simran Singh is desperate for a break and some time away from her busy job as a social worker-come-crime investigator. And so the unspoilt idyll of Goa seems just the place - white beaches, blue seas and no crime. 

But when a disturbing video appears on her phone, featuring a young girl being attacked by a group of men, she realises that a darkness festers at the heart of this supposed paradise. And when she discovers out that the girl is Liza Kay, a British teenager who has gone missing, she knows she must act in order to save her.

But first Simran must break through the web of lies and dark connections that flourish on these beaches. Everyone, it seems, knows what has happened to the girl but no one is prepared to say. And when more videos appear, and Simran herself is targeted in order to keep her quiet, the paradise soon becomes a living nightmare.

My thoughts:

Kishwar Desai does not beat around the bush. Her first few lines are always the attention-grabbers. She comes straight to the point (or the case).

The main protagonist in the series, Simran Singh, is a 46-year old social worker (who really ends up being a detective for the cases she gets embroiled in). Simran Singh is long past conventional marriageable age, loves her smoke and destresses with alcohol. She is headstrong but gullible at times; though her heart is in the right place. She has a penchant for courting risks by meddling into cases related to vulnerable women, which usually also runs her into powerful politicians and inefficient police. Her family consists of her mother and an adopted teenage daughter, Durga (who was part of ‘Witness the Night’).

Quite evidently, the book has taken liberally from the much-publicised Scarlett Keeling case. You may read about the case here. Since it was dealing with sexual crime against women, the book also gives a lot of references of the recent Delhi gang-rape case and other such reported cases, which sometimes puts the narrative off-track. But clearly, author’s motive was to highlight the injustice meted out to women like Scarlett Keeling who have been victims of sexual violence and who are now lost into oblivion with several perpetrators yet to be brought to books.

Honestly speaking, the author had much to consider in putting all the strings together for this book. Having the protagonist on the crime scene; involving her in situations in which Scarlett was found dead; also incorporating the recent, much publicized Delhi rape case and other sexual violence reports; Simran’s pursuit of the case; inserting a romantic angle; and moreover, the setting of Goa had its own baggage like issues of locals against tourists, problems due to modernization, night life, surge in crime, the drugs mafia, et al. I felt there were a few unnecessary, cringe-worthy sequences about the sexual violence.

What I admire about the author is her ability to highlight a social, women-centric issue and weave a fascinating, fast-paced thriller around it. Perhaps it is her years of experience in journalism that helps her accomplish that. In retrospect, since I had read her previous 2 books, perhaps I had unrealistic expectations from the third one. But if you like this one, trust me, you will love the other ones more.

This book is not a masterpiece but like all Kishwar Desai’s books, it is a compelling read, woven around topical women-centric issues, and like always, it too strikes a note. As Smita also mentioned, the only issue with all of the author’s three books is that their endings do little justice to the fast-paced narratives. But having said that I feel this book will work for the readers who like thrillers or crime-based fiction.

Review Book courtesy: Simon & Schuster India
Image source: Amazon

Book Review: Why Loiter? by Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan, Shilpa Ranade

Title: Why Loiter? Women & Risk on Mumbai Streets

Author: Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan, Shilpa Ranade

Publisher: Penguin India

Pages: 280

Price: Rs 299

Genre: Non Fiction / Urban Studies / Women issues

Rating: 10/10

Format: Paperback

“Why Loiter?” is a transformational book. It suggests that women must fight for the unconditional right to access public space. It is surprising how we, as women, have got so accustomed to justifying our presence in the public space that it is now internalized in our systems. 

If we are waiting for a friend on the road, we would rather wait at the bus stop or fiddle with mobile phones, all to imply that either we are waiting for the bus or busy with some important call or message. Why can’t we loiter? Why can’t we be unapologetic about having fun in public space, and also not judged? Quoting from the book “..when there are visible public attacks on women, the discussions inevitably focus on how the women could have prevented it. Clothing is the first target: its length, width, cut and even colour are debated in the blame game of national sexual politics…”

It is a common perception that ‘Bombay girl’ is having most fun. It is a benchmark for almost all women across India, to live life like a Bombay girl. You really sit up and notice when the authors tell you why they chose Mumbai to offer their arguments: “For if this is the standard of access to public space in the country, then perhaps we lack both ambition and imagination.”

This book “draws on the findings of a three-year-long research project, the Gender and Space project that focused on women and public space in Mumbai to demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that despite the apparent visibility of women, even in urban India, women do not share equal access to public space with men.” The problem is women have accepted their marginalization in the public space.

Here are some standout points and thoughts from the book, which may compel you to read it:

• ‘Loitering’ is considered frivolous. Demonstration of purpose to justify being in public space is important at all times. Even feminists who fight for women’s rights are wary about right to loiter because it will impact the seriousness of their work.
• Poor infrastructure like lack of or significantly less number of public toilets, toilets which have been insensitively designed and many times closed during nights, poor road lighting, poor transport facilities etc further impacts the usage of public space by women. 
• Public spaces should be designed to maximize engagement. “One key obstacle in the good design of public spaces is the assumption of a neutral universal user of space….the ‘neutral’ user is usually male.” 
• Fighting for unconditional right to access public space is a larger issue than focusing on crime against women in public space. Because when you focus on the crime, the access for women is further reduced, women start living a more protected and chaperoned life. Because then people start focusing on why you were there in the first place? With whom? Wearing what? Doing what? The struggle against violence and the quest for pleasure cannot be separate things. 
• The society is obsessed with controlling women’s movement. But the concern is more about the reputation and family honour rather than their physical safety per se. 
• Supposedly safe places for women like malls or cafes are really private-public spaces and you need to have a certain consumption power to be able to enjoy that space.
• In the global vision of the city, women, old people, disabled, poor and people from certain religion do not feature. It raises questions on rights to citizenship. Why should a city be claimed / owned only by a specific group?
• How we lament flourishing malls and vanishing parks! How our weekends are spent at malls in consumption rather than doing nothing in public spaces. Perhaps that is what global city is all about. Loitering is a threat to that dream global world. You must consume all the time.
• Then who is having fun? Muslim Girls? Rich Girls? Slum Girls? Working Girls? Night Girls? Can Girls Buy fun? Differently-abled girls? Homosexual Girls? Old Girls? The authors have dissected and concluded that no matter what the social status, economic class, age or orientation, their ‘fun’ is always conditional. Nobody is having unadulterated, pure fun.

Of course, there are many more arguments, well-represented in the book. So, read it.

I highly recommend it to every girl, every woman. Read it, if you can. And why only girls? Everyone should read it. It brings forth a strong argument and thought-provoking perspective. And men should also read it to understand how women in their lives negotiate access to public space on daily basis.

Note: Text in italics has been quoted from the book.

Image source: Penguin India

Book Review:Origins of Love by Kishwar Desai

Title: Origins of Love 

Author: Kishwar Desai
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Pages: 470
Price: Rs 350

Format: Paperback
Genre: Fiction / Medical
Rating: 9/10

I loved Kishwar Desai’s first book Witness the Night. So, when I came to know about the release of her second book ‘Origins of Love’, I quickly checked it out and found the premise quite interesting. Both the novels are woven around women centric issues – first one on female infanticide and the girl child, while the second one is on IVF and surrogacy. The second book starts where the first one ends though there are no real linkages, and both can be read independently and in no particular order. In ‘Origins of Love’, the protagonist from her first book, Simran Singh, returns with the flourishing, murky world of IVF, surrogacy and stem cell research.

Dr. Anita and Dr. Subhash Pandey, with partner Dr. Ashok Ganguly, run a posh and successful IVF centre in Delhi offering IVF and surrogacy facilities to interested couples, which include gay and international clients. In one such attempt, a surrogate delivers an HIV positive baby, Amelia, and spells potential doom for the hospital.  Soon the commissioning parents of baby Amelia also die in a road accident during their trip to Rajasthan, causing double trouble for the hospital with no one to claim the child.

With the hospital’s reputation at stake, Dr. Anita involves her cousin, Simran Singh, the 40-something social worker, to unravel the mystery of how the child got the infection and also to find out her surviving family member, if any.

The IVF and surrogacy business is flourishing in India, resulting into the mushrooming of several such centres across the country. Couples who do not want to carry the child themselves or who are not able to do so or the gay couples., etc; are flocking the centres in large numbers that includes a huge demand from international clients who opt for India owing to availability of surrogates at a very low cost, and absence of any strict laws safeguarding the interests and health of the surrogates.

‘Origins of Love’ has a myriad of characters, parallel stories which converge later and sub plots which propel the story at a fast pace, keeping the reader hooked. Kate, who wants to have a baby through surrogacy; her husband, Ben, who wants to explore adoption and who nurses guilt from his colonial past; the middleman Sharma, who arranges for surrogates and lures poor women into the vicious circle of surrogacy; sub-inspector Diwan Nath Mehta in Customs and Excuse Department, who gets embroiled in the business of supplying confiscated embryos to a hospital through his boss Nazir Ali; Edward Walters, the health conscious sperm donor; surrogates in the form of underage girls, women without children, women separated from their children, women who need money for family, et al.; doctors like Ashok Ganguly and Wadhwani, who want to stay ahead in the stem cell research because the future is there, even if illegal at the moment; politician couple, Renu Madam and Vineet bhai, who want a heir for their party – with such an interesting gamut of characters, the story moves forward at a fast pace and makes the book pretty unputdownable.

I admit there are some loopholes in the story, a few very naïve treatments and a relatively lame ending when compared to the high the book creates throughout its 400 odd pages; but overall, the book is interesting and accomplishes the task of putting the spotlight on the pitfalls of this lucrative business!

I am definitely picking up Kishwar Desai’s third book, which she hints towards the end, is on its way!

Image credit: Amazon