Happily ever after
Carlo Pizzati, who suffers terribly from ‘the most interesting man in the world’ syndrome, came to India as a ‘yoga-person’, and stayed on. He married a woman who proposed to him in the course of their relationship. “I think you should marry me. Hello? I’m a caaatch!” she said, and he agreed. Many locals thought he wouldn’t last but, so far so good, he has. It can’t be easy because even the gated communities named Bella Rive and Calm Waters are ridden with mice and snakes, and when the tsunami comes it will wipe away your foundations.
This book is partly biographical, an account of the author’s life in India in a beach house with the woman he loves and their large family of stray dogs. His love for his wife, respect for her family, and admiration for her very cool chemical-engineer father are refrains so persistent that I wondered what exactly he was trying to sell. But Carlo also claims to grow luscious tomatoes and splendid roses on inhospitable beach sand so perhaps it was only good energy manifesting.
This book is partly biographical, an account of the author’s life in India in a beach house with the woman he loves and their large family of stray dogs. His love for his wife, respect for her family, and admiration for her very cool chemical-engineer father are refrains so persistent that I wondered what exactly he was trying to sell. But Carlo also claims to grow luscious tomatoes and splendid roses on inhospitable beach sand so perhaps it was only good energy manifesting.
Besides a little about his earlier life, and what
happens to him in village Paramankeni and environs, this book is also quite a
lot about Carlo Pizzati’s conclusions about all kinds of things in an
incredibly complex land! While he stoutly claims not to be Wendy Doniger,
William Dalrymple, Patrick French, – or even Megasthenes, Xuanzang, Al Biruni
(and so on) and therefore this CANNOT be ‘an India book’, he does have his own
engaging theories about the way things work here. Arriving in ‘the watershed
year of 2008’ he embraced ‘Mamma India’ in a period of exceptional cyclones, of
Tata Nano, Premier League, an Indian winning the Booker Prize and 8% economic
growth. Through his journey as a ‘yoga-person’, someone who made exceptional
choices and landed up as a mapillai (Tamil for ‘son-in-law’) of Gujarati Jain
in-laws in Besant Nagar, Chennai, Carlo’s narrative is strewn with interesting
data and contextual information. He well understands the importance of the
mango and its role in parochialism and identity across India. He has observed women
staying married to violent mummy-spoiled brutish husbands, surrounded by
friends and family members who may gossip but never intervene. He marvels at how
Indian law allows a person named in a suicide note as psychologically
responsible for the suicide, to be arrested, tried and at times convicted. When
he muses on the auntie-uncle cultural nomenclature, it is to spot the auntie
concealed within the hottie, the uncle germinating in the stud; to appreciate the
stud nature in an aged uncle with a wild streak and the charming seduction of
the hottie quietly inhabiting the auntie. Carlo Pizzati experiences India’s synthesis
of religion, politics and commerce, and highlights one of the exceptional icons
of this nexus: the best dressed poor people in the globe, with their
multifarious saris, striped lungis and wrap-around turbans. In his relatively
rare setting for ‘an India book’, he approaches the ‘marvellous human experiment
called India’ – from its outskirts, a location of limitless sea and sky where
open defecation abounds. And the brave, sporting Carlo attempted open
defecation too, but sadly found himself unable to perform.
In slow, contemplative sentences and in rapid
exclamatory ones, his prose and his theme switch rapidly. Perhaps this is just
a modern book, aimed at the sophisticated short-attention-span reader who
delights in toying with new formats – but it is rather effervescent at times (like
a stereotypical Italian?) Not surprisingly, Carlo has mastered and neatly documented
Indian hand gestures. Fingers pointing inwards and then, suddenly swinging out
an open hand to say ‘all!’. And the sudden twist with index finger pointing
upwards for ‘wtf?’
The insight that most impressed me was the truth
about why natives consider vellais (Tamil for ‘whiteys’) better than them. It’s
not the scars of colonialism but because they are – SPOILER ALERT – mentally
freer, with fewer social obligations to succeed, to marry, and behave as
required.
And the claim that most annoyed me was that “Indian
women are like Italian men”, indicating that the entire population of Indian
women tends to encircle men, sniffing to select the delicacy they might savour.
Was this supposed to be a compliment? An enticement? A joke? I don’t think so.
This review was written for Hindustan Times and appeared on Saturday 12 Jan 2019.
