The Enclave review: Love and longing in Bombay of the naughty noughties

In her early forties, recently divorced, she reads the Bombay Poets and harbours literary ambitions of her own. An eight-feet-by-six Bhupen Khakhar hangs on her apartment wall, amongst the Bose speakers, “ground glass shades and rotary dimmers.” She loves driving her Corsa.

Maya is not an Adarsh Balika, either in the workplace or in her personal life, peopled by “halfway-house men”: Softs, Alain and Santy. Softs sums up Maya’s sweet affliction: “Be a paid up member of the bourgeoisie and do what your heart wants you to.”

A hat tip to economic reforms of the 1990s

The world of multiple relationships requires “substantial outlays of time”: “The weighing of odds; the winnowing; the frequent false starts, the hit-or-miss. Then, for those of the men where the all-clear has sounded, the often tryingly slow process of getting to know them sufficiently well for the whole thing to be worth its while.”

There are moments when Manchanda seems to sit in judgement on his lead protagonist: “Complacency, narcissism, self-delusion — she’d been host to them all, and with their help had brought herself to this pretty pass.” I was less sure of these passages.

The story is set in the late 2000s, a time when the economic reforms of the 1990s were bearing fruit, transforming not just the physical landscape but also inner lives, particularly of the middle-class. Socialism was making way for capitalism, the newly atomised individual was breaking out of the strictures of family and tradition.

The novel tips a hat to the architect of these reforms, Manmohan Singh, or, rather, his turban: “Man with the pianissimo voice, stranger to bombast...He who affects those impeccably wound, gently peaked turbans, only ever blue and off blue, that further shrink his already diminutive face.”

The magic in the mundane

There is not a wasted word in this 324-page novel. Every chapter bears a title, not a number: “Borges, Rajesh Khanna, Kamala Das”. It’s high on thick description; the prose is luminous, at times showy. It’s part of the pleasure and hazard of reading Manchanda.

When Maya hears the strains of a voice, “the ensuing words go all askew, warped like the letters in those captcha frames flung in your face nowadays, for you to prove you are not a golem...”. A bureaucrat’s safari suit breast pocket is “a receptacle aureate as a jeweller’s cabinet, ebullient with the gilded clasps of two boutique fountain pens, a gilded laser pointer, a gilt-edged presenter, a golden pen drive...”.

When Maya’s father is doing his rehab with a physio, after suffering a stroke, “From across the wall, there issues a lavish raita of sounds. Muffled yet audible grunts and squeals, elongated ones, woven in with moans of nearly orgasmic heat, as if Keith Jarrett there were agonising over a particularly taxing improvisation.”

Something as mundane as Maya’s father tending to her investments in stocks and shares — “Forms already filled in by him: For he doesn’t trust her to spice them up with all manner of bungles” — is given an artistic dimension: “Continually, he shapes her portfolio, then mangles it out of shape, then reshapes it, putting her in mind of a potter moulding an urn, who, the moment her urn’s been rounded off, her wheel still spinning, frowns at it dissatisfied, whumps the clay into a formless, lumpy mass again, then coaxes it into a new urn bearing scant likeness to the first.”

Portrait of a woman, time, and city

Maya’s love interest, Softs, a Lefty from NID, bolts down chicken soup, “the tablespoon in his hand whipping between bowl and mouth briskly as a loom’s shuttle.”

Precisely because Manchanda is so careful about his choice of words, studiously avoiding stereotype, that when he describes malls as “snazzy” it sticks out. It’s a very occasional blemish.

I’ve always felt that there are two kinds of writers — those who make you reach for the dictionary, like Martin Amis, and those who, like VS Naipaul, tackle human and societal complexity, using a vocabulary of no more than fifty words. Manchanda belongs to the first category. I learnt some new words while reading The Enclave: crepitus, anechoic, weltschmerz, froideur, abaft and demulcent. It works in description, but can be odd-sounding in dialogue, like the use of “furlough” here: “The grocer’s regular boy’s gone furlough.”

The Enclave is excellent at capturing a certain kind of restlessness and fluidity: in relationships, in work, in ambition, in how we choose (or not) to live our ‘unconventional’ lives, how we now tend to blur the lines between friendship and love. Many readers will see and hear themselves (and their parents) in the narrative. I certainly did. Even as it is the portrait of one woman, it also effortlessly becomes the portrait of a time and a city. Nothing is perfect, happy endings are elusive, and yet there is beauty and joy in the struggle of living and loving. While peeling off the layers of one’s rebellious soul is never easy, it brings in its wake an uncertain fulfilment lacking permanence, but fulfilment nonetheless.

This precious novel captures the desires and foibles of a generation born roughly in 1965 or thereabouts, which tries to articulate itself differently from what came in the past — an urban India mired in set-pattern lives. In an ironic way, it reminds us that while it is the past that makes the present possible, nothing is what it could be unless an individual wants to be the agent of amendment. We are the indulgent masters and mistresses of our wobbly destiny.