Book Review: SMALL DEATHS

Title: Small Deaths

Author: Rijula Das
Publisher: Amazon Crossing
Pages: 319
My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

 

Lalee is a sex worker at the Blue Lotus brothel in Calcutta's biggest red-light district, Shonagacchi. Tilu Shau, her most loyal client and a far-from-bestselling author of erotic fiction, longs to liberate her from the brothel by offering her marriage. His plan is scuttled when one of the prostitutes, Mohamaya Mondol, is murdered. Her death opens a vacancy and Lalee is offered a room on the top floor along with the chance to be an A-category sex worker. 

The move promises to catapult her into the big league, a life of luxury, wealth and access. But it only sends her tumbling down into a vortex of corruption and violence controlled by a perverted godman, Maharaj.

An NGO, Nari Shakti Vahini, joins hands with the Sex Workers' Collective to demand justice for the dead girl, even as the police, led by the largely incompetent Samsher Singh, who hopes the to-do will blow over. But then the media picks up the story and Inspector Singh is under pressure to do something. 

Will he rise to the occasion? Will there be any justice for the dead girl? 

The book is written in the 3rd person omniscient past tense PoV of Lalee, Tilu and Samsher. The title of the book refers to how the French describe an orgasm as a small death. But I also saw it as referring to the deaths of all the people who died and those whose lives were destroyed by the government's decision to demonetise currency notes of Rs 500 and Rs 1000. 

The book, set in the aftermath of demonetisation, reminds us of the struggles faced by sex workers, a group of people that no one cared about, when their clients suddenly found themselves unable to pay. The book reminds us how this draconian policy destroyed millions of ordinary lives, costing people untold sums of hard-earned money. The small deaths, even as the government congratulated itself on a decision that killed the economy, refers to the deaths of these people too.

I didn't care much for Lalee, but Tilu grew on me. Tilu has an enduring love not only for Lalee, but also for Kolkata, his enduring muse. He longs to write fiction set in a time before the city was born, but his publisher demands he spend time writing erotica.

I also liked Samsher at the beginning. He doesn't want to be a hero, to save the trafficked girls or clean up the city. He barely has the guts to stand up to his own mother. All he wants to do is to accept bribes and live an easy life. He's not very bright and can barely ask the right questions during an investigation. Unfortunately, his character arc didn't progress at all.

Even though the book is written in English, it captures well the mood and the vibe of the locale, as if English were just another Indian language. The tone of the book is partly critical, partly indulgent. The authorial eye has no patience for Grown men with hands inside their pants...such a commonplace scene in metropolitan Calcutta that no one had paid him any attention. 

The writing was good. Sample these:

Creative energy, like a gassy stomach, will make itself known.

We are an expletive; a whole population of women connected only by their livelihood reduced to a single word of offense... every woman is turned into a profanity.

The fact that they built lives and homes there in the midst of their sordidness is described as A mangled, tenuous dignity, one with tread marks all over it, but sometimes even that is a lot.

The subject, which revolves around the trafficking of girls as young as seven years of age, is sordid and can drive one to despair, but the author doesn't let anything get in the way of her story. She also makes the point that sex workers don't always need saving, unless they are minors. They just need space to be, to live their lives without being criminalised, even as the clients get away scot-free. 

The author makes a case for letting them live their lives with dignity, and mentions the hatred that respectable middle-class women held in their hearts for prostitutes. People like us who speak out from our positions of privileged innocence.

Even the men who sleep with the prostitutes are not spared by the author. Lalee reflects on how prior to committing the sexual act, some customers wanted to know their names, their stories. Hunting for a story, for a fleshy bit of human tragedy. But Lalee, when pressed in this manner, always gives a fake story. When you lost everything, your name and your story were the only unoccupied country.

I couldn't understand the focus on Vishal Currimbhoy, the husband of Deepa Marhatta, who runs the Sex Workers' Collective. Why were there chapters devoted to him, when he had nothing to do with the plot of the story?  Incidentally, Vishal is a Hindu name, and Currimbhoy is a Khoja Muslim name. Yet the author tells us that Vishal is a Parsi, which doesn't sound right. 

We are also given a peek into Samsher's life, his relationship with his mother and wife. Again, this glimpse didn't fit in with the plot.

The book began well, and the middle was strong too, but towards the end, it seemed to lose steam. We get no closure on what happened to the seven-year-old twin girls kidnapped at the ashram, and even though Lalee is the protagonist, we feel emotionally invested in those girls. Also, was the godman punished, or did he get away? There were too many questions left unanswered. I was disappointed in the ending. 

(I read this book on NetGalley. Thank you to the author, the publisher and NetGalley.)