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ameya88 's review for:
Milk Teeth
by Amrita Mahale
I brought this book based on a extract from a chapter on the online portal scroll.com. To be honest, I didn't even read the whole extract - I read a part of it, liked it so much and thought to myself - this is a book I'm going to read in its entirety anyway, so why 'spoil it'. This is a familiar feeling for me (as it is for most readers or watchers of movies or eaters of fine meals I assume) where quite often even before you start, you've built certain expectations in your mind. And it is then so disappointing to have to say (as I often have) that "I really wanted to like this, but....".
But but but... it is even nicer to be proven right, when the cookie tastes just as delectable & heavenly as it looks and smells. When the book is as wonderful as you had expected (actually 'wanted' is the more appropriate word) it to be and you turn the last page, put it back into the dust jacket which you'd carefully put away while you were reading (everyone does that no?) totally satiated. Even more so when it's a newly released, debut novel which no one 'recommended', where you know that the expectations were based on some weird sense of your own intuition and not on anyone else's. Amrita Mahale's Milk Teeth is all of that, and everything more which I've not been able to articulate.
I read this cover to cover - starting Saturday night after dinner and because it was so good, I kept reading till I finished into the wee hours just so the spell wouldn't be broken. Two thirds of the way through (it's a three part book) my wife asked me "But what is it about and why is it called Milk Teeth?" and I found myself struggling to answer at that point. Is it a romance set in Mumbai of the late 90's - almost with candyfloss stereotypes from every rom-com worth its salt - a spunky female protagonist who follows her heart and a serious male protagonist who follows his head? But no, while that's the skeleton it's about so much more and it'd be unfair to reduce it to that. Is it about the ubiquitous Mumbai story we still continue to hear every day 20 years into the future from the world of Ira & Kartik - a building (finally) going in for redevelopment (the opening pages made me think of Arvind Adiga's Last Man in the Tower)? Well, again - not really.
I suppose the best I can come up with is that it is just about Mumbai, about growing up with and in the then Bombay - of its people, their homes and their relationships and how the manic metropolis envelopes all of them in its all-pervasive ether and touches them, impacts them and changes them in ways they don't realise and in ways they can't control.
Milk Teeth takes its time to set the context, introducing us to characters in the aforementioned apartment building, their families, their histories and so on and while your interest is always piqued it is not quite clear where the book is headed until a breathless denouement - where it suddenly picks up speed as the traffic clears - which at least I for one didn't see coming. Ending a story is so difficult (think all the Bollywood movies with a great first half) and as the stack of pages under my right thumb kept going down I wondered how would this be wrapped up so quickly? Is this one of those post-modern works with no ending at all - a slice-of-life tale where plot structure, ending and closure is for 'the bourgies'? Or is there going to be a sequel (which I find quite annoying)? But it's wrapped up most adroitly- telling the tale with what needed to be told, leaving you the hint of a tease to let your imagination wander and enough to think about.
Mahale's true gift is to take familiar environments and people ('personas' to stretch the MBA metaphor we started in the book) and let us re-look them with a new gaze within this story, while not dissecting them dispassionately like an academic would do to a frog. They are all around us - families, friends, neighbours, colleagues, gallis, localities, even the way bedrooms are organized and balconies are (were?) converted into the study room for kids. Play the 'think of which acquaintance of you does this character remind you of' with yourself through this book (a game Kartik could have come up with). These people especially were always familiar to us, who we always knew may have had warts hidden away but now we can see them and therefore we must reconcile ourselves to living with this new normal. Dynamics of class, caste, religion, sexuality and more come up and intertwine which each other before they're swept underneath the carpet again - but the lump is now forever visible much like the warp on the nice notebook of Ira's which met with the rains. I did feel I learnt more about a city in which I've grown up and lived in for most of my life. Recommended for everyone, but especially to those who've grown up in Mumbai to renew an acquaintance with pre-cell-phone city preserved now only by nostalgia and photographs.
PS : I also loved that there was no unnecessary exposition around so many details and specifics - the dishes, the locations, the references, the lingo - and that may be purely selfish here because it allowed me to feel (smugly enough I'm sure) like I'm in on the inside joke :-) But it makes the story feel so much more honest and unpretentious. And some of the text made me pause and take screenshots - one of those books which it is worth reading on a Kindle because it would have let you highlight so many lovely paragraphs and lines.
But but but... it is even nicer to be proven right, when the cookie tastes just as delectable & heavenly as it looks and smells. When the book is as wonderful as you had expected (actually 'wanted' is the more appropriate word) it to be and you turn the last page, put it back into the dust jacket which you'd carefully put away while you were reading (everyone does that no?) totally satiated. Even more so when it's a newly released, debut novel which no one 'recommended', where you know that the expectations were based on some weird sense of your own intuition and not on anyone else's. Amrita Mahale's Milk Teeth is all of that, and everything more which I've not been able to articulate.
I read this cover to cover - starting Saturday night after dinner and because it was so good, I kept reading till I finished into the wee hours just so the spell wouldn't be broken. Two thirds of the way through (it's a three part book) my wife asked me "But what is it about and why is it called Milk Teeth?" and I found myself struggling to answer at that point. Is it a romance set in Mumbai of the late 90's - almost with candyfloss stereotypes from every rom-com worth its salt - a spunky female protagonist who follows her heart and a serious male protagonist who follows his head? But no, while that's the skeleton it's about so much more and it'd be unfair to reduce it to that. Is it about the ubiquitous Mumbai story we still continue to hear every day 20 years into the future from the world of Ira & Kartik - a building (finally) going in for redevelopment (the opening pages made me think of Arvind Adiga's Last Man in the Tower)? Well, again - not really.
I suppose the best I can come up with is that it is just about Mumbai, about growing up with and in the then Bombay - of its people, their homes and their relationships and how the manic metropolis envelopes all of them in its all-pervasive ether and touches them, impacts them and changes them in ways they don't realise and in ways they can't control.
Milk Teeth takes its time to set the context, introducing us to characters in the aforementioned apartment building, their families, their histories and so on and while your interest is always piqued it is not quite clear where the book is headed until a breathless denouement - where it suddenly picks up speed as the traffic clears - which at least I for one didn't see coming. Ending a story is so difficult (think all the Bollywood movies with a great first half) and as the stack of pages under my right thumb kept going down I wondered how would this be wrapped up so quickly? Is this one of those post-modern works with no ending at all - a slice-of-life tale where plot structure, ending and closure is for 'the bourgies'? Or is there going to be a sequel (which I find quite annoying)? But it's wrapped up most adroitly- telling the tale with what needed to be told, leaving you the hint of a tease to let your imagination wander and enough to think about.
Mahale's true gift is to take familiar environments and people ('personas' to stretch the MBA metaphor we started in the book) and let us re-look them with a new gaze within this story, while not dissecting them dispassionately like an academic would do to a frog. They are all around us - families, friends, neighbours, colleagues, gallis, localities, even the way bedrooms are organized and balconies are (were?) converted into the study room for kids. Play the 'think of which acquaintance of you does this character remind you of' with yourself through this book (a game Kartik could have come up with). These people especially were always familiar to us, who we always knew may have had warts hidden away but now we can see them and therefore we must reconcile ourselves to living with this new normal. Dynamics of class, caste, religion, sexuality and more come up and intertwine which each other before they're swept underneath the carpet again - but the lump is now forever visible much like the warp on the nice notebook of Ira's which met with the rains. I did feel I learnt more about a city in which I've grown up and lived in for most of my life. Recommended for everyone, but especially to those who've grown up in Mumbai to renew an acquaintance with pre-cell-phone city preserved now only by nostalgia and photographs.
PS : I also loved that there was no unnecessary exposition around so many details and specifics - the dishes, the locations, the references, the lingo - and that may be purely selfish here because it allowed me to feel (smugly enough I'm sure) like I'm in on the inside joke :-) But it makes the story feel so much more honest and unpretentious. And some of the text made me pause and take screenshots - one of those books which it is worth reading on a Kindle because it would have let you highlight so many lovely paragraphs and lines.