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shom 's review for:
Milk Teeth
by Amrita Mahale
Milk Teeth | Amrita Mahale | Book 89 of 2020 | Westland | ebook
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The book seeps with nostagia of middle-class-atmospherics of 90s. Set in Bombay turned Mumbai, and bifurcated between perspectives/flashbacks of Ira and Karthik - a childhood couple, belonging to Asha Nivas - the supposedly first rent-controlled apartment building in Matunga. The prologue finds us with their neighbour in a late afternoon, opening the housedoor to a man who takes his leave with a dreadful gesture and leaves with an envelope that reads : GET OUT.
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300+ pages later, it is "outside" Gateway of India, beside the walls, Kartik starts his tale of "sorry"s, and acknowledgements roll-up.
.
In between these two, Mahale crafts her tale with suave detailing and precise combinations of analogies and allegories, of people and places limited by boundaries set by themselves and others, and the choices of crossing or being confined within them. Illuminated uncannily with unhinged and impassionately insightful descriptions, her words precariously provides a reading experience unlike any other I've ever read, carrying in-between the expected and throwing the un-expected with a whirlwind. She leisurely unravels her exquisite prose-pieces, putting glitters of gems and ill-forgotten pathways to diverse worlds of air-conditioning breeze, or charms of cable TV and watertank-tops, enticing world of the newly spawning internet-chat-rooms, highrises displacing shanties, the smell-sound-cacophony of crowds thronging roadways, fresh smells from roadside updui/irani stalls, polarizing feuds of communities windswept in tides of communalism. The tapestry woven and put in place comes out amazingly in a confused modernism, where English lukewarms its way into superseding "position and status", yet is not preferred in domestic settings, where surnaming and renaming people takes precedence over their behavior, where rumored histories shape up claustrophobic future.
.
This is that kind of book one reads - to travel to a place without visiting it.
.
The book seeps with nostagia of middle-class-atmospherics of 90s. Set in Bombay turned Mumbai, and bifurcated between perspectives/flashbacks of Ira and Karthik - a childhood couple, belonging to Asha Nivas - the supposedly first rent-controlled apartment building in Matunga. The prologue finds us with their neighbour in a late afternoon, opening the housedoor to a man who takes his leave with a dreadful gesture and leaves with an envelope that reads : GET OUT.
.
300+ pages later, it is "outside" Gateway of India, beside the walls, Kartik starts his tale of "sorry"s, and acknowledgements roll-up.
.
In between these two, Mahale crafts her tale with suave detailing and precise combinations of analogies and allegories, of people and places limited by boundaries set by themselves and others, and the choices of crossing or being confined within them. Illuminated uncannily with unhinged and impassionately insightful descriptions, her words precariously provides a reading experience unlike any other I've ever read, carrying in-between the expected and throwing the un-expected with a whirlwind. She leisurely unravels her exquisite prose-pieces, putting glitters of gems and ill-forgotten pathways to diverse worlds of air-conditioning breeze, or charms of cable TV and watertank-tops, enticing world of the newly spawning internet-chat-rooms, highrises displacing shanties, the smell-sound-cacophony of crowds thronging roadways, fresh smells from roadside updui/irani stalls, polarizing feuds of communities windswept in tides of communalism. The tapestry woven and put in place comes out amazingly in a confused modernism, where English lukewarms its way into superseding "position and status", yet is not preferred in domestic settings, where surnaming and renaming people takes precedence over their behavior, where rumored histories shape up claustrophobic future.
.
This is that kind of book one reads - to travel to a place without visiting it.