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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Ensemble cast
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Ensemble cast

Ensemble cast

The canvas: Basu’s story is set around a Bengali family in Mumbai. Abhijit Bhatlekar / MintPremium

The canvas: Basu’s story is set around a Bengali family in Mumbai. Abhijit Bhatlekar / Mint

About halfway through, just as one is beginning to wonder if there’s really any point to the thoroughly enjoyable saga of the madcap Banerjee household in Bombay (defiantly not Mumbai), Cappuccino Dusk becomes another book.

The canvas: Basu’s story is set around a Bengali family in Mumbai. Abhijit Bhatlekar / Mint

Except it doesn’t, not really. Maltesh, the cartoonist with an afternoon newspaper who is whisked off into the forests, is apparently the victim of mistaken identity: His kidnappers were looking for one Malati Iyer, a sub-editor who had written a negative report about the outlaw. The Baul-turned-brigand explains it thus: “I know, I know. (My men) picked the wrong person. It’s unpardonable. They are good men but not very intelligent." For the purposes of the book, however, the goons are very intelligent: If they hadn’t picked the wrong person, Maltesh would have been yet another loose end at the conclusion of Cappuccino Dusk. Take him out and the novel would have lost a colourful, endearing character. Having introduced him, however, debutant novelist Kankana Basu doesn’t seem sure where he fits in her scheme of things.

That the sprawl of Cappuccino Dusk is misconceived is apparent in the case of Malati. As the sub-editor who gets under Som-the-misogynist’s skin, she plays a crucial role, but once the chinks appear in his armour, you get the sense the author doesn’t quite know what to do with her without heading the Mills and Boon way.

The plot mishaps and an ill-defined timeline undermine Basu’s real strengths: a gift for humour— rare enough in Indian fiction in English—and an unerring eye for people. Her characters, in fact, deserved better, tighter, less predictable stories.

Cappuccino Dusk is perhaps best described as one novella and several short stories in the matrix of a novel. It’s an uneven, strangely frustrating work: You get a glimpse of the author’s talent and the possibilities of her core ideas, yet they stop short of being realized. One hopes that like Halfway House—where Basu’s first collection of short stories was set, and which plays a minor role in this novel—the Banerjees will reappear in a future work.

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Published: 13 Mar 2009, 09:23 PM IST
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