Book Review: Passion and Poppadoms

Agh! Eeks! Yuck!- these were some of my reactions as I was reading through Pocket Books' "Passion and Poppadoms"- a Nisha Minhas creation. I still curse the day I bought this book. I was at the airport waiting for my grandma and uncle; the flight was late and I had nothing to do. When I saw the description- A wickedly funny novel with a name like that, I fell for it. Good Marketing, but how I wish the content was equally good. Wicked it is, but there is hardly anything that is even remotely funny about this apology for a novel. To all those who are interested in knowing- Passion is the story of Marina, an Indian girl living in Fenworth on the outskirts of London, working as a sandwich filler while dreaming about sleeping with Thomas Harding, a rich and good looking hotelier. How she manages to win Thomas over his blonde girlfriend, Nicole and her own blonde room mate, Emily is what the novel is all about. The plot sounds simple and entertaining, but this novel is so strangely written that I don't have adjectives to describe how horrible it is. What could have ended in 100 pages has been stretched to 483 pages (divided into 36 chapters). Nisha does have a good narrative style, but the kind of crap that fills the pages of this novel can best be described as verbal torture to the reader. Even the climax that describes the India trip of Marina and Thomas has been stretched to two chapters while it could have ended in a paragraph. Everytime there is a mention about Thomas, the writer squeezes in a love making scene and starts describing the principal parts of Thomas. Come on, there is a limit to be over sexed about one's leading man. The love making part can easily give Sidney Sheldon and Irving Wallace a run for their money,but all it evokes in the reader is contempt; for that is how dispassionately and disgracefully these parts have been written. Apparently, Nisha Minhas has already written 2 best sellers (?)- Chappathi or Chips? and Sari and Sins. I can kinda make out what kind of outrageous creations those would be. Nisha is an Indian living in the UK (with her partner and two cats, it seems. What a pertinent piece of information!) and she suffers from what every Indian diasporic writer or artist suffers from- confusion about oneself. That confusion is clearly evident in the way Marina's character has been etched out. In the name of giving the readers (English readers, that is) a taste of India, what Nisha ends up doing is paint a rather dull, uninteresting and distasteful picture of India and Indians. The topic of racism that crops up every now and then in the novel is something that Nisha would have personally experienced for those are the only times when we feel there is something identifiable with real life about what has been written. My last words on this topic would be- Avoid Passion and Poppadoms. Chew a Bubble gum instead!