Brief Review: All The Lives We Never Lived by Anuradha Roy

All the Lives We Never Lived By Anuradha Roy. Hachette India Books.

Anuradha Roy is like Anees Salim. With each new book by these two authors, the reader knows they are in for a truly immersive experience; this is virtual reality of another kind.

In this intriguing read, Roy picks up strands of history like the fight for India`s independence and  WWII, strands of incidents from the lives of real people like Rabindranath Tagore, the German artist and musician Walter Spies, the English dancer and Orientalist Beryl de Zoete and then, twines them with luminous strands of fiction, inventing a small town in the foothills, a light-spirited  but not blithe-spirited young mother named Gayatri Sen Rozario, her controlling husband Nek Chand Rozario and the protagonist, Gay`s son Myshkin.

We have sixty-year-old Myshkin Chand Rozario, telling us what is essentially a tale of abandonment. His much adored mother, Gayatri  abandons him and her loveless marriage, to go seeking a new life in Bali. Later on, his father too leaves him for a spell of wandering and a spell in jail. `I have shaped my past for myself. It fits me well enough now, I can live in it. I do not want it to change for a new version of the past,` he tells the reader.

For the most part Myshkin, a retired horticulturist, appears to be self-contained man. But when his buried anguish breaks through, it startles the reader and creates the most poignant ripples in this intriguing tale that weaves real figures like Rabindranath Tagore, the German artist and musician Walter Spies, the English dancer and Orientalist Beryl de Zoete, along with the imagined Rozario family and friends, into the same plot.

There are passages that sparkle with imagery like this: Barbed wires of white light streaked through the black sky. Berries from a jamun tree came pelting down with the wind. The rain came like curtains of broken glass.

Such a good read.

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