The Moon in the Lining of her Skin’. That’s as good a line as you will get in love poems enlivened by Byronic imagination (it is actually taken from Pablo Neruda). But in any case, the title is a red herring, for this is not the place to look for standard-issue love stories. Here romance, such as it exists, is so star-crossed, so strewn with hurdles, that you will begin to think Romeo and Juliet had a ball. Why would anybody read it then? The honest answer is that when you have had enough of the ‘and they lived happily ever after’ stuff, your taste takes a different turn. You thirst for something different and away from the run of the mills and Boon. Your thirst can lead you to the genre known as ‘dark fantasy’.
Kiran Manral has taken to dark fantasy like a fish to water. There are three female protagonists in the book―all of them equally deep, driven, and at least one of them is carrying on a no-holds-barred dalliance with the devil. They have names like Noor, Rani and Gulab. No surnames, please, they are not of our kind. Forget surnames, I dare say, they don’t even carry Aadhaar Cards. If you can’t tell them apart, worry not. Bewilderment comes with the territory. The characters themselves can barely tell one from the other.
The stories of the three women have sub-stories and further sub-stories until, like a plate of noodles, you won’t be able to tell where one ends and another begins. Holding up the flag for the male of the species is a full-time ‘hit man’, euphemistically called a collector of souls. Such as they are, all of them are borne along swiftly by the dark tide of the prose. There is also a large helping of uncanny simile and metaphor. Witness, for instance: “Like vultures, their thoughts circled over their heads at a distance.”
There are few writers going who can build ‘atmosphere’with the compelling sweep of Manral. And even fewer writers who can make the erotic seem so ethereal. But sometimes there is an unwieldy muchness about the story and its progeny substories. Things are happening no doubt and at multiple levels. They are all rivetingly narrated, but you can step back and ask if it was necessary for so many things to happen.
If this book gets made into an OTT series, they can dispense with the dialogue writer, because throughout the book you rarely hear people converse. Conversation is redundant because everyone seems to know what the other person wants without things being made explicit. The film, if and when that happens, would need arrestingly, or more appropriately, bewitchingly and hauntingly beautiful women. If nothing else, that alone would make the film worth watching.
THE MOON IN THE LINING OF HER SKIN
By Kiran Manral
Published by Hachette India
Price: Rs599; pages: 354