An unusual story that starts as a modern fairytale and ends with the grimness of this world, 'The Last Song of Dusk' takes the readers through a roller coaster ride of love, loss, fate and acceptance of life as it comes. The novel opens as Anuradha leaves Udaipur to meet her prospective husband Vardhaman. The story then continues to tell us about her tryst with 'kismet' When she enters Dwarika house, the house at their first encounter had told about the Mischief it could unravel with unpassioned deviousness - the death of her first son, Mohan. After the arrival of Divi-bai, a eyelash-less had who made a 'malicious fitting' to the Gandharva family, Anuradha learns that love and loathing, joy and distress, quietness and noise, all eventually blur and one is left wondering where one started and the other ended. Things drastically change after the death of Mohan when Anuradha found that contrary to what others said, Death was not deadening at all; rather it was a dynamic creature whose black fragrance, whose concrete stillness seeped into the wood of the furniture, the linen of the bed, the flowers in the vases; it was everywhere as omnipresent as its only sibling, Life. On the other hand, quietness found its way into Vardhaman: not merely as a baffling reticence but the species of heavy silence one finds in the folded white wings of Death's seraphim. And all these do not change even after arrival of their second son Shloka who at an age of four could be described as an ascetic with an amazing genius for melancholy.
The readers are then introduced to Nandini - a-walk-on-water, soul painting, beedi-smoking girl who saw people for who they were and who, at the age of seven had wisely concluded, 'Life is pathetic'. The fate of all these characters unravel in an old villa of 1920s' - Dariya Mahal, a monstrous house who licked up all its inmates with its deep, morbid sorrow that was too sacred for it to lose.
In his narration, Shanghvi touches every aspect from the incredibility of imagination to the inevitability of realism. the readers are introduced to all possible facets of life such as pain, pleasure, fear, hope and fantasy through his eloquent description of events and individualism of the varied characters. The language is poetic and imaginative in which Shanghvi lavishly uses imagery, personifications and metaphors. His achingly melancholic tale is sprinkled with humour, witticisms and tenderness that engage the readers in vicarious emotional turmoil throughout. As the story proceeds, the readers quietly agree that fate has its own way of bringing forth long forgotten secrets, each time making humans relive it with same pain or pleasure; that life in its own way indicates its intentions, good or bad long before the event actually takes place; and that how bad a situation, the only way to endure it is to live through it.
Shanghvi brilliantly matches the situation with the characters. Even the disturbingly silent child Shloka falls into places with the quietness of Vardhaman and the grief of Dariya Mahal; and the mysterious ways of Nandini with the terrible secrets of her past. In the first chapter, the readers encounter the statement "In this world, my darling, there is no mercy" and throughout the story the truth of this statement is brought forth as each new event unfolds and the characters crave for the 'small mercies of life'.
The narration is delicately interwoven with a number of small stories to look into the depths of the life of four main characters. However, in a n attempt to introduce variety and fullness, Shanghvi sometimes unexpectedly throws the reader off-track. A great many characters are introduced some of whom leave no or sometimes only an ephemeral impact.
But as a whole, the book looks into tragedies of life as they are and as life can be; it is a story of sacrifices, courage, relationships, destiny, desires and forgotten secrets; a tale that beautifully interweaves the distant worlds of imagination and realism in a language that Shanghvi majestically uses.
[Book Review by Ankita Mukherjee]
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