After The Music Room, here comes another strong offering from author Namita Devidayal, with her second novel, After Taste. Reading After Taste is sure to leave you hungry. This is a direct result of the liberal use of food throughout the book. Food is everywhere, on every occasion from the mundane to the festive, or when there are mentions of ‘burps of satisfaction’, as well as a metaphor, whenever possible. As when a sister says, “her brother was handsome and eligible, like freshly baked brown bread for the catering college in Switzerland”. Another example is when an ‘intense bond’ between mother and son is described as the “milk that flowed into, and corrupted, the sweet business of life”.
But life is not sweet when described by Devidayal in her novel. Though there is a liberal use of halwa and gulab jamuns and jalebis, these do not in any way serve to sweeten life. Bitterness, guilt, inadequacy, misery, cunning and deception is what boils up like bile throughout the story and tends to leave a bitter, not sweet, aftertaste.
The story spans two generations of a family establishing a foothold in the city of Mumbai. After losing everything in the money-lending business, they turn to the halwai or sweet-meats business. The change in fortunes of the family is spearheaded by the mother, a hitherto simple but tenacious woman with magic in her mithai and parantha moulding hands. The men, in general, throughout the novel are shown as weak and shameful characters, prone to drinking, smoking, philandering or simply sleeping inertly in the face of their troubles. The women are not heart-warming, angelic creatures either. They, too, turn into insecure, double-speaking, not-to-be trusted characters. Who do you trust in this story? Maybe only the maid-servant.
For Mummyji, the strong, manipulative central character in this novel that evokes memories of Rohinton Mistry’s kind of plots, is interested only in two things — food and money. She bribes her sons and family with both and controls them. That is how she ‘divided and ruled’. And when she talks to her miserable younger daughter about her disintegrating marriage she advises her, “A husband has no use if he has no money. That is the only rule in life. Finished.” She could not have been more blunt than that.
Is there no hope at all in this book? Maybe not, as it speaks of innocent children who are enjoying an innocuous pony ride at Breach Candy, and who are not even part of the plot, as those “who would grow up to be oblivious to the pains of others”. However, the author does leave a glimmer at the end when some of the main characters strike out on a path of rapprochement and maybe even happiness.
The reader is forced to re-examine the way the book is described twice on the back cover with words like ‘gossip’ and ‘gossipy’. However, this is surely an unfair description, for the book has a sadness that is far beyond read-and-toss gossip.
For those who like their fiction reading sweetened with a few spoonfuls of sugar, After Taste is not the perfect choice. It is an offering of a writer who is sure of herself and mature enough to say it. She does not write about servants and drivers and lower class struggles. She talks of urban settings and middle-class subterfuge that could be happening in the homes of our neighbours. And then for one stomach-churning moment, if we stop to think, we wonder if it may be happening in our own homes too. This book is very real and alarming. Sometimes too real and too alarming.

Mohyna Srinivasan is the author of The House on Mall Road