Once there was a girl called Lilly who never lied to her mother but her best friend Irene could never tell the truth. Margaret Mascarenhas’ second novel The Disappearance Of Irene Dos Santos sails through a plot which seems deceptively simple at first. Irene teaches Lilly how to French-kiss but when Lilly is caught kissing a
boy in the lift, her parents change her school. The girls conspire to keep in touch and with Irene’s help Lilly forays into the world of boys, beer and bikinis. To ward-off her parent’s suspicion, Lilly takes Luz with her on Irene adventures.
Luz is the daughter of Marta who works for Lilly’s parents. The two girls are raised almost like sisters. As a child Luz, feels Lilly is always given the head of the banana and as an adult her quite married motherhood burns Luz with envy. She grudges the fact that years ago Lilly chose Irene for the trip to the jungles of Maquiritare: the fateful day on which Irene went missing.
While the general consensus is that Irene drowned that day, Lilly refuses to believe.
Her memory of the trip planned by her parents is fudged. She vaguely remembers a swim, a fight over stolen red shoes and later Irene telling her that she was going to elope with her boyfriend and that Lilly must not tell anyone. Even though Irene is gone, Lilly is unable to forget her. The episode leaves something amiss in Lilly and Irene becomes a barred topic in the family. But years later when a pregnant Lilly suffers a dangerous fall she begs her father to find out about Irene.
The story, which is neither sequential nor linear, moves through an array of characters. The eight chapters into which the novel is divided are named after the people whose tales are told.
When Lilly slips it is decided to hold a novena where the family prays to local deity Maria Lionza, and everyone has to tell a story to the unborn baby. The six chapters that follow are sprung around the stories of love, birth, sex, revolution and death. The stories are engaging and, at times, reach back several generations. The stories are familiar yet mesmerising, each getting its due share of the author’s care.
The final chapter “Irene” is, however, an antithesis to all that precedes. One does not realise that very little has been revealed about Irene till the last chapter turns up. While it answers the questions about Irene’s “disappearance” it does so with a flourish of surprise. The reversal could seem an unnecessary culmination to, an otherwise, a brilliantly told story. Over the years, A Beautiful Mind-twists have become so common that they end up appearing excuses for the writer’s inability to conjure a good climax.
While some writers paint with words, some can make them sing and some others can even make them breathe, but very few can make them tell a story.
Mascarenhas has the unique ability to tell the story on her own terms. The author, who is a US citizen of Goan-origin, locates her novel in Venezuela, where she herself grew up. Lilly’s father Ismael is a dashing musician of the revolution; a hard man to catch for any woman till he met Lilly’s mother, Consuelo. They marry on the seventh day of their courtship and Ismael never set his eye on another woman.
Their household help and Luz’s mother Martha, is a Cuban who migrated to Venezuela to escape the brutal revolution and crushing economic conditions. Her own mother Maria fled from Spain at the age of 16. Maria was taken in by a brothel-runner who takes pity on the girl when in a bid to protect her virginity Maria insisted that “her speciality was hand work”. Martha is born out of a moment of indiscretion when Maria is serving a client. Mascarenhas draws on a range of social-political issues from political revolutions to tribal rights and bares the verdant, violent history of a continent.
Like on the cover of the book, the face of the protagonist is turned away from us. From the time Irene eggs on Lilly to “study” herself (“pointing to her vagina”), it is established that Irene is the bad girl. Nothing about Lilly is wicked or opaque, but Irene is kept a mystery. We are told little about what she thought or how she felt. Even when you’ve lapped up the book you can’t be too sure about her true character which makes the book a compelling read.
After all, “bad girls” come with a certified fan following given their rarity and the dazzling reach of their imagination.