French Sahib
by Pierre Freha
The premise is interesting. Two men in a relationship, one Indian, the other French, return to India from Paris, ostensibly to let the latter’s family know they will be getting married in a civil union.
Philippe Delcourt (45) thinks it will be easy, smooth sailing, once the initial shock is over. But he hasn’t reckoned with the Indian sensibility and downright unwillingness to face the unpleasant. And unpleasant this certainly is, for the mother of his paramour, Pradeep Rao, second youngest in a family of four, a computer engineer who seems to be running away from a public confrontation of his own sexuality.
This is the core story, and in a series of passes, some into the past, others free-wheeling, we see the gradual unveiling of a traditional South Indian psyche uncomfortably up against the French with its ideas of liberte, fraternite and equalite and everyone having the fundamental right to do what they want.
But reality dawns even on Philippe, who eventually seems to accept that there are certain things (actually, a lot of things) in India, that you cannot push.
The novel, incidentally, is Freha’s seventh, and one suspects it has suffered a bit in the translation. So it comes across as replete with clumsy syntax, stilted dialogue (Radha refers to her daughter at one point, as ‘honey’ but usually they are just ‘dear’, as in Enid Blyton or Richmal Compton mothers), in lots of spots I found myself inserting articles and generally, it was a tough read. The plot, once having established its main storyline, then meanders into a hundred different directions, very few of them interesting to the average Indian reader. So one can safely assume that it is a book aimed largely at the French, with only the setting (the South, Cochin, Chennai) as a backdrop for the whimsical development of the relationship between Philippe and his Indian ‘family’ giving it the piquancy of a local reader appeal. hat’s missing is a real understanding of the need to translate the original into a true rendering of the colloquial without losing the flavour and the intention of the author.
Spoiler alert! Even the insertion of the tsunami at the end does little to raise the novel out of its plodding pedestrianism.
French Sahib
by Pierre Freha
Roman Books
Rs.495