Reviewed
by ASIF ANWAR ALIG
A
Blueprint for Love, by Chatura Rao, Bloomsbury Publishing India Pvt. Ltd., New
Delhi, Year2016.
S
|
It had pleaded to overcome human agonies. While
reading A Blueprint for Love by Chatura
Rao, I digressed to similar feelings. Reverberating with human anguishes and
hollowness in the relationships, this book portrays why mankind’s anarchies
haven’t diminished yet.
Almost
a century ago, Hemingway augured the scenario of a landscape of war-torn world,
and expressed such anarchies through his fiction work. Meanwhile, A
Blueprint for Love realizes today’s sufferings of the Gujarat carnage milieu
besides an unfinished love story set in current context.

From the communal disharmonies to religious
chauvinism, this book questions such pandemonium in Indian identities to human
barbarism which demonize moral values and at the same juncture perish love.
Unlike other love-themed fictions, this
novel engages readers with diversified plot and scenes thoroughly scripted as
metaphors of realities which humans face. It beautifully crisscrosses from present
to past to also highlighting human loneliness and shillyshallying of characters
with the towering creative instinct.

A must read for Indian fiction
lovers, A Blueprint for Love takes the
readers to various locations—scenes from Pune to Himalayan foothills, Mumbai to
Gandhinagar and Baroda to Delhi, to experience it how relationships entice through
egos for extempore sufferings. Its storyline sinuously appeal to the readers to
know the places where the characters move. It balances the expressions of loveliness,
personal sufferings, lifelessness, homelessness and hopelessness to India’s political
tragedies in an era while human sanctity is utterly devalued.
Novel’s protagonist characters Suveer,
Reva, and equally powerful Aboli—whom novelist presents in memory—is symbolic
of love and passion. Other character, Tarun appearing in the backdrop to Suveer’s
frequent travels to Gujarat on journalistic assignment finds the plot digresses
to a different connotation. With the shifting of plot to Gandhinagar, novel narrates
how home of a Muslim businessman in the Hindu-dominated neighborhood becomes bone
of contention in modern progressive India.
The stories of sufferings, especially
that of Muslim woman being molested by the Hindu rioters and the tales of betrayals
in the urban societies, symbolizes a very different kind of India. Incidents, such
as Suveer doing his best to save the same Muslim woman, Mahnoor by even risking
his life, to getting hospitalized and other related incidents are worth inspection.
That communal chauvinism was simply
vested interest of a few selected people. It appealed in this context that in every
scene of the novel that reflects either melancholy or failure to understand the
emotional punch. They thus, truly define the blueprint of love—whether platonic
or passionate.
Suveer is at crossroads in his life but
other character, Reva barely overcomes her own share of sufferings. Love redefines
itself in numerous paradoxes. Each character of this novel meticulously describes
love as a longing. The empowered theme of this novel is while summer-filled
romance has its place; some of the recognizable characters are groomed for bloodlust
due to sectarian violence. They juxtapose social realities having been translated
into fiction.
This novel concludes while a mob-molested
Muslim character Mahnoor feels solace in her recuperation with a hilltop Hindu family
host to revitalize for her willingness to lead life afresh. Her husband Zahyan though
fails to overcome his share of trauma. Misguided by community’s political zealots—so
called savors of him—he is fated to choose the downwards path of hatred and
thus fails to enjoy normal life.
http://www.ceylontoday.lk/print20170401CT20170630.php?id=20972
This review article was first published in Ceylon Today, May 14, 2017 edition.