Synopsis of "Courtesan of Storms"

An unfulfilled marriage with an Indian American techie returns Leela, a brilliant, beautiful young doctor, to India in search of love. One night in the troubled month of December 1992, Leela, to use her own words, "steps out" of her marriage. She takes on an out-of-town Hyderabadi as her lover for the night, and becomes a slave of sex.

       By when Leela meets Sat, an ageing shelved newsman, in a soiree in an upper-class neighbourhood of Old Delhi, she has gone through relationships numbering in "double digits" and innumerable one-night stands. She is all surface and her dealings are skin deep. She has cluttered her life with tourism and American shopping malls and filled her home with things.

       Sat, on the other hand, is deeply alienated and a declinist if he has any ideology at all. For most of his life an unbeliever, a time associated with a Ayodhya yogi yet leaves him with some faint understanding of the eternal forces of nature. But he nevertheless hankers after love in the notion that it would save him. He hopes to find love with Leela. But it is an illusion. An isolated and forlorn newly-wed in cold, snowed in Vermont, Leela craves for the hot, over-populated, copulating frenzy of India. In the wild pendulum swing of her return to her country, Leela scatters away to make little sense to her own self, much less to Sat.

       Leela is true. She lives a life of true lies. She calls herself a slut to Sat. She lucidly understands their differences, and accepts that no amount of love would overcome them. She says to him that she is a here-and-now person and he is always looking for depth. He says it doesn't matter. She says it does. It is almost as if Leela is defying the impulses of love, willing herself to damnation for leaving her inadequate husband and GI Joe-loving six-year-old child night after night to trade herself for fun.

Before long, she knows the smell of sex, nauseates with it in a room, but is all the more imprisoned by it. Leela figures she is bipolar disordered. She becomes a practicing psychiatrist on Sat's goading in a great old hospital. But her chosen profession, her nymphomania and her guilts drive against and amplify one another in all consuming destruction. She and Sat in togetherness end up reinforcing their opposite poles, and she leaves him.

       Courtesan of Storms opens from after Leela has gone away. Sat tries to escape into work. The book erases all of Sat's inner journeys because it wants to show Sat's side that is a watcher. Sat watches and observes his friends and their coloured virtues and myriad vanities. Sid Ray who finds success as a Calcutta writer holds the opinion that if you don't sell, you might as well not write. Sharmista has a modern life. She is at a dead-end in love and in her news TV career and lives in denial of both.

       Ranjit Singh is a schizoid dealer of spirits whose head grows too hot for a turban. Ranjit has an intuitive understanding of everything from pinhead matters to Ras Leela, Rajneesh, Jagdish Bhagwati's trade theories and nuclear weapons. Madan with a frozen knee, who often calls in on Sat at work, is a theatre director and a dam designer for the Union government who wants a transfer back from Poona to Delhi. Madan's minister wants a bribe to push his case. And there is Ragini, an NID-trained designer with the smarts, who dies young without regaining her Iyengar identity, but is redeemed by her Goan childhood that does not entirely lose its lust.

       Leela, Sid Ray, Sharmista, Ranjit and Ragini live in Courtesan of Storms through Sat's thoughts, interactions, recapitulations, night conversations, and discussions in company. But Sat, himself, the first person narrator, makes his presence felt in the story with his general absence.

       Leela's father, a Partition victim who helps Sat's friend with his personal account of the tragedy of Operation Bluestar, dies of cancer after a two-month battle. Leela is broken but especially so because of unreconciled filial angsts. The man Leela leaves Sat for, who is the very image of her first and only unrequited lover, estranges from her. Low after two failed IVFs for her new love, and pining for her child who is taken away to America by her husband, Leela attempts suicide. It leaves her right hand wasted. She calls for Sat, only to walk away to begin a new life alone.

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"Courtesan of Storms" is available at the following bookshops:

Delhi:
Bahrisons (South Extension), Teksons (South Extension), Variety Bookstores (Connaught Place).

Mumbai:
Landmark, Odyssey and Crossword Bookstores

Chennai:
Landmark, Odyssey bookstores

Kolkatta:
Crossword Bookstores

Bangalore:
Sapna Book House, Gangaram

Hyderabad:
Akshara

Chandigarh:
Modern Bookstore, Capital Book Depot

About the author

N.V.Subramanian was born in New Delhi in 1958 into a Thanjavur Tamil Brahmin family. Martial and artistic traits have simultaneously run for two generations in the family. Subramanian's grand uncle fought in the early Twentieth Century wars in China, while his grandfather, largely a self-taught man, drew him to literature. From his father, he inherited a disposition to sketch and write, and when his family prevented him from joining the army, he drifted into journalism.

Subramanian rose swiftly in the profession, becoming assistant editor with Sunday Mail and India Week, and quit the print media as chief of bureau, deputy editor and roving editor for Sunday magazine. Now he edits www.NewsInsight.net, a strategic affairs website.

Subramanian's rovings took him all over North India. But his sensibilities about the politics of the Centre and the Peripheries were sharpened by his Kashmir, Punjab and North East assignments at the height of insurgent violence and by his reporting of sectarian and caste conflicts. It gave him a measure of understanding of the power of the Indian State, which proved valuable in the writing of his first novel, University of Love, a study of one-hundred-and-fifty years of violence, which was published by Writers Workshop, Calcutta.

N.V.Subramanian lives and works in Delhi as a strategic writer. His analyses have been published in Le Monde Diplomatique, Defence News, South China Morning Post, Gulf News, Opinion Asia, and Asian Affairs.

E-mail the author: subramanian.n.v.1958@gmail.com

"Courtesan of Storms" can also be bought directly from the the publisher. Please contact:

Har-Anand Publications Private Limited

Address:	E-49/3, Okhla Industrial Area, Phase-II, New Delhi-110020
Telephone:	011-41603490 and 41603492
Fax:	011-41708607
E-mail:	haranand@rediffmail.com
Website:	www.haranandpublications.com

Price: Rs 250