Joseph has come back home to Guwahati without a job but with lots of musical hopes and he finds that his girlfriend has had enough of him. She’s been freewheeling behind his back with a musician that he dislikes and is issuing marching orders. Being dumped, of course, is par for the course for Joseph – Uma is his third girlfriend and, unkindest cut of all, she’s even sold his bike and refuses to give him the money. After he’s finished mourning her, with some help from his irrepressible friend Utpal, he decides the best thing to do is ask destiny for some help.
Relationships, like marriages, after all, are made in heaven. After strumming through some sad ballads and his memories, Joseph remembers the fleeting glimpse he had of a girl he had nine years ago at a bus stop. He doesn’t remember what she looked like but thinks he remembers that she was wearing a grey skirt. And so the hunt begins.
The author grew up in Guwahati so he is familiar with the yearnings of young people in Assam and the neighbouring states of the North East, where every young man has a guitar, sports blue jeans and is ruled by the women in his life, whether it’s his mother, his aunt or his girlfriend. There are a host of entertaining characters, Joseph and his friends, Rahul the nerd with glasses, Babu the bodyguard cum driver. There is also the sense of a morel liberal kind of society where even parents can also consent to orchestrated meetings and fall in love if the circumstances are right.
The story of Joseph’s hunt is an entertaining laugh a minute story, as he rummages through Facebook looking for the girl he thought he saw. It also makes a statement on the nature of love and how life never is what we want it to be.
And while the ending is not what you might expect when you start reading the book, the problem is that Basumatary’s story is so entertaining that you find it hard to accept what happens. As a matter of fact, you tend to wonder whether the author himself accepted it because he hurries the reader through those pages so that they hardly have an effect. Still ending notwithstanding, it’s great travel reading, so enjoy!
Chocolate_Guitar_Momos by Kenny Deori Basumatary
Published by Tranquebar India
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13/06/2011 at 12:05 Permalink
Anjana, you ALWAYS review books I want to read. It’s so frustrating that many of them aren’t available outside India.