Westland.
Pages 320. Rs 195.
Kanika Dhillon’s maiden foray into novel writing has come with much fanfare. Dhillon has earned herself a head start with Sharukh Khan himself unveiling her debut novel. And why not? She is after all the screenwriter for the much-touted Ra.One and also happens to head the Creative Content Division of King Khan’s Red Chillies Entertainment. She appears to have journeyed through Bollywood with aplomb having worked with Farah Khan in Om Shanti Om and Priyadarshan in Billu Barber. One envies her Midas touch, but her book Bombay Duck is a Fish tears at this perception and reveals the hard work and sweat, the pain of broken dreams and the glamorous fallacy that is Bollywood.
Neiki Brar, a small-town girl, moves from Amritsar to Bombay in search of the glitz and glamour of a star-spangled Bollywood. She starts working as a lowly Assistant Director to a famous film-maker but soon finds that her job is not so much about film-making as running errands for everyone on the set. Battling with the egos of her colleagues and celebrities, Neiki survives the rat race and manages to carve a niche for herself. However, her romantic entanglement with a shallow, opportunistic, sex-starved actor Ranvir Khanna, becomes the raison d’etre of her premature death.
The character of Neiki Brar seems to have emerged from Dhillon’s own Mumbai experiences, but the character development is not without contradictions. In the initial phase, Neiki is shown as ambitious, aggressive, hard working and undeniably talented. She is also not without compassion and takes up cudgels for her maid or the "extras" on the set or even Sam, her colleague. But, suddenly, for no reason at all, she pulls on the mantle of a suicidal jilted lover. Neiki’s suicide does not emerge naturally from the chronology of events and is as precipitate and inexplicable as the story lines of most Bollywood films. The diary-entry manner of narration is interesting, if not unique. It could have been used as a tool for development of Neiki’s character but the short succinct fact dominated entries focus on the day-to-day unveiling of facts rather than the internal strife of a character.
This novel is written in a manner characteristic of a film script. Be that as it may, Dhillon has sketched the beauty and ugliness of Bollywood in bold arresting strokes. The out-of-work dwarf Goku, the shenanigans of actors, the obsession with making things look good, the cut-throat blame game as well as the debilitating hard work on a film set is there for all to see. The title of the book, Bombay Duck is a Fish, is a perfect analogy for the deception perpetrated by the make-believe Bollywood world which looks beautiful and ideal but has a hidden underbelly of pain, suffering and betrayal. Just as Bombay Duck is a Fish, Bollywood is not what it appears to be. An interesting read that gives the reader a peek into behind-the-scene Bollywood.
buy the book at Amazon.com Bombay Duck Is A Fish
Published in the Tribune dated 14 August 2011
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