The Blue Bedspread is Raj Kamal Jha's first book, a collection of multiple stories, vignettes and personal essays strung together around the artificially created peg of his Sister's one-day old child, sleeping in the room next door, covered by a blue bedspread that had also been used by the protagonist, the Brother and his Sister, when they were young.

The book essentially deals with the lives of the Brother, his Sister and their Father with multiple characters flitting in and out at different intervals. Through these multiple "stories", we eventually learn about the Family, but it takes a hell of a time for us to get there. Most of these characters are expectedly morbid. They either drink or beat their wives or kill their husbands or fight or have horrible mothers-in-law and in general, live terrible lives. Many of the pieces, like "Cable Television" or the piece on the American Center Library, are just rants and personal "Times of India middle" essays, describing facets of life in modern day Calcutta. These only help to break the pace of the "story", if there could be said to be one in the first place.

As soon as I started reading the book, my immediate gut feeling was to stop and give the book away to some unsuspecting "bakra". When I told my wife about this, she smiled and patted me on my wrist; apparently I was her "bakra". I stuck on simply because I am the eternal optimist, hoping that the book would get better and the pretentiousness would disappear. It does become a little better in the middle and towards the end, when the characters are more fleshed out, but since Jha does everything possible to make sure that we do not get involved with his characters, it doesn't matter.

As seems to be the norm with many modern Indian English novels, the stories keep jumping in time randomly. This provided me with considerable mental and physical exercise; mental exercise while trying to figure out the time periods the author was referring to, and physical exercise for my page-turning fingers, as I had to go back and forth to understand what was happening. An entire piece titled "Durga Pooja", in the "Sister" section is so devious that I understood who was who and what was what, only another 20 pages down the line.

And the hang-loose parts. Incest between the Brother and Sister is introduced, but never really further explored. Pederasty between the Father and the Brother is talked about and then forgotten. Or maybe all these are just ways in which to pack in as many "hot topics" as possible to make the book interesting and saleable.

Why! Why was the book written! Was it because he wanted to write something, anything! There is no doubt that Jha writes well and has a flair for words. But just as the ability to rhyme well does not a poet make, a flair for words does not necessarily an author make. Or maybe Jha just wanted to write; and to find an audience for his rants and peeves, he found some props on which to hang the stories and voila, the book was ready. And then he had Pankaj Mishra, the person who discovered Arundhati Roy to recommend his book and with a 6-figure dollar advance, what more could one ask for!

The problem with trying to read books like this is that unless you can get into the author's head there is no way to know what exactly he/she wants to say. I sometimes think it is better to stick with the Harry Potter books than to read modern Indian English novels that try to say a lot allegorically, hoping that the reader will make the jump between the words and the author's mind. What does Jha want to convey with the "Sarajevo woman"! Why the hell is she in the book! At least with the "old man who cleans the pigeons", he is trying to make a point about the way the city is moving. But the "man with the cable TV who beats his wife" falling in love with the "Sarajevo woman" makes no sense to me.

Or maybe I am biased, because I prefer a good beginning, a nice middle and understandable endings with a proper flow.

I am sure I will be told that I don't understand the fine nuances of this book. But I sometimes wonder who these books are written for, if not average "Joes" like me, who are not English literature students or professors, but literate individuals who have been reading books ever since they can remember; having started with Chandamama, Amar Chitra Katha, Indian and Arabic fairy tales, Enid Blyton, Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew then Chase, Harold Robbins, Sidney Sheldon and other "airline travel" books, with generous dollops of Shakespeare, Shaw and the classics along with sci-fi, noir, detective and God knows what other genres, including Indian authors such as Naipaul, Rushdie, Seth, Geeta Mehta, Anita Desai and the like. If I find the book difficult to understand, if I have a problem with its motivations, if I have to ask myself why it was written and why I bothered to read it, there has to be something wrong with the author and the book.

Or I guess with me!