Early in the first chapter of Sandip Roy’s Don’t Let Him Know is a letter. Written by Sumit, the letter is an admonishment to a lover for not being strong enough to stand by the relationship. Amit, who has just brought his widowed mother, Romola, to the US from Kolkata, found the letter in an old address book and hands it over to her, assuming it was hers. The letter, old, its paper translucent but the words still clear, is the thread that holds the book together. Written over 12 chapters, each of which is a complete short story by itself, Don’t Let Him Know does need a thread. But Roy’s brilliance lies in using it sparingly as a device to quickly plant many thoughts inside the reader’s head — several possibilities, in fact — and not a recurrent trope through each of the stories. (To be any more specific would be giving away the “secrets that have their own secrets” that the book jacket promises, and so I shall desist.)
The geography that Don’t Let Him Know occupies is one readers of Indian fiction are pretty familiar with by now. Romola and her husband, Avinash, grew up in Kolkata. Avinash went to the US to study and after the wedding, Romola joined him there. They lived in America for a year, then came back and “settled down” in Kolkata. They have a son, Amit, who takes a similar route out. Only, he meets and marries an American girl and continues to live there. (Yes, dear reader, I know what you are thinking. Hasn’t Jhumpa Lahiri told us these stories in book after book over the last decade and some? The short answer is yes, much of the landscape is familiar. But to Roy’s credit, nothing in the book makes you hark back to anything you read in Lahiri’s works.)
When we first meet her, Romola has returned to the US after many years. Forced by the traditions of widowhood, albeit self-imposed, she has eschewed non-vegetarian food. But the burgers that dance in television advertisements are too much for her to resist and in the first glimpse the readers has of the feistiness she hides behind the folds of her sari, she sets off in an unfamiliar town looking for a McDonald’s. In a sense, Romola’s burger dash holds in it the challenges that all of Roy’s characters face — a sense of tradition and duty, a culture of denial, and a veil of secrecy.
What makes
Having grown up in Kolkata, lived in the US and now returned to his home city, Roy’s descriptions of life and lifestyles in both continents are spot on. The non-linear structure of the story and the slightly disconnected chapters both comfort and confuse the reader. A story on young Romola’s brief dalliance with an up and coming actor, left me baffled, anchored as it was with nothing else in the book. Yet, the device also helps the reader understand the characters from their own as well as other people’s perception of them. My quibble with the book is that barring Romola (and it is hard to describe her as the sole protagonist), Roy fails to create another memorable character. Avinash, who piqued my curiosity the most, remains taciturn and inscrutable, and Amit seems like a cardboard prop, the mandatory child who is necessary to move the story forward. Yet, the book is so tightly edited that these are flaws I picked out after I was done reading it.
I had been going through a patchy reading phase — flitting from one to another, unable to sink my teeth into any — when I picked up Don’t Let Him Know . Not only did the book keep me in its grip for two days, I emerged from it, excited, clearheaded and ready for more. As validations go, that’s all a book requires.