By Rajeev Balasubramanyam
Bloomsbury Paperback Original
$14.95
Reviewed by Tessa Laird, first published in Rain Taxi, Vol 6 No 2, Summer 2001
 

In Beautiful Disguises is written from the perspective of a 16 year old girl whose name we're never told, who lives in an unspecified South Indian town. To escape from an arranged marriage to a lecher, our anonymous heroine seeks further anonymity in a large (but equally anonymous) Indian city.

It's strange that Balasubramanyam is so shy of specifics. One could assume the result would be a "dream like" prose, but the tone of this debut novel is prosaic, if a little vague. As if to let us know right from the outset that In Beautiful Disguises is no magic realism fest a la Salman Rushdie, the heroine states "My birth was fast, efficient and businesslike, without mysterious portents, flaming meteorites or phantasmic deluges of blood descending from the sky."

It seems fair enough that a young writer like Balasubramanyam might want to strike out from the floral histrionics associated with Indian diasporic writing; his is a more subdued, personal style. The jacket cover proclaims that the novel charts that hitherto virgin territory in our collective psyches: "Holly Golightly meets Arundhati Roy," (thus spake Marie Claire). At first I was prepared to dismiss this as a piece of glib copy, not least because Balasubramanyam's prose doesn't possess anywhere near the intense sensuality of Roy's. Eventually though, it seemed the best peg to hang this work off: Audrey Hepburn's scatty, tipsy, endearingly annoying character Golightly from Breakfast at Tiffany's, is an effective mirror of the heroine of In Beautiful Disguises. Even the awful racist cameo in Tiffany's (Mikey Rooney playing a Japanese) is recast in Disguises as a mono-dimensional French tyrant called Mrs Marceau - and surely having the namesake of a mime artist is intentional, as Balasubramanyam underlines his delight in superficiality, masks and disguises.

However, rather than merely hint at the connections between his heroine and Hepburn, Balasubramanyam feels the need to lay the comparisons on thickly, though he never manages to explain why this South Indian girl, who spends every day at the "Magick Movie House" never once mentions the name of an Indian starlet to model herself upon, or the name of a single Indian movie which has captured her imagination. Seemingly caught in a warp both in time and space, her obsession with Hepburn remains an incongruous trope. Perhaps it is supposed to represent the heroine’s anomalous position in the social structure of her village, but I rather think it's an indication that Balasubramanyam is writing from several removes at once: inhabiting the head of a young girl in the space of India when in reality he's a male living in England. These kinds of removes are irrelevant in the face of great literature, but In Beautiful Disguises is merely an odd, patchy tale, albeit peppered with some effective, occasionally evocative moments. Overall, as its name portends, In Beautiful Disguises, as the name portends, offers nothing more than a superficial romp in an artificial India.