Book Review: "The Red Tin Roof" - Nirmal Verma

There are literary works that leaves you spell bound sometimes with their plot, sometimes with their narration, and sometimes by the sheer beauty of the text. The Red Tin Roof falls under the third category. Set in Shimla, the author's home town, this particular novel evokes such mesmerising descriptive picturesque beauty. The text is nothing but a visual amalgamation of surroundings, people, and their emotions.

The plot is etched around Kaya, a young girl who lives in the company of older women and a younger brother and happens to visit her uncle and his son uphills once a year. Plot is more in thought than in narrative and is about Kaya's self-discovery on her path from being a young girl to reaching adolescence. Deprived of a similar company she develops certain desires, spends time detached in thoughts and fantasies. She finds comfort yet an eerie detachment in company. The seamless valley becomes her companion where she let her thoughts flow. She has questions but no one to answer, puzzles but no one to solve. Her existence is that of curious being having eyes of child and a vision beyond her age. Her self conflict eventually comes to a rest with her first menstrual bleeding symbolic of attaining inner peace and tranquility.

The narrative has a stereotypical beginning, middle and an end each referring to introduction, character development and a symbolic ending respectively. Divided in three parts; the first two parts are in third person narrative with seven chapters each while the third part is in first person narrative and has a single chapter which in format is symbolic of the fact that Kaya finally discovers herself, her sexuality, defined no longer by the confusion that persisted in her existence so far.

The characters are monochromatic and that could be justified with the fact that we witness everything from Kaya's perspective. The reader to is kept distant from Kaya to contribute to the mysteries and confusions of the stage of puberty which all experience in their own personal ways or the stage when we have no one to look up to.

The translation preserves the natural imagery that Nirmal Verma evokes in the original Hindi novel. It even retains certain hindi terms which Indianizes the language making it more appealing to local readers.

On the overall the way in which imagery is evoked, with its essence soaked in every sentence, it serves to be a imaginative reading experience.