Why The Windfall is the one post-liberalisation novel you need to read
“Mrs Jha stepped away and opened the fridge. She could feel the sweat gathering under her arms. She leaned down and allowed the refrigerated air to slip down the front of her blouse. She was gaining weight. She looked over at Mrs Ray, who seemed to become younger and more beautiful every day. Granted, at forty-two, Mrs Ray was seven years younger than Mrs Jha but the glow wasn’t just about age. She looked younger now than she did when Mr Ray had died five years ago.”
Diksha Basu’s gorgeous The Windfall is studded with passages of such remarkable simplicity, yet power. As Mr Jha, manager of a minor technological training franchise who sells his website for a considerable windfall and decides to move from a flat in Mayur Palli in East Delhi to a bungalow in Gurgaon, much comedy ensues.
Mr Jha develops a fixation for outdoing his Punjabi neighbour Mr Chopra who has a reverse obsession with his new neighbour. Mrs Jha, who is mistaken for the maid by the new neighbour, struggles to come to terms with the new life, which involves a son studying in America (or rather blowing up the family’s new money on weed and sex) and a new life without maids (because otherwise how will guests know that they have acquired a dishwasher) but with an endless array of possessions that come with the so-called posh life (among them a stainless steel kitchen from the TV cooking shows with pots and pans hanging off hooks and a living room like Mr Chopra with a faux Sistine Chapel dome painted on the ceiling). And Mrs Ray, the neighbour they leave behind in Mayur Palli lives out her widowhood sneakily buying booze and clandestinely smoking cigarettes, with her maid Ganga for company.
Until, of course, the whole thing comes gloriously undone. In this delightful novel of the problems of new money, the women are the stars. While Mr Jha steadily loses perspective, and Mr Chopra follows suit, it’s the women who hold fort. Mrs Chopra with gold bangles and her day-long kaftan is the one who wants her money-guzzling son, 28-year-old Johnny, to do some work — Mr Chopra believes that the fact that Johnny goes to the best restaurants in town, travels abroad regularly with friends and wears flashy designer jeans without doing a day’s work is a tribute to him. There's Mrs Jha with her starched saris and her firm morals. And Mrs Ray, ooh the wonderful Mrs Ray, with her endless appetite for life.
And, and, Balwinder, Mr Chopra’s guard, who is grateful that he is made to sleep out near the gate only on nights when they have parties.
And that really is what Basu’s novel is about — the hierarchy of wants. All Mr Jha wanted was to give his mother a full length mirror where she could check the pleats of her sari, having grown up fatherless and a permanent burden on relatives.
All Mrs Jha wants to do is to work for her NGO, trying to get best wages for rural weavers, even as her husband can’t get enough of a new house with its 24-hour geysers and new money which will give him access to business class travel — “we will lie flat on our backs while flying through the skies,” he tells her excitedly. All Mrs Ray wants is love — and her yoga pants which she is convinced have been stolen by Mr De from her balcony. And all Balwinder, Mr Chopra’s guard, wants is a good night's sleep, a trade-off for the times he is made to sleep out near the gate when they host have parties.
Basu has an economist's understanding of how money works and a novelist's eye for emotion (''Mrs Jha was sick of being nervous. She double-locked all the doors and windows before bed every night. She checked the vault at the bank at least once a month, and she had even joined a ladies investment club and taken their advice and put a significant amount of money into gold bricks''). Basu's novel is almost like a short history of liberalisation in India, showing the transformation in a million ways - the parking lot where kids used to play in the East Delhi apartment being overtaken by a jumble of cars, the absence of temples in Gurgaon because more and more people build their own prayer rooms, disinterested street vendors selling ripe guavas to servants because the owners of Gurgaon homes never actually step out on the streets.
And discovering, at the end of everything, that happiness is sharing a crème caramel with two spoons.