01-08-2025
Review of Age of Mondays by Lopa Ghosh
The inner world of Vera Narois, the 10-year-old protagonist of Lopa Ghosh's new novel Age of Mondays, is surprisingly grim, shaped by the turbulence she is living through. She must deal with a mother going away every Monday to 'a cold, cruel place', her parents' marriage unravelling at the seams, flailing friendships, and a class teacher who is very uncomfortable with her overactive imagination and worldview. 'Sadness is not a bicycle that you learn to ride, and once you have learnt it, you cross over to the other side and become a sadcyclist... (it) is a smell, a colour, a person,' she thinks.
Narois's childhood is hardly idyllic. It is one in which time is calculated in 'mega-annums and giga-annums', parents' fights that grow from sounding like the 'low hum of a helicopter' to 'a mini-earthquake', and 'like fireflies, cancer stories gleamed and glowed'. To escape all this, Narois begins creeping into the Jahanpanah Forest in South Delhi, a patch of wilderness 'that has existed for centuries, rustling, shedding, lurking', overlooking her 'house with limestone walls (that) can be spotted from an aeroplane if you have the eyes for it.' Here, she meets a strange, almost otherworldly bunch of people, the Jahanpanah Jugnus, led by the handsome Silver Samir, an encounter that will have momentous consequences for little Narois and her family.
Shadows of the past
Ghosh's attempt to write in a child's voice — despite the unmistakably adult phrases often clashing with Narois's somewhat more ingenuous perspective — gives the novel remarkable depth and profundity. One cannot help but be moved by the thoughts and feelings of this very young person who is forced to constantly grapple with a dystopian present, filled with inequity, disease, drug abuse, depression, the rise of right-wing nationalism, the threat of war, the Israel-Palestine conflict and the unshakeable shadow of the past, whether it be the 2002 Gujarat riots, the Holocaust or the Iranian Revolution.
Crammed with rich imagery, wry observations, interesting similes and metaphors, forays into synaesthesia and onomatopoeia and some clever dialogue, Age of Mondays is also a reminder that the world our children are likely to inherit is a doomed one, unless something changes and fast.
Age of Mondays Lopa Ghosh HarperCollins India ₹499
