A Cardboard Bequest
Anjana Neira Dev
HALF-BLOOD by Pronoti Datta Speaking Tiger, New Delhi, 2022, 264 pp., 499.00
December 2022, volume 46, No 12

The ‘skein of duality’ that runs through Pronoti Datta’s debut novel gives it its special character, and as one toggles between the past and the present, between people and places, and between culture, politics and history, all of which make up the warp and weft of the story, the reader is drawn irresistibly into its multihued narrative.

Dictionaries define half-blood in various ways: to denote degrees of separation in consanguineous relationships, as well as to describe social hierarchies pertaining to the pejorative epithet used for someone who is marginalized for not being racially ‘pure’.  It is the latter connotation that the author plays with to tell her stories, of the central protagonist and her father, the real focus of the novel. It is a letter from her mysterious and shadowy (biological) father, Burjor Elavia, that sets the narrator, Maya, aka Mahtab and Moonie, on a quest that will take her across time and space on a journey of discovery that is as personal as it is socio-historical. When the novel opens, she has just read the letter, more than a decade after it was given to her, and from this moment onwards, she embarks on a series of expeditions to unravel the tangled skeins of the past, hoping to give her life meaning, direction and focus and also, to have something interesting to talk and write about.

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