Why is it that every Helen is an enigma? Homer’s, Marlowe’s, Bollywood’s? Does the letter H—drawn like a one-step ladder connecting nothing with nothing, or a bar in a passage between two walls—have something occult to do with it? Neither Menelaus nor Faustus could read his Helen. Both were doomed.
Jerry Pinto is determined to read his Helen, indeed decode her as ‘a phenomenon’. So, he comes equipped with a fairly sophisticated toolbox stuffed with cultural studies, literary theory, postmodernism, postcolonialism, social history, and gender and sexuality studies. And he adds, to cap it all, a dash of the American no-longer-new but evergreen New Journalism. In fact, the reader is tempted to reach out for Norman Mailer’s Marilyn Monroe. Pinto is restrained and lambent, Mailer recklessly dazzles. That also suggests, incidentally, how different Bollywood is from Hollywood.