Atlantic Books; 371 pages
**1/2

 

The Russian writer, Anton Chekhov, devised a literary technique called Chekhov’s Gun. It is a fictional element that is introduced early and “pays off” later. Justine Hardy’s debut novel opens with a Chekhov’s Gun: an intriguing prologue that casts a shadow on the three residents of The Wonder House, a houseboat moored on Nagin Lake in Srinagar.

Suriya is mute and shrouded in some terrible past that taints her daughter Lila as well. Together they take care of Gracie Singh, a cantankerous Yorkshire woman living on the boat since her Indian husband’s death two decades back. In that time Gracie has witnessed the valley transform. Masood Abdullah, the boat’s landlord, has jettisoned his jean-clad flirtatious self for a family patriarch who ‘wears his beard long and his morals high’.

Few contemporary novelists have deployed Kashmir, one of the original crucibles of Islamic extremists, as a setting for fiction – The Wonder House is important therefore. Ms. Hardy’s affection for the land that she has reported on as a journalist since 1990 is clearly evident. She convincingly evokes the ancient rhythms of Kashmiri life in the bullet-bunker-battle besieged valley of today. The same valley where Muslim peasants grow saffron that graces the Hindu foreheads as sacred tika also bears mute witness to the daily crossfires between a predominantly Hindu Army and Muslim insurgents.

Confined in this sectarian hothouse is an adolescent Irfan, Masood’s nephew. Smitten by Lila, yet seduced by Jehadi rhetoric, he crosses the border in order to train as a militant. Soon thereafter, Hal Copeland, an English journalist arrives in Srinagar to report on the conflict. His resemblance to Gracie’s long-dead son gets him an invitation to stay at The Wonder House where he promptly falls for Lila.

Kashmir is an explosive backdrop and Hardy paints the battleground well (Irfan, the pubescent boy in a repressive world, seeking release by becoming a soldier of Allah; Masood, who frequently douses his desire for whisky with the wet rag of Islamic piety; the soldiers who beat women’s breast to force confessions from their husbands.) A vivid historical backdrop mandates a gripping plot, one that can rivet the reader to the story, not the setting. It is in plotting the storyline that Ms. Hardy fails. She dwells so long on delineating Gracie’s crusty character, Masood’s internal conflicts, and Hal’s insipid wooing of Lila that the climax is jerry-built. The resolution of loose threads is hastily dispensed with – in the last but one page Ms. Hardy informs why Gracie named the boat The Wonder House. Chekhov’s loaded gun finally gets fired in the last page, the epilogue, by which time the intrigue that peppered the novel seems like so much hokey.

Hal as investigative journalist is entirely unconvincing – he never comes around to conducting the interview with Gracie that brought him to Srinagar in the first place. Why would Lila, clearly a strong, resilient woman, fall for this passive stranger? Even Gracie Singh, married to a Hindu Prince, witness to the Partition of India, has no real perspective to provide on what is essentially a Hindu-Muslim conflict.

Kashmir’s chinar trees turn a splendid russet in autumn – when the Persian invaders first beheld them, they exclaimed, “What a fire!” The Wonder House has all the ingredients for combustion, yet it stops short of enflaming the reader.