17 November,2023 05:58 AM IST | Mumbai | Nandini Varma
Shashank Gupta. Pic Courtesy/YouTube
Shashank Gupta's debut novel, Visitors to the House, is an endearing collection of tales about five strangers who enter a cottage in the hill town of Didoli and develop interesting relationships with the family inhabiting it. The book is divided into five sections. Each of those is narrated through the perspective of a different member of the family - the son, his step/sister, the step/mother, the father, and a girl named Theresa with a traumatic past.
What's enjoyable about picking up Gupta's novel is that it is a sweet reminder of innocence. It is filled with stories of kids and their journey growing up as they navigate the world around them. The third tale, in particular, is a beautiful narrative told by the stepmother, Mini, who encounters a girl with green eyes and golden hair swinging on her gate one day. The story introduces Mini's grief from having lost a child who was only a few months old. After getting to know what the girl, whom she calls Kadu, had experienced, she begins to take care of her and finds, in this process, a way to deal with her own loss and the emptiness that she's carried all this while.
However, the book can sometimes become too simplistic. Potentially complex moments are often compromised for easy resolutions. In these moments, one wishes that the writer, who explores an interesting world of small beauties before smartphones, had taken some more risks with subtler emotions. The book may have read better if the sections were shorter and sharper. The writer is also unable to switch between the voices of the different narrators with enough assurance. Perhaps for these reasons, Visitors to the House offers small episodes of delight, but also moments of disappointment for the reader.
