Love in dark times | Review of ‘Like Being Alive Twice’ by Dharini Bhaskar

Intense inter-religious love story set in a dystopian world explores love and choices in a fractured society.

This inter-religious love story set in a dystopian unnamed nation packs quite a punch. It is an intense exploration of what it means to love in a fractured world.

Priyamvada (Poppy) and Tariq are in love. When we meet them, in Dharini Bhaskar’s Like Being Alive Twice, Tariq intends to propose, and Poppy intends to say yes. In the alternating chapters that follow, the  author cleverly plays with form and style to give us two versions of their love story. In one version, ‘The Yellow Door’, we are shown the reality as it is. In the other, ‘The Blue Door’, it is as it could have been. In the common denouement that both reach, one question stands out starkly: do our choices matter when the world we live in will dictate the outcome?

This book, like the television series Black Mirror, imagines a very dark future, specifically in the way that technology can be and is used. There is meticulous world-building here, of people and places, as well as the description of a Tally Card.  The Card assigns points based on a whole host of factors such as religion, identity, marriage and lifestyle. The points dictate where you can live. Those with lesser points are denied entry into the posh, guarded, gated residential enclaves. There are many pushed to the margins, the Door Mohalla, where both air and land is foul. The Card clearly works to exclude, to ‘other’, to control the life you lead. Infidelity, marrying the wrong kind of man, not having children within a stipulated time, all invite punishment. The Tally Card is Big Brother.

It is in such a distressing world that Poppy and Tariq’s story plays out. In one version of it, they are married but soon flailing. In both versions, compromises are made to survive, to achieve a better future and game the system, but of course, all of it takes its toll. There are strong women characters; Poppy’s mother is one. There is a similarity in the double life that both mother and daughter lead and the choices they make.

The men both love pay the price for the decisions that these women make. Tariq’s mother too comes across as someone steady and sure. She turns out to be prescient in what she says will happen with regard to the Card and the points it assigns. She lives abroad and Tariq, in one version of the story, wants to immigrate. Poppy considers this a form of cowardice. The author does not indicate whose side she is on. It is up to the reader to decide.

The poetry of American poet Linda Gregg is woven into the book and they are all uniformly beautiful lines. The title of the book is a line of her poetry, too. What the story makes you ponder over is that nobody is safe in an authoritarian,  divided country. Everybody is vulnerable. Then again, when the political is so oppressive, the personal, to fall in love with somebody ‘unsuitable, ’ is also a resistance of sorts.

The reviewer is a Bengaluru-based author, journalist and manuscript editor.