Book Review: Overwinter

OVERWINTER

Publisher: Hachette India
Writer: Ratika Kapur
No of Pages: 248
Price: Rs 495
ISBN 9789350092637

You are impelled to explore and think about your own relationships once you read Overwinter. That is how I would like to assess Ratika Kapur's maiden venture into writing a novel. She tells the story from the hustle and bustle of a metropolis, but it is her sheer gift of writing, and imagination, which creates unique serenity around the characters and contrasts that with storms of emotion that is happening to each one of them, in particular Ketaki, the protagonist. As you read it you get attracted to the characters in the novel, as Ratika makes them your usual next-door men, sometimes plainly unassuming.

Ketaki is in deep sorrow and loss of hope to see her maternal aunt's husband pass into coma after a near drowning experience. He is 'passionately' loved and desired by Ketaki, who he brought up as his own child ever since Ketaki's mother passed away. Ratika Kapur beautifully captures the mind and heart of this protagonist as she battles her own discomfort and from the four walls of her aunt's place, recalls and evaluates her relationships with men. Some platonic and deeply emotional ones, and some outright sexual associations for which she is shown to have some kind of loss in her own composure, if not compunction.

The story takes a dramatic leap when Ketaki's father returns from New York and reveals to her a long kept family secret. This 'secret' which you will eventually read in the novel, is told in an environment of mounting suspense - Ratika's gift of writing again - and the turn of events that unfold thereafter is also gripping. The story also deals with different shades of relationship which Ketaki has with her aunt. Overall, a telling tale about relationships, varying from long and powerful ones to queer and disturbing kinds.

Ratika is a first time novelist who seems to have fully utilised her experience of publishing house job to what would work best for her novel. This book was long listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize. No doubt she is already into her second outing as a fiction writer.