Child/Currency
By Ketan Bhagat
About the book
“Five years old is not big, Papa.”
“Really… then what is big?”
“Eighteen years.”
“Eighteen… why eighteen?”
“Because then mama can’t stop me from meeting you.”
Kanha’s words haunt Shreyas Kapoor. Shreyas hasn’t
met his son in months because his estranged wife Prakriti treats Kanha like
currency to be exchanged rather than as a child to be cared for.
Shreyas is alone, broke, and helpless. The law,
society, and her family (maybe even his) all unjustly favor Prakriti. Destiny
plummets Shreyas into a legal battle he’s bound to lose.
Enter faith—a higher power that follows no laws
and has no bias. Shreyas takes refuge in his practice of the Holy Geeta and the
words of Sathya Sai Baba, “Why fear when I am here?”
Will Shreyas have to wait until Kanha is eighteen
to meet him again? Or will God have mercy on His devotee and deliver a miracle?
My take
This is the story of
Shreyas Kapoor, a sales manager and a struggling author, overshadowed by the
success of his best-selling author elder brother Preyas Kapoor. All is not well
between the two brothers, but their mother tries to maintain a balance between
the two of them. Shreyas’s wife Prakriti expects more out of Shreya’s writing
career, probably constantly comparing him with his over-successful brother.
Cracks develop in
their marriage, arguments turn into fights, and one fine day, Shreyas leaves
his house, not imagining what life has in store for him.
The story shuttles
between the past and the present. One part of the past includes incidents from
Shreyas’s childhood, how the relationship he once shared with his father, and
the toxic relationship between his parents, have shaped his views and beliefs. The
other part describes his relationship with Prakriti, how he supported and
funded her dream of becoming a Yoga guru, splurging on her and her dreams.
The present dissects
each and every aspect of marriage, of the relationship between a man and a
woman, the expectations and disappointments, the egos and clashes, the love
that was once there, that slowly seeps away with words and actions.
But at the very
centre of the story is the relationship between Shreyas and his son, Kanha. Shreyas
dotes on his son, and would go to any lengths to be with him. But just as the
title suggests, the child is made into a sort of currency by the wife, and the
battle becomes ugly. Shreyas is not permitted to meet his own son, and that is
something he can never live with.
Step by step,
Shreyas tries everything he can do to sort out the situation, and get an allowance
to meet his son. He tries talking peacefully to Prakriti, he gets friends and
family to speak to her, and finally it becomes an ugly court case with lawyers involved.
Through this
journey, Shreyas inclines towards spirituality and when life starts becoming
intolerable, he begins seeking advice from his spiritual guru, who doesn’t give
him any false hopes but teaches him how to face the adversities in life with
the same attitude as one faces the good things.
This is one of its
kind of book that focuses on parental alienation, and how a child becomes a scapegoat in the brutal ego clashes when a marriage breaks. It also highlights how
sometimes, the laws which favour women for obvious reasons, are exploited by
women themselves. It narrates the emotional turmoil a father goes through when
he is denied the basic right of seeing his son by his estranged wife.
The protagonist
Shreyas is a good human being, a dutiful son, a thoughtful friend and a doting
father. However, somewhere in the narration of him as a husband, I felt he was
a bit misogynist, overly conservative and judgemental right from the
beginning, and that could be one aspect that brought the couple to separation. We
never get to know Prakriti’s side of the story, so blaming her entirely for whatever
went wrong between the two seems unfair.
The way Prakriti
takes advantage of being a woman and keeps the father out of her son’s life,
not realizing what it would do to the child’s psychology, seems brutal, and if
such things are happening in our country, the law needs to be scrutinized so
that it is not unfair to men suffering from such kind of mental abuse.
Parental alienation
has been captured beautifully and makes the reader think and analyse the
situation.
The downside of the
story is its length, slow pace and the number of unnecessary characters. The story
could have been made more concise, reducing unnecessary details of trivial
incidents that don’t add much meaning to the overall story, and by reducing the
number of characters that serve no purpose other than adding more prose.
The greatest upside
of the book, which I found really intriguing and captivating, was the way
snippets from the holy Bhagvad Gita are discussed and described. It shows the
author's deep knowledge on the subject, and takes a reader like me, who still
has to learn a lot about spirituality, on a spiritual journey of her own.
So overall, even
though slow-paced, a nice book that gives not just one but many strong moral
lessons, I rate it 4.5.
