"Dildo in a bin! Who put it in?" Embarrassed about mistaking a vibrator for a bomb, Khush and his anti-terror squad go about looking for the owner of the pleasure tool. Khush and Shom have been friends since childhood. In their forties now, they love to swing to latino beats in Mumbai's nightclubs. Shom, the reticent one, is very different from the flamboyant Khush. Everything changes when Shom meets Raima. Their sensual yet spiritual love is separated by age, wealth and background. Shom throws caution to the wind and meets life head on, choosing honesty over hypocrisy. It's a Love Story emerging in the contemporary world of wealth, lust and power, like the freshness of the lotus flowering in stagnant waters. Raima, a victim of circumstance, is exposed to the world very early in life and as such she is tough, sharp and street smart. She is the soul of the book. Faceless is the story of love and passion so powerful, so pure, that we live it with Shom and Raima.
The blurb on the book says 'soon to be made into a motion picture'. If i meet the producer tomorrow morning, i would advise him to stay away from this one and save some money. Faceless by Tapan Ghosh is a mixture of everything, yet nothing. The story line is as dead as the dildo in the bin, which incidentally is the starting point of the story. This particular plot point is used mainly as a shock reference and does not compensate in any way for the monotonous tone or an overdose of philosophy and wisdom in the narrative.
Embarrassed about mistaking a vibrator for a bomb, the anti terror squad go looking for its owner. This silly piece then proceeds to introduce each of the characters, Khush, Shom, Swapna, Natasha and Sara in a sequential way each having a back story to bank upon. Things get interesting when Raima meets Shom. They are mutually attracted, fall in love and at last find their true soul mates in each other! Their sensual and passionate love is the crux of the story. Will their love survive the test of time? Or will they desert each other?
Lying solely on sexual innuedos and two-faced jokes, it is hardly original writing and heavily borrows from those American sit-coms. Alas, if it was even half as entertaining, it would have made my reading day. The plot is clumsy, punctuated with awkward scenes and cringing dialogues and even the transition between the various plot points is hardly seamless. Even the climax, inspired from a Class-A recent Bollywood thriller is also a cop-out and does not engage you enough to forget it flaws.
The constant 'i wanna be cool' repartee and expletive-laden language gets boring after a while, mainly because each of them is followed by a half-baked, unconvincing plot point that clearly stretches your imagination to absurd regions. It is not a hard read, pacing is fast and language lucid; but you can't compensate for something as basic as a storyline in such a quick metro read.
I am going with 1.5/5 for Tapan Ghosh's 'Faceless'. Save your face, stay away from reading it. There are many good things to do in life, reading this one is definitely not one of them.
shallow in deep waters! Faceless is a poignant and mature tale of human relationships and attempts to redefine the meaning of illicit relationship and prostitution - although only in one chapter. It also involves interesting info about shemales - a category or the 3rd gender we hardly know about! However sadly , the beginning of the story although interesting '"dildo in a bin , who put it in?" makes some readers anxious to open it and expect something much lighter. The initial part of the book seems to be like a big joke and it even makes us wonder if the joke is on us! The story focuses on the relationship of 40 something Shom ( who is married) with Raima - the street smart woman and Kush , their flamboyant mutual friend. The characters are fleshy and deep =) The hindi dialogues without appropriate meanings and the songs in between are speed breakers. The book is written in simple language and can be completed quickly. The guilty conscience of the men never seems to be at work and this gives us the sense that cheating ones wife is not wrong or even acceptable. This book attempts to break new ground but breaks itself through cliches . It also attempts to delve too deep on reflections than actions and gives us not a sense of story. The highly sexually active relationship puts off some people and the later maturity is surprisingly nice though one finds it hard to believe after the initial action! Logical loop holes - There is no proper reason for Raima falling head over heels in love with shom and it leads us to think like she's overdoing it or being a gold digger. and the last 10 pages are so incredibly out of sync with the whole book and moves so fast it defeats logic. Most incredulous epilogue :P Wait . The book is becoming a movie right?! xD Thats why! It would be 90% of the action packed epilogue and 90% of the soulful story
Sadly, this book was just bad. The author seems to be slightly delusional as to how life in Mumbai( or SoBo, as the author calls it) is. the story is fragmented,and there isn't much of a story to begin with in the first place. The readers fails to understand the basis of the relationship between the two besides just plain lust.