Kkrishnaa’s Konfessions
Smita Jain, Westland, 2008, pp 369, Rs 250
First a personal confession...sorry konfession — I am writing this sentence after five false starts. Obviously Kkrishnaa, our dear spicy, self-indulgent heroine’s writer’s block has rubbed off on me. And considering that I am an avid watcher of the kind of soaps Kkrishnaa pens, a karmic konnection doesn’t seem too unlikely.
As one of the scriptwriters of Kkangan Souten Ke, the soap with the highest TRP on SuperNova channel, KKrishnaa is fast running out of ideas and worse, her chain-smoking caffeine-addicted fat schemer of a boss Rajne knows it too well. Every time she sits to type in front of her computer, all she can dish out is screenplay in slow motion interspersed with one too many rapid camera zoom-ins (yes, yes that very familiar time-dragging trick.)
So our desperate-for-drama heroine (as her boss Rajne reminds her ‘when it comes to TV soaps, there is nothing like too much drama’) borrows her lecherous neighbour’s telescope and trains it on a swanky apartment complex opposite her flat. She watches skeletons tumble out before you can say Ekta Kapoor.
Her mind, already warped because of writing gems such as KKangan..., hits upon a typically K-serial scheme to spice up the lives of those she is spying on — she dashes off anonymous letters to all the residents. Not that these residents needed any more drama in their lives — one of them is a media tycoon who indulges in self-flagellation; another a self-help guru who organises orgies in his apartment; the third is a politician who’s having a passionate affair with a has-been actress.
One fine day, while she is peeking through the telescope along with her now-boyfriend-now-script-stealer friend Dev, she witnesses the murder of a raunchy item girl in one of the apartments and the killer notices them watching. There! Her life becomes a mirror of the very soaps that she pens as suspicious police, byte-hungry media and the killers all swoop down on her and chase her and boyfriend through Mumbai gallis.
So far so good. Author Smita Jain, who herself has written television scripts, has the plot in place; some of the characterisation is bang on target too, but the book fails to live up to its trendy cover mainly because of the poor quality of writing.
There are many awkward descriptions and chunky passages that drag you away from what could have been a really spicy narrative. Many of the characters don’t rise above the cardboard and the sub-plots in the novel, whether deliberately or unconsciously, can give the K-soap plot diversions a run for their money. The murder mystery too gets somewhat lost in the media-television-cops mayhem.
Still, something you can pick up for a boring train journey — especially if you are missing your favourite K-soaps.
