Mistress of All She Surveys: themes of Alka Joshi’s Perfumist of Paris

Siddharth Mehrotra-

The Perfumist of Paris (2023. Toronto: Mira) is the second sequel to Alka Joshi’s Henna Artist (2020. Toronto: Mira) and the immediate sequel to The Secret-Keeper of Jaipur (2021. Toronto: Mira), and serves to conclude the trilogy.

Like every good post-colonial writer, Joshi brings a hitherto marginal perspective to the center of attention in this volume: that of Radha, sister of Lakshmi (the narrator, protagonist, and titular character of The Henna Artist). True to genre, the character of Radha is never better pleased than when actually defying some other figure’s expectations, enemies and well-wishers alike, in pursuit of her own satisfaction, and much of the narration is devoted to her frustration over an unmet need to do so.

A secondary theme is that of reconciliation: chiefly of Radha with her snobbish mother-in-law, and again with an even more snobbish childhood rival, both on grounds of the same need to defy society and re-arrange circumstances to suit oneself. Here, we see some contrast with the first volume of this trilogy, in which Lakshmi’s achievements were made in the cultivation of relationships, and her status threatened by their dissolution. In this third volume, Radha’s achievements operate exactly the opposite way around: she is constantly striving to escape some relationship or re-establish it under her sole control.

The Perfumist of Paris concludes with a loose household of its leading characters lolling about and congratulating themselves, laughing at one another’s jokes; an ending slightly out of harmony with the rest of the trilogy, but well and truly consistent with the public sensibility prevailing at the time of publication: a new Me Decade, in which the ideal is no longer status in society, but territory somewhat outside it, in which everything and everyone is specially chosen to please oneself, and everything less than wholly pleasing and flattering is cast into the outer darkness to be ridiculed. In this respect Joshi proves herself a versatile author, capable of changing imperceptibly within a single volume from the usual post-colonial style, to the style distinguished by Charles Dickens (Oliver Twist, Bleak House, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield), Lucy Maud Montgomery (Anne’s House of Dreams), Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged), Robert Heinlein (Time Enough for Love, Stranger in a Strange Land), Kurt Vonnegut (Cat’s Cradle), Madeleine L’Engle (The Young Unicorns), and Ellen Raskin (The Westing Game), all of whom define happy endings as membership in a clique of the like-minded; the same motif satirized by George Bernard Shaw in his play Heartbreak House. By this device, Joshi sets an example of an Indian author outgrowing the conventional limits of modern Indian writing, and showing the writing, like its heroine, need not be always bound by the world’s usual expectations.

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