Phantom Lovers

Phantom Lovers
by Achala Moulik
Published by Olive Turtle (2023)

There is perhaps nothing as pyrrhic as romance, and those who persuade us of this speculation are the novelists, perpetually preoccupied with its worldliness, just as the poets once floundered in its metaphysics. Worldliness is easier to read than metaphysics, making it all too painless to accuse the reader of the romance genre of colluding with its brazen breeziness. In Phantom Lovers, unfortunately, Achala Moulik exhausts this breeziness to the point of humdrum.When a proverbial civil servant like Moulik sets out to write a novel, worldliness is connate. The provincial will not do. A set of two novellas, Phantom Lovers wades through multiple locations: Kabul, Rome, London, and, of course, India, not bereft of frills expected to chaperon such expeditions in the novelistic form. Though if Bollywood has taught us anything, a cosmopolitan romance of the colonised cannot afford to shirk provincialism entirely. It expenses the stakes.

In With Fate Conspire, a British magistrate falls in love with a girl from a Zamindari household in colonial India. In Wait, another such girl from another such elite household falls in love with an Afghan Muslim academic, who might as well be the doppelgänger of the British magistrate. While these premises promise, Moulik ballasts her pages with historical minutiae, and the novellas begin to read like cleverly written notes from a history class, producing fiction that gestures toward feeling but is distracted with fact. When politics figures in, footnotes promptly inform that dialogue incorporates original speeches of real politicians. (You don’t need to read the novellas to know many of its supporting characters. It is likely you’ve encountered them all in textbooks.) Moulik uses history as a crutch rather than as a stage for courtship, perhaps believing that the reader must be enthralled before they can be moved. This might explain why no feeling is allowed to ripen without first being justified by an event, a date, or a diplomatic posting.

In Phantom Lovers, romance itself may require clearance from the Ministry of External Affairs. 
The lovers in With Fate Conspire, Julian and Madhusri, are torn apart by circumstance, only to encounter each other a hundred years later, reincarnated and younger, as Alexander and Radha, descendants of their original families. While it offers the possibility of unmooring the narrative from linear time, the reincarnation feels conveniently tacked on. Even the mystical reader is disinclined to believe. The characters read more like charlatans, fooling even each other. Wait might have been more forgivable were it not for the letters exchanged between its lovers. Since when was exposition the only task of letters in matters of love? Even a romantic endeavour like letters feels emphatically unromantic, and even if that is the point, given that the Afghan lover is sequestered and thus tight-lipped, he doesn’t even bother with subtext. An affair without subtext is not just unromantic; it is entirely prosaic. And while Minoti, the lover, may be content merely to know he's alive, the reader is forced to persist through another uninspiring letter that merely outlines the action. Some show, not just tell, is necessary in romance. With morose pacing coupled with a narrative that explains itself, the reader is not prompted to sympathise with Moulik’s characters. After all, how can you fall in love when you’re told to? 

In the end, Phantom Lovers is a curious exercise in romantic fiction that is as impressive as a flirtation with a smiling man at a party when you’d rather be with the brooding one. Moulik’s writing, ever cautious, never allows the irrational, embarrassing, electric endeavours of love to grip the reader. Her insistence on explanation over evocation, context over chemistry, and fact over feeling stilts all that could’ve worked for the novel: ritzy stakes, cross-cultural love, the attempt to entwine romance with the political. Readers who favour intricately researched settings and a firm historical scaffold over emotional immersion might find something to admire here. But isn’t that compulsion to explain everything the most unromantic dalliance of all?