Romance in Utopia

Book Review

Title: My Haven

Author: Ruchi Chandra Verma

Pages: 161

This little novel is a surfeit of sugar and honey. All the characters that matter are young employees of an IT firm in Bengaluru. One of them, Pihu, 23 years and all too sweet and soft, falls in love with her senior colleague, Aditya. The love is sweetly reciprocated too. The colleagues are all happy, furthermore. No jealousy, no rivalry, nothing that disturbs the utopian equilibrium that the author has created in the novel.

What would love be like in a utopia? First of all, there would be no fear or insecurity. No fear of betrayal, jealousy, heartbreak… Emotional security is an essential part of any utopia. There would be complete trust between partners, without the need for games or power struggles. Every relationship would be built on deep understanding, where partners complement each other perfectly. Miscommunication and misunderstanding would be rare or non-existent, as people would have heightened emotional intelligence.

There would be no external constraints either. No financial pressures, societal expectations that hamstring relationships, cultural taboos… Love would be purely about connection and companionship rather than social status or survival. Love is a natural choice in that world, not something that would be desperately sought. Relationships would be about mutual joy rather than fulfilling a void.

All of this, even an excess of it, is what Ruchi Chandra Verma’s novel offers us. The only little problem is the excessive fairy-like goodness of the heroine, Pihu. She is an angel who seems to have lost her way in heaven and descended on planet earth. The author wants us to take her as a simple, innocent, and naïve woman from an ultra-conservative family in Lucknow. Of course, such goodness is too fragile for a world like ours. But Pihu is fortunate to get Aditya who understands all that because he is another angel from heaven though he probably didn’t lose his way; he must have chosen his way to planet earth.

You cannot sustain a story with such characters who are too good. So, the author has thrown in a little misunderstanding here and there. But even those misunderstandings are sweet in the end, like in any passionate, young, and amorous relationships. All too good. If you want that sort of a world at least in your reading delights, go for this novel, a sweet story of a paradisiacal romance between Angel Pihu from Lucknow and Archangel Aditya from Allahabad.

Whatever that may be, I would like to end this with a question: Would such romance as you witness in the utopia of this novel feel as thrilling as the ones shaped by struggle and imperfection in the real world? I’m an intransigent romantic at heart even at the age of 65. In spite of all the utopian dreams I nurtured as a young man, I know how tough it is to sustain the sweetness of romance in actual life. 

PS. This book was a prize I received in one of the many blogging activities I participate for the fun of being in commune with fellow bloggers. I’m grateful to Ruchi Chandra Verma, Manali Desai, and Sukaina Majeed for this prize. 

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