A coming of age story set in a co-education boarding school, Arjun Rao’s debut novel Third Best is an unwinder.
How often have you looked for a book that draws you in, keeps you engaged for a while, provides an occasional laugh, prods some emotional empathy, moments of recognition and then lets you move on without a backward thought? For some of us, more often than one would like to admit.
With its easy language, skimming pace and recognisable characters, Third Best is charming, and, forgettable.
Rao, like most debut novelists, draws heavily on his personal experiences — seven years as a student at The Lawrence School, Lovedale, and then several as a teacher at the The Doon School.
The story weaves round the maturing of three boys — sporty Nirvan, out-of-the-box Gautam and sophisticated, good-looking Faraz — as they move from junior to senior at Shore Mount School.
All possible ingredients that could make up school life are touched on: the burden of expectations that most children carry these days, bullying at its worst, love and sex — both the budding romance between schoolmates and the teacher-student one — and unwritten, unbreakable codes of behaviour, like never telling tales, even when a few bones are broken.
If you’ve never been to a boarding school and think they provide an existence cushioned from physical and emotional battering, you are wrong.
If you think they are stinking dens of violence and repression or a military-like regimented existence, you are wrong as well.
Life at Shore Mount puts the kids through some tough situations, some pleasurable ones and some so mundane one wonders why they are in the book.
As they move from junior to senior to seniormost, the boys develop leadership qualities, they go through heartbreak of all sorts and bond in a way that can only happen at a boarding school. Ask any former boarder — it’s a sort of brotherhood.
Adolescence in itself can be hard. Dealing with hormone-induced moods, awkward ways the body grows and reacts, the acne, adults who continue to treat you as babies… Several going through it in the same space and time could ease things a bit.
The central character of Third Best is Nirvan Shrivastav, who carries with him the burden of having two illustrious generations preceding him at Shore Mount. After a stuttering start, Nirvan, despite self-doubts and a string of troubles, ultimately excels and also shows grit enough to buck the trend when it comes to bullying.
Is Nirvan a bit too good to be true? Maybe. Rao’s book is obviously intended for young adults as well as older readers and there is no harm in icons and inspirational stuff, not that much of it going around these days.
My favourite is Gautam Singhania, the free spirit, who usually arrives for classes without books or stationery, scrapes through grades and believes that you do badly not because you didn’t study but because the teacher hates you. “‘What difference will it make to my life if I know this?’ asked a very irritated Gautam as they made their way out of the science lab…”
Gautam comes alive with music though and finds his own little bit of stardom and a girlfriend as well by the end of the story. He also shows stoic maturity in the way he handles news of a close personal tragedy.
Faraz Baig — well, let’s leave some things to be discovered through the book.
One of the more lovingly etched characters in Third Best is the suave English teacher Nathanial Gomez. Gomez brings romance to his lessons, is a much adored teacher who gathers fan-following with ease, yet as easily loses the trust of a favourite student.
Gomez, the headmaster William Jones, and the new teacher Zoya Bakshi, are shown with flaws and frailties. Perhaps, an attempt by Rao, who’s been on both sides, to tell students that teachers are as human and as susceptible to weaknesses and emotions as they are.
The minor characters in Third Best are often quite unidimensional, like the studious, bit of a show-off Ruma, or Nirvan’s artist mother with her constant phone calls and letters harping on performance. Some are even caricatures like the pathetic Tilak House housemaster The Worm.
The girls get bit of a short-shrift but this is a coming-of-age story man, not chick-lit.
Some vignettes too seem a bit off-track, like the REM concert in London Ruma and Nirvan attend, though it possibly has a place in Rao’s vision of things along with the Delhi party with free-flowing booze and weed that Gautam attends or the brief visit to the Singhania home in Jaipur and glimpses of a feudal, dysfunctional family.
One gets the feeling that Rao possibly had a much longer manuscript and struggled to bring it down to a reader-friendly length ending up leaving a few rough edges.
I loved the dialogue most times, except bits where it dragged or got repetitive. Real life does, but it can get painful in a book.
Overall Rao’s done well with the teenage angst — I enjoyed the book in most parts, and hope the youngsters do too. There will, of course, be a readership of current and former boarders who will love it. I believe Rao is working on a sequel. The school stays, with a different set of students. Let’s hope it’s more polished stuff along with the good bits in this one.
Here, to end with, is a “good bit” that I rather enjoyed. The boys get to the ninth, are no longer juniors and therefore less harassed by seniors.
“The only downside was they all looked a bit uglier than they had before they left for their vacation. Gautam was convinced and told them as much, that it was god’s way of letting them know He had a plan for them, a plan that would ensure no girl could ever have a conversation with them without being completely repulsed… Nirvan’s face had broken out in a horrible rush of pimples and try as he might he just could not get rid of them. Applying toothpaste or Vicks Vaporub on his face or drinking water to the point he thought he would truly burst proved ineffective. He refrained from rubbing spit all over his face, though Gautam swore that worked… Faraz was the only one who seemed to have been spared from the cosmic conspiracy.”
If you are or have been a teenager and say that you’ve never tried to spit on a pimple, you are lying. Or, perhaps, you were one of the lucky few who were spared, like Faraz.

Sunrita Sen is a freelance journalist. She can be contacted at sunrita@gmail.com