[1]I do not know much about Mohan Deep. The book The Five Foolish Virgins has a jacket blurb for him: “the author of the bestselling star biographies Madhubala, Simply Scandalous: Madhubala and Eurekha!” What this reveals about the author — besides the fact that he likes film — is minimal, I only find out through his Wikipedia page that he was heavily into feng shui and sat on the Censor Board of India for some time.
Therefore, my reading of The Five Foolish Virgins was almost expectation-free. Mohan Deep might be an author with three books under his belt and a career in film journalism, but this book — packaged like a Hindi potboiler with the picture of a girl on the cover, hair blowing across her face, lips slightly apart, set against a brightly red background — was new to me. The book moves from pre-Partition India to the offices of a film journalist who falls in love with a movie star and then just as rapidly moves to Nafisa, a Canadian-Pakistani actress trying to make it in Bollywood. These aren’t the only characters either, the beginning of the book includes a lengthy cast of characters, which you should read to make any sense of the way the book moves.
Muddled into the dialogue are long lengths of Hindi in the Roman alphabet, something that no doubt, adds to its authenticity, but which clashes horribly from the almost chaste English used otherwise as well as the spelt-out accents of someone from a lower economic status. Sample dialogue: “I apolojise on their behalf […] he is a krime reeporter.” [sic]
Ultimately, it may be packaged as a fast-paced, slick Bollywood novel about love and revenge. Maybe the author would have done better to turn this saga into the long rambling Bollywood movie he clearly takes his inspiration from.
The Five Foolish Virgins, Mohan Deep, Quest Mercury, `350
Links:
[1] http://archive.asianage.com/tab5jpg-526