Title: Our Impossible Love
Author: Durjoy Datta
Number of pages: 289
“13 year
old girl gang raped in south Delhi”, “6 year old daughter raped by servant in
the house” and many such headlines are not a new thing to people in Delhi. Such
horrendous crimes have become common and majority of the people do nothing
except cribbing about the situation and the authorities just get away with the
situation by offering handsome money to victims (if alive) and their
families(if dead).
Going by the name of the novel many readers would have
expected the review to start with the girl and boy and how they met but this
novel is not only about the love story of two characters but it is more than
that. The story is about friendship, kinship, jealousy, and many other perils
that are prevalent in the society. The story revolves around two major
characters Danish, student of psychology, belongs to high class society of Delhi
and his parents are well educated and his brother, Ankit, is always in the news
because of his amazing IT ventures and Aisha, 17 year old student who loves her
family from the bottom of her heart and belongs to middle class society whose
father is getting transferred from here and there and her mother is fighting
against dialysis with all her might. Danish is the student counselor in Aisha’s
school and she usually consults him about every personal matter and in all this
process she is trying to become a better woman. Another major role is played by
Aisha’s new boyfriend, Vibhor who is another hot-shot boy living on the
luxuries of his parents.
Things changed on the 18th birthday of
Aisha when Sarthak, her brother, throws a big party and she got drunk so much
that she blackouts in Vibhor’s home and without her consent he had sex with
her. Aisha terms this as rape whereas all her friends just think she is
overreacting. After facing weeks of discomfort and shame in her own self she
tells this to Danish who supports her, discloses it to her family and helps her
in filing a case in the court against Vibhor. Lack of evidence and strong
ministry support to Vibhor helped him and Aisha was proven wrong in the court.
The bond between Danish and Aisha fostered when he helps her to fight back
against people who don’t believe her and have started teasing her, calling her
slut and made her life hell in the school. Aisha came to know about Danish’s love for her
through a document in his laptop that clearly spoke his heart out and after few
days she confronted her feelings as well. Sarthak who turns out to be a gay and
also has a boyfriend, Eriskin, in Poland and comes for her rescue and her
mother is so open minded that she accepts the way her son is and only thinks
about his happiness. Such stories are rarely visible in real life even in metro
cities of India. Their mother’s behavior will actually come as a surprise to
many readers.
Before leaving for Poland, Sarthak and Eriskin became the
partners in crime with Aisha and played a prank on Vibhor and tried to prove
him a gay with the help of social media and that’s when he realized that what
he did with Aisha was actually a rape and not something what he called little
rape and she wasn’t overreacting. The story ends here when Aisha and Danish
decides to live happily together ever after. Misconceptions of people regarding
what rape is and what it is not is so wrong that the society and even the
authorities that are supposed to do justice failed to understand what the girl
has actually gone through during all those moments. In the nutshell, Durjoy Datta
tries to bring out various aspects of different relations, a simple and cute
love story, impact of western world, hype of social media and how the most
educated people fail to understand the very simplest of the things. The novel
is a good read if somebody is just interested in a small real world story that
will have some fictional angles.
Do
consider it if you are travelling as it is a light read!
