Sudhir Bisht's "The First Lady of Roli Petroleum" reads like a gripping comedy rendered in a very simple, almost lyrical prose ...I smiled as I flipped through every page of this powerful satire about a group of Indian expatriates working and living in Lagos. In delicate power-plays and switches between deceit, intrigues, mudslinging, racism and abuse of sex and family values, we are opened to a world of an abrasive love of power and some inordinate desire for a world of emptiness.
Depicted through the prying eyes of an omnipresent narrator, albeit a protagonist with a sharp tinge of pride jealousy that can't be purged, we see a crafty and revengeful Sameer who would do anything to protect his family values and a beautiful job. You can only but pity the Dhanajay, the brilliant MD of Roli Petroleum who is not obviously unconscious of "sexcapades" around him but must get to the top to satisfy his wife's schizophrenic lust for power, a streetcar named Savita.
His other colleagues who are too timid to be confrontational but would be subservient to her royal majesty, the first lady of Roli, even at the risk of losing their family values. That is a tragedy in itself. Jaspal's insipid deployment of his frolicking sexual deftness, firstly, to stain and demean his beautiful and loyal wife, Reema in the open glare of his colleagues; and later, to mop the already smeared hot panties of her Lordship for no other reason but insatiable greed and self perseverance. That's another tragedy of a tremendous substance. Savita on the other hand, is simply a victim of her upbringing, a weakling she calls a husband, and a heinous desire for mammoth avatar of reverence and recognition.
Sudhir's portrayal of the Nigerian police and the traffic officers on Lagos streets has a sulking note of a corrupt force, which is not too far from the situation on ground. It's however a sharp disengagement from the central plot, and obviously has no serious impact on the thematic concern of the story. I would have expected a more profound descriptive rendition from a narrator who seems to know his ways around the bustling city of Lagos and its definitive impact it has on the large population of prosperous Indians other Asians living in Nigeria.
It terms of colours, sounds and spice of life, the novel has not created an anticipatory desire, an expectation to an Indian reader, his primary target audience, wanting to explore and feel so much the prosaic setting of Lagos. The African city of Lagos is not utopian but a real world that can shape the lives of any Indian family that lives there as author has casually depicted. There are pristine and virgin beaches in Lagos, where high-hipped pretty Nigerian ladies deck in flowery and very bright bikinis glazing in the sun, hooking up with their Asian lovers on usually bright Sunday afternoons for sumptuous bite of 'suya' and good laughters in makeshift bamboo huts. The daring ones like Jasper the stud could have explored the dark and delicate curves of Stella more romantically on those steep and erotic beaches of Lagos rather than walking hand in hand in some frantic effrontery, along Rambole Street like a bollywood desperate love scene. The discrete moves of the clandestine Donald and the angelic Savita could have been established around the red-light districts of Ikoyi and Victoria Island for those "quickie" jolly rides. The Author does not, in my view, give an explicative and picturesque punches to his gamut of sexual suspicions he populates the novel with. A writer most holds a didactic promise to his readers especially where family values are the crux of the theme should be more creatively assertive on this aspect.
Nevertheless, we have seen in this sizzling novel that marriages are never kept alive even if both parties live together in a foreign country like Dhanajay and Sameer, and certainly not when spouses live apart as in the case of the stud, Jasper and Radia.
The author seems to be saying "power is nothing without control". And power of sex could be seemingly salutary initially, and could satisfy some incipient desires, but hidden therein, a cesspit of some horrendous consequences and tragic stumps. Sudhir has presented a canticle about the extreme nature of power of sex and its limitations .
A good novel to read for families that live apart and those that live "in-apart".
