ROAD TO PERDITION
THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE WAS
ot plasticine when my generation read it at school. But, by college, we’d begun to play with it like clay, because it seemed less of an imported toy. The question of irreverence to the Queen’s English was catching on when I practised copywriting. But by Tarun Tejpal may well be the best bedside reading for the eternal Queen Elizabeth II. She’ll be fascinated with the writer’s facility with a language she must know better but hasn’t dared to make as malleable. Every other line of this opus fills the reader with wonder at the mind of a provincial Chandigarh boy who has married his Naipaul with Dostoevsky and