It took me 2 months to complete reading my first book and I’m totally disappointed with myself. However that does not take anything away from enjoying the most heart wrenching book I have read in a long time. I’m glad I could start and it happened with this book, which is not as much a book as it is a memoir of the writer about being a writer. The thing with reading books that feature the writer who wants to be a writer himself/herself is that, there is a certain indulgence flowing across the prose which does not restrict itself with the technicalities of a story or a plot. It can be seen as a deterrent, but as long as it is honest you wouldn’t mind it too much. This one is certainly honest, even while being clichéd and flawed. 

Soumya Bhattacharya’s If I Could Tell You is a series of letters a father writes to his daughter, where he narrates, and looks back at, his life in failures. There are no surprises to the story, even if they are thrown at us abruptly, nor are there any quotable quotes, but what makes your eyes moist is the way a father pours out his heart to his daughter, using these letters as a way to find some sense in his actions and eventually succumbing to the inevitable doom that has been lingering over his life ever since he wished to become a writer.

There is a great scene towards the middle of these letters when his daughter Oishi comes up to him feeling low. When he asks her what was wrong, she tells him that they were playing a game in her school where everyone has to say what their father was in a rhyme “My father is a doctor…tum..tum..tum”. Oishi says that she doesn’t know what her father does. To this he asks her to say “My father is a father…tum…tum..tum”. He doesn’t want himself to be saying that he was a writer. However Oishi persists and says everyone’s father is a father and she wants an answer. With an air of disappointment, loathing and resignation he says that he is a writer. He feels shameful for saying that and this is exactly how I feel every time I say to myself that I’m a writer. Through his letters Soumya creates so many of these wonderful moments and the end of this book is a classic in itself, where the father, being a writer, ignores everything about grammar, punctuation, commas, periods et al and reaches out for his daughter as a last attempt in one long passage that wants to say so much, but doesn’t come across as anything legible.

Ultimately, this is a story of a man, who always wanted to be a writer, who wanted to be the best father but didn’t know how to be one, who wanted to be a rational husband but couldn’t be one. There is no effort in the writing, nor was there any in covering up the inadequacies in him as a person. It almost seems to celebrate the failure that the author turned out to be, but thankfully the prose is not as poetic to suggest such a notion. I do not also endorse the way he chose out of the issues that were plaguing his life, which I felt was rather timid and escapist, but it can also be probable that I’m not “artist” enough to understand his anguish, nor his intense desire to not do anything else about them.