Book Review: Burps, Chirps & Cat-Astrophic Turfs by Sonal Singh
Writer Smita Das Jain reviews the book Burps, Chirps & Cat-Astrophic Turfs by Sonal Singh
I am not an animal lover.
And perhaps that is why Burps, Chirps and Cat-Astrophic Turfs by Sonal Singh surprised me as much as it did.
At the heart of the book is a rather simple premise. A sunbird chick unexpectedly crash-lands into Mrs Choudhary's world, and what follows is the story of rescuing it, caring for it, growing attached to it and, eventually, confronting what caring for another living being sometimes demands of us.
Mrs Choudhary already presides over a pet-crazy household, so the arrival of yet another creature should perhaps not be extraordinary. Except that it is. The little bird gradually occupies not just space in her home but also a place in her heart.
And somewhere along the way, despite having little experience of that particular bond myself, I began relating to Mrs Choudhary.
Not as an animal lover. As a mother.
I understood that mixture of protectiveness and pride, the instinct to hold on even while knowing that loving something sometimes means letting it go. It also made me understand a little better why people call themselves “pet parents”. The object of our affection may be different; some of the emotions perhaps aren't.
Yet this isn't a book that wears its emotions heavily.
For much of it, I chuckled my way through Mrs Choudhary's world. Sonal finds humour in the familiar eccentricities of family life, domestic conversations, pets and people, and particularly the rhythms of a marriage that has had years to perfect its own language.
One exchange between Mrs Choudhary and her husband made me smile:
“You get up before me. How about you make me a cup for once? Twenty-four years of marriage and not even twenty-four cups to date.”
His response is predictably ingenious: nobody in the world makes chai like her; the taste is unmatched; they should probably patent it.
Anyone married long enough may recognise the strategy!
I also enjoyed watching Mrs Choudhary in her different relationships: with her husband, her children and her mother-in-law, whose equation with her evolves through the book. And then there is Kitabi, her literary agent, who almost feels like additional comic relief in a book that wasn't exactly short of humour to begin with.
But what elevated the reading experience most for me was Sonal's prose.
Having published poetry before, she brings a poet's eye to her fiction. The book is peppered with metaphors and similes that make you stop. Not because they are ornamental, but because occasionally they capture an emotion more effectively than several explanatory sentences could.
This line, towards the end, stayed with me:
“...in the sacred hush that follows her departure, where grief and pride hold hands like old companions.”
That image holds so much: the sadness of letting go and the pride of seeing someone you have nurtured become capable of leaving. Lines like these really amped up the reading quotient for me.
Then something interesting happened.
A book that had made me chuckle and smile for much of its length began to make my eyes well up in its final chapters.
By the last chapter, I was crying.
By then the story was no longer simply about rescuing a bird. For me, it had become about attachment, nurturing and the difficult grace of letting go. It was also a reminder of the relationships that sustain our lives and the many forms that love and compassion can take.
However, a couple of things kept the book from working equally well for me throughout.
The first was predictability.
Once the sunbird entered Mrs Choudhary's life, I could more or less anticipate the trajectory of the central story and where it would eventually lead. For me, part of the pleasure of reading a novel lies in that what-next pull, the urge to turn another page because I don't quite know where the author is taking me.
I didn't experience that here. I enjoyed the journey, but I was rarely in a hurry to discover the destination.
The second was the pacing. Mrs Choudhary isn't presented only as someone passionate about animals. She is a wife, mother, daughter-in-law and writer, and those different identities make her a fuller character. But some of these strands, and the characters associated with them, continue to emerge fairly late in the book. Her identity as a writer, for instance, becomes significant only after we have already spent considerable time with her.
I would have preferred some of these elements to be established and woven into the narrative earlier. With fewer late additions and slightly tighter pacing, the central story could have had greater momentum.
Yet, there is also something fitting about the simplicity of this book.
We live in a world that seems determined to make everything more complicated. Burps, Chirps and Cat-Astrophic Turfs doesn't try to do that. It finds its story in a small bird, a chaotic household, a long marriage, family relationships and one woman's capacity to care.
My rating for the book is 4.3/5. Sonal reminds us that love doesn't always arrive dramatically. Sometimes, it simply crash-lands into our lives. And we need to live with an open heart to recognise it.
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