By James Levine
Weidenfeld & Nicolson £12.99
Reading The Blue Notebook, James Levine’s fictionalised diary of a Mumbai child prostitute will seize your heart. Just 15, Batuk has already spent six years on the infamous “street of cages” — “making sweet-cake” as she euphemistically records, with 10 punters, or “bakers”, a day.
Her plight is beyond bleak, but in the words Batuk pours into her notebook, this starved-sparrow of a heroine finds laughter and salvation: “I have been blessed with beauty and a pencil,” she writes, though that pencil is propelled by her gift for Scheherazardian stories that might, in more privileged girlhood circumstances, be earning her an A star in GCSE English.
The A-star student could take her writing materials for granted: Batuk is forced to french-kiss the barrow-boy who brings her the precious gift of a pencil sharpener. She is boundlessly resilient and utterly without self-pity.
On the face of it, James Levine, a British-born professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic, Minnesota, seems to select strange territory for this first, lyrically impassioned novel. In it, he strays far from his specialist fields of endocrinology, obesity and nutrition, fleshing out the inner life of a girl sold into sex slavery by a father who paradoxically adored his little “silver-eyed leopard”.
Detaching her mind from the body’s loveless business of turning tricks, Batuk relives the uncomplicated memories of her early village childhood, fishing on the riverbank and the three month hospitalisation for TB, during which she discovered, alone among her peers, the joy of books and reading.
In her soaring imagination, Batuk’s steel-barred cell becomes a gold-leaf throne-room fit for a queen, her bed adorned with cushions feathered from fledgling eagles. These romantic passages provide sweet relief from the harsh, contrasting chapters in which Batuk faces extreme degradation as the sex toy of a spoiled, but savage little rich boy.
There’s just a moment here when the book could turn a touch fairytale as Batuk is pampered in a luxury hotel, designer-dressed to meet her merciless paying guest. But this is not the upbeat stuff of glass slippers, Pretty Woman or Slumdog Millionaire: Levine determines to spare us no nuance of abuse, no slap, kick or tear. He is not sensationalist, never gratuitous, yet seems to insist his readers do not look away, as Batuk’s elevating eloquence becomes her physical undoing.
Levine, it turns out, is writing from life and, true to his calling, of social sickness and healing hope. His novel was, indeed, born in Mumbai where, investigating child labour for the UN he spotted a street girl in a pink sari, writing intently in her notebook.
How, Levine wondered, could her situation be reconciled with the confident mantra that “education is the answer”? What positive action could he deploy to make a difference?
What he did, like his heroine, was to write and now half of all author proceeds from The Blue Notebook will go to the “Sparrows’ Nest” charity which helps to care for the children of Mumbai prostitutes, offer them affection and educate them for different lives.
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