Good morning, ladies, gentlemen, and dogs. Especially dogs. Who know it’s better to commit suicide than to be part of an insipid story of a woman who lets her life slide into despair because she had to have a child at 17 — faulty condoms! — after which the father, unbelievably, disappeared.

So, let’s put our paws together for Shiro and Zoobi, the greatest lovers of art ever, for willingly consuming poisoned meat and dying instead of being fawned over in this sorry saccharine saga. If we hadn’t been so well-bred to begin with, we’d have bitten all the characters in this novel and given them rabies, so that you readers could have been spared.

As for you, Vipasha, did your mother mortgage your brains to fund your five-star birth, or did you do it yourself at boarding school for lipstick? Everyone has a crush at 17, unless you’re so fat that your crush kills the boy you’re drooling over. Some get pregnant. A few even keep their babies. But who breaks up with the father — son of a rich man — without taking any money from him? Even NGOs take donations from corporations that choose to screw them.

And that modelling career. Why did you give it up? You were on the cover of Glamour . Two people in this novel actually recognised you afterwards. You could have gone back to it. They’re doing a lot of commercials with clueless middle-aged women in them.

And this boarding for rich people’s dogs. That’s us. This Paw Factor of yours. You run it with one old man to look after all of us? He’s so ancient and blind that half the days he feeds the bushes in the garden instead of us.

This Jamu kaka, can’t he cook anything else for us? The same meat and vegetables every day. But then that’s just like your life, Vee. The same thing, day in and day out. And no, we aren’t talking about that. Because you aren’t getting any, are you?

Ankush. You’re the guy who got her pregnant. And got her into modelling. Who are you, Tinder and naukri.com rolled into one? And then your son gets in touch with you after all those years, and immediately you’re going weak at the knees. The last time anyone behaved that way on seeing a son he had fathered long ago, his name was ND Tiwari.

You, Aryan. First, son, we can’t blame you. We liked playing with you. And when you felt you had to reach out to your father, we thought maybe you couldn’t stand being with your mother anymore. Hell, we couldn’t stand being with your mother anymore.

What did she do all day at that gym anyway, if it paid her a fourth of what she earned from boring us to the point of suicide at Paw Factor? Who would look at her even with a sculpted body if she was going to be so sorry for herself all the time? She’s so pathetic that when she came on to our vet, who only had Asperger’s Syndrome when he met her, he developed early Alzheimer’s so that he could forget he ever knew her.

But you, Aryan. You got all excited when you found out your father was a DJ. And you made him come to India. You wanted his dollars, didn’t you? And your mom brought you up as such a loser you were even willing to settle for Australian dollars.

Ankush and Vipasha. Vipasha and Ankush. No, Modi sir did not say ‘make out in India’. It was not your patriotic duty to sleep with each other after 17 years when you thought your son had been washed away in a flash flood in Uttarakhand. What were you thinking? That your faked orgasms would un-drown your son? Didn’t you know the heroine’s children never die in saccharine romances? Oh, I forgot, between the two of you the only book you’d ever read was Facebook.

And this storyline. Full of surprises. Like the one you get when you see the sun rising every morning. If this novel had been any deeper you could have drowned an ant in it. All right, maybe not drown, but it would at least have had to hold its breath.

Now you know, dogs and ladies and gentlemen, why Shiro and Zoobi committed suicide rather than live through this. Heaven knows we’d have joined them willingly. Luckily our owners took us away. It happens for a reason.

(This monthly column helps you talk about a book without having to read it.)

Arunava Sinha translates classic contemporary Bengali fiction, non-fiction into English

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