Cyrus, the personable young narrator of Ardashir Vakil's engaging debut, Beach Boy (Hamish Hamilton, £14.99 in UK), is the son of wealthy, if somewhat casual, parents who live in a glass house. Being the shrewd boy he is, Cyrus has learned to exploit the relaxed parenting of his somewhat distant, businessman father and Westernised, former tennis player mother in order to enjoy the freedom of the neighbourhood - or at least, of his neighbours' homes. "References to my mother's not feeding me enough, sometimes overt, sometimes snide, had a currency amongst the neighbours at whose houses I often ate. I considered these insults a fee one had to pay for eating their food, for demanding their friendship, for sleeping in their beds, partaking of their quarrels, sharing their holidays, walking their dogs . . ."
His neighbours remind him of Jesus: "They liked to give, they wanted to share, but they couldn't resist the temptation to make me feel guilty, to make me suffer, to make me feel ashamed of my family, to pretend that I was a deprived child to whom they provided succour." He is candour itself, and admits: "Wherever I was, regardless of plans, if one of my neighbours asked me whether I wanted to go out with them, to the movies, to visit their friends, into town for a meal, even on a holiday, I always said yes."
Set in Bombay in the late 1960s and early Seventies, Cyrus's story is far more than an account of yet another boyhood revisited. His dialogues with his friends as well as the conversations he overhears reflect the emerging cultural influences of American music and film. Although he describes his own thoughts, fears, sensations and obsessions with intrepid detail, Cyrus is a passive, uncomplaining, rather formal observer who misses very little. Central to his early life is Mrs Verma, "all colour and all smiles", who brings him to the cinema, his favourite place. Her lips are painted chocolate red, and of her he says: "to get to know Mrs Verma, one needed to comprehend the hundred variants of her smile."
When not fantasising about sex, a subject young Cyrus discovers early in life, he is preoccupied by the movies. "I developed a feverish hankering for Hindi cinema. Mesmerized by its idols, I rushed to see them perform and came out copying their every move. After seeing Apna Desh, Kati Patang, Aradhana, Daag and Namak Haram I began to act like Rajesh Khanna. Emerging into the Bombay sunlight, I practised my heavy-lidded glance on strangers. I walked with my shoulders slightly hunched, leant to one side and dragged my feet. I delivered normal speech as if I were handing out a ultimatum. I tried to recreate the rhythms of Rajesh Khanna's speech in English and stroked my cheek as if I were sunk in melancholy thought."
The comedy of the book is subtly undercut by the growing uncertainties of his parents' marriage. A love letter once written to his mother by his father and discovered by Cyrus stuck between the pages of a book, upsets the boy, in the context of their current arguments. Cinema is escape. "I loved the darkness and calm of the theatre, the comfortable seats, the fact that no one could see me . . . for three hours I could stop thinking about my poor marks at school, my parents' fighting, the lies that blighted my existence or the tennis matches I should have won. That's why I liked going to the pictures on my own."
Vakil is yet another addition to the group of outstanding contemporary Indian writers which includes Upamanyu Chatterjee, Rohinton Mistry, Amitav Ghosh and Vikram Chandra, all of whom write elegant, formal, faintly old-world prose which is also conversational and witty. Considering that legions of novels have been written on the theme of childhood revisited, Vakil has succeeded in bringing something new to a familiar story and frequently shifts his tone in a narrative which appears random yet is deceptively disciplined. Beach Boy has an ease, grace and natural lyricism far surpassing Arundhati Roy's recent laboured and extraordinarily over rated debut, The God of Small Things.
It is a narrative of set-pieces, such as that in which Cyrus sets off on an early-morning run with the Krishnans, led by Mr Krishnan, a Marxist and health fanatic who owns an old Ford De Soto. Later, Cyrus goes on holiday with them to Mr Krisnan's home village, and vividly describes the train journey, which takes more than forty hours. His meeting with the faintly scandalous Maharani who, as he recalls, "showed genuine enthusiasm for our exchanges", assists his sexual researches.
Then there is the tennis match in which Cyrus carries the hopes and - for once - sustains the interest of his mother. Victory will mean an expensive dinner as a reward. He almost wins. Disappointed by his failure, his mother tells him: "The problem with you, Cyrus, is the same in tennis as with other things in your life. You just don't have the staying power, the perseverance . . ."
Mid-way through his story, Cyrus announces: "All my life I had wanted to live in a high-rise building." This becomes possible when his parents divorce. His father remains a shadowy presence, ironically emerging as a central character only on his sudden death in an American hospital. Even here Vakil avoids the obvious. Far more pressing to Cyrus than the actual loss of his father is his inability to remember his last meeting with him, "where I was, what I was doing, where my father was, the last time I encountered him, just wouldn't come to me."
By the close of the novel Cyrus has managed to shoot himself in the foot with his father's final present, an air rifle. Still, as his friend the Maharani comments: "Never mind, Cyrus, you will survive. These things happen." Her remark serves as a metaphor for an adroit, often remarkable and humane first novel, one of the finest literary debuts of this, or any year, and which could well prove a Booker contender.
