Breathing In Colour ;
By Clare Jay; Hachette;
Pages: 276; Price: £6.99
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As any bibliophile will tell you, reading is more than just an intellectual exercise, it’s an emotional feast. A good book, no matter what its theme is, will exhilarate you. And Clare Jay’s Breathing In Colour is one such book.
The outline of the story is simple enough: Alida Salter, a single English mother, gets a call from the Indian police saying that her teenage daughter, Mia, has gone missing and is presumed dead. This sets Alida off on a journey to India to look for her child. But this journey is two-fold: the physical journey leads her from place to place and clue to clue in search of Mia. But on this quest, she also journeys inwards via her lucid dreams and her memories of the past.
We discover that Mia is no ordinary person, she is a synaesthete. The author’s website says, “The UK Synaesthesia Association describes synaesthesia as a ‘union of the senses’. This is not an illness, but a sensory condition in which textures might be tasted on the tongue, or musical notes experienced as colours. In synaesthesia, the five senses, which most people experience as separate, are mingled in almost any combination, so that one sensation involuntarily conjures up others.”
The reader follows Alida’s story as a narrative of events as they are happening to her in the present. But Mia is missing, lost; and the author uses a very ingenious device to introduce us to her inner workings: Mia story is told via a series of retrospective diary entries that trace her childhood and her strained relationship with her mother. We discover that Mia is the child of a broken marriage and the survivor of a mysterious and shattering tragedy that tore her family apart and caused a gulf to grow between her and Alida.
Now it is up to Alida, who is left with Mia’s art work and some of her possessions, to trace her daughter in the daunting vastness of India. In this quest, she befriends Taos, an Australian artist. Taos suggests that they explore Mia’s collages to find a clue to her mindset and thus discover her whereabouts. The clues on collages take them from the streets of Madurai to the beaches of Trivandrum, from the Vittla Temple in Hampi to an ashram on Krishna River.
But time is running out, and Alida is sure that the answer to this mystery lies in the tragedy that shook her world more than a decade ago. Will she be able to come to terms with her past? Will she be able to understand the colourful messages that Mia has left behind and find her alive? The story is fraught with tension and keeps you on the edge of your seat, eagerly awaiting what will happen next.
Filled with colourful descriptions of India and memorable characters, the book is a unique literally experience: Jay’s descriptions of a synaesthete’s rich sensory world make this book a not-to-be-missed experience. The book traces many journeys: within its characters, in altered states of awareness, in India. The author takes her readers with her as she explores these numerous destinations: don’t miss this trip.
A version of this review was published in the Businessworld Issue Dated 16-22 June 2009
Book Reviews 
Breathing In Colour ;
