In a display of egregious overconfidence, Mullick makes her plot skip around spatially and temporally till the reader is left feeling disjointed and confused. The story itself is sparse, bereft of detail and coherent arcs, and the protagonist—an obvious extension of Mullick herself—is self-involved to the point of being loathsome. She indulges in herself and her flights of frenzy like an absolute hedon, with barely enough cause to justify any of her self-destructive tendencies.

Mullick’s twenty-two years are reflected, mostly for the worse, in her writing. Apart from a surprisingly beautiful epilogue wherein she exercises precision and restraint to deliver a bleak ending, her language is ostentatiously, unnecessarily over-decorated, failing to lend her story the cohesiveness it needed. That might not have been altogether amiss had Mullick’s voice been more defined. As it stands, however, Frequencies is chock-full of experimental writing done in a shaky voice, more reminiscent of Creative Writing 500 than the feel of polished avant-garde that she seems to be going for.

In a word, Frequencies is gimmicky. Fortunately for Mullick, some of those gimmicks are catchy enough to induce a chuckle or two. The tag cloud she uses as a back-cover summary is somewhat innovative, as is her cheeky inclusion of a self-penned book review interwoven into the narrative. The constant barrage of intertextuality, random detours into poetry and second person, and over-formatted structural styling, though, are trite and more reflective of mediocre blogger culture than the literary weight that Mullick unsuccessfully tries to lend to them.

All in all, this first novel left me with a sense of what could have been. If Mullick had concentrated on the interesting arc of her uniquely placed postcolonial ponderings or on building a more compelling story, the end result might have been eminently readable. Instead, we are left with the appetizer of potential, waiting hungrily for an entrée that never arrives.

The second floor patio outside L’Opera lay open underneath a cold winter sky, bathed by Delhi’s perennially hot sun. I brought out a cheery slice of mille-feuille and a coffee from the patisserie and settled into a wrought-iron chair, waiting for the caffeine and cream to kick-start a temporary alleviation of my black mood.

Two tables away, the only other person haunting the patio in the middle of a working Tuesday lingered over a litter of espresso cups. White hair, cream chiffon, double-strand seed pearls; a Yash Chopra heroine gone grey,

Had Jay and I met inside fading bodies

ashing her cigarette into the wind; long, slim ones from a light blue box—

closer to ash than flesh at eighty-three

Vogues. I’d only ever seen them in Europe—the long, slim fingers of a Polish hooker draped around them, offering me one, two, the whole box diffusing through us by the Amstel.

lost,

She was

instantly, irrevocably;

blowing out precisely curled plumes, stylized to perfection like the rest of her. Polished, gimmicky and overtly declarative. discarded time and irrelevant space.