Seven Shades of Grey--not to be confused with the similar-sounding erotic novel Five Shades of Grey--takes place in India. Vivek Mehra is an author who knows India well and who also understands the ubiquity of the Internet and its influence on the lives of those who actually live at great distances from one another. Reading this book makes one feel like a voyeur peering over the shoulders of those in a chat room. Written form the point of view of an Indian chemist working on perfecting a new formula, the narrative is really about a tortured soul seeking refuge in the messages he receives from women as distant as New York City, Canada, and Singapore. His own wife Dolly, for whom he professes great love, is nevertheless an incidental character. She is often gone visiting her parents for a month at a time, leaving Vikram Singhal to find solace and inspiration online. The women with whom he communicates seem as distressed as he is, dissolving into tears and aching for spiritual connection that is only fleeting when it comes.
The book is a series of Internet encounters and vivid dreams punctuated occasionally by what appear to be real-life encounters with real people. MAA is the thread connecting Vikram to the real world--as he lights incense and prays to this god between sleeping and dreaming and connecting to women in chat rooms.
When Dolly66, ironically with the same name as his wife, abandons their virtual connection, he is lost. He had placed in her his spiritual connection to the universe and now is bereft. It became another Internet friend's task to save him and explain to him what the reader had already ascertained about the relationship with Dolly66. His cyberspace world included profound expressions of love for women he had not met, women who represented a pure kind of spiritual love beyond the day-to-day world he shared with his wife. Perhaps it was only Vikram who did not understand that he "knew" only what came to him through the words on his computer and that the words could easily represent an invented reality.
All of the ramblings of Vikram take place as he sits in the waiting room of the maternity ward waiting for the birth of his first child after ten years of a barren marriage. The reader can only speculate about the future of Vikram and his real-world wife Dolly, a woman who admits that as an Indian woman she was taught to obey her husband. In the prologue Vikram describes himself as a dutiful husband "as confused as ever." His year of living in the "new planet" of the Internet have transformed him, but has he learned anything? The reader is left wondering what the next year will bring.
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