Step into the first few pages of Ardashir Vakil's One Day, and you will find yourself in bed with the unspectacular Englishman Ben Tennyson-a schoolteacher and occasional cookery writer-and his feisty, bossy Indian wife Priya Patnaik, a broadcast journalist. Their son Whacka is still asleep, oblivious of the possibility that Ben may not be his father after all or that the next day, his third birthday, will be the stage for an entire novel.

ONE DAY By Ardashir Vakil Penguin Price: Rs 395 Pages: 304

Through constantly regurgitated memories of the past, we learn Ben and Priya met at university (Oxford, no less), have lots of sex (images of which could make a grown man blush) and have spent their entire relationship in a state of turmoil, confusion, infidelity and yes, even love ... "Reality tv in a book" you think, acquiesce to your voyeuristic appetite and prepare for a peep through the keyhole of what you believe will be an exposition of middle-class multicultural Britain at its most banal. And for the most part, you will be right. But to be fair, while One Day is about Love, Marriage and Baby Carriage with a twist of class, race, sexuality and intercultural cross-fertilisation issues, most pressingly it is about memory-what we remember and what we forget-or try to-in order to get on with life and relationships.

The narrative, like memory itself, is random and meandering, jumping from past to present to future, objects and events of the here-and-now hyperlinked to objects and events of long ago. A quintessential stream-of-consciousness novel, One Day is filled with probing and provocative observations, self-flagellation, analysis-paralysis and ennui-a novel of pure exhaustion. Priya and Ben are constantly allowed their parentheses, their moments to reflect, doubt, double-check or wallow in their bourgeois neuroses like spoilt children having the sulks at a wounded sense of entitlement. "Guilt was an emotion purely suited to the English Middle Classes. That and tiredness," thinks Priya. "Whenever you ask somebody how they were, it was always I'm so tired, I'm so exhausted. I'm wasted, whacked, knackered," and of course, the postscript, "Nobody in India would know the word 'knackered' ... How infected she had become with these English words."

STREAM OF CONSCIENCE: Vakil

The best parts of the narrative read like the diary of an obsessive-compulsive people-watcher in the London Underground-sometimes sad, often funny and sweet, and occasionally bizarre. Though the city and its people show signs of life, they are often smothered by worn-out quotations from Joyce, Shakespeare, Keats and gang, not to mention a writing style with an identity crisis. But if you can wade through the clumsy and archaic ("the tumescence of something soporific", "a distressed woman's ululation"), you may find a sentence like "Ben observed this comfortable wedlock embrace: white brother, brown sister, like a swivel of layered chocolate, dark and white". You will also see a few brilliant sketches of character and idiosyncrasy, especially of children. When chain-smoking, bingo-playing Brenda at the school tea counter begins to talk, you know you have met the archetype of working-class British womanhood. And at the end, though One Day feels like an all-access pass into someone else's head as they experience the world, you do occasionally feel like giving it a crack on the noggin.

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