Opportunity Knocks
DIANE MEHTA
Agni 50, 1999
Interpreter of Maladies. By Jhumpa Lahiri. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999.
Love and Longing in Bombay. By Vikram Chanddra. New York: Little, Brown & Company, 1998.
The hullabaloo over Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, in 1997, put Indian literature on the map for many readers. But it also led to plenty of misunderstandings about what Westerners call “Indian writing.” The term is a complicated one. India’s population is approaching a billion. At least sixteen national languages, and hundreds of dialects, are spoken in different parts of the country. Calling someone an Indian writer doesn’t compare to calling someone, say, a French or Portuguese writer; it’s comparable, instead, to calling someone a European writer. But let me attempt a definition: any writer of Indian descent whose work is informed by India in an important way is classified as an Indian writer. Some of these writers compose novels in Indian languages and others write in English.
Under the category of “Indian prose writers in English” are two main subsets. Quintessentially Indian writers include R.K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand, and Raja Rao. Narayan gave us books that feature a fictional Indian town, Malgudi, in which lovable, parochial-minded Indians encounter conflicts associated with modernization. Anand’s English-language novel, Untouchable, describes the immense tragedy of the caste system through the eyes of an untouchable—the lowest on the caste system’s totem pole. And Rao’s The Serpent and the Rope is about a quest for spirituala truth, in both India and Europe.
Since Independence in 1947, a new class of Indian expatriate writers has emerged. These are writers who as adults left India or those who grew up abroad. Most Indian writinig in English fits this description. Yet these writers have little in common besides their descent; they approach their themes from completely different backgrounds and religions. V.S. Naipaul has written about the Indian community in Trinidad. The Delhi-born Anita Desai, part German and part Bengali, and the foreign-born Ruth Prawer Jhabvala produced considerably lighter novels about outsiders trying to enter life in cosmopolitan India. Other English-language expatriates, including Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Michael Ondaatje, and Ved Mehta, have written variously about colonial India, post-Partition India, the India of their childhood, immigration to other countries, and wanderers—Indian or otherwise. And finally, from Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry, Sashi Tharoor, Babsi Sidhwa, and Sari Suleri, have come historical novels about India and Pakistan during and after Independence and Partition.
As young writers, Jhumpa Lahiri and Vikram Chandra form yet another category. All the stories in Love and Longing in Bombay, Chandra’s second book, and Interpreter of Maladies, Lahiri’s first collection, are about marriage. Both are what I’d call Indian-American writers. Chandra was raised in Delhi, and educated later in America, where he now lives. Lahiri is fully American—born to a Bengali family, she was raised in the northeastern United States. What separates Chandra and Lahiri from other Indian-descent writers—and what makes them in some ways more American than Indian—is their capacity for creating psychologically complex characters who are no less intimate for being morally ambiguous or misled.
Indians, both in India and America, enter two kinds of marriages: love matches and arranged ones. I believe, as I think Chandra and Lahiri believe, that in the end the kind of marriage one chooses matters less than the way one chooses to respond to the awkwardness of learning how to live together—and to the betrayals that may emerge in any marriage. Sometimes arranged marriages between suitable couples flower into love, and sometimes love unravels. Either way, all marriages risk betrayal and indifference. That the stories take place among Indians or in India seems secondary; the plots revolve around the practical and emotional expectations of people struggling with their feelings. And while politics doesn’t figure into the premise for Lahiri’s and Chandra’s stories, it enters their work in more subtle ways. Political struggles shape the background for most of Chandra’s stories: in their wake, marriages fall apart. And although political unrest rarely appears in Lahiri’s fiction, subtle competitiveness evident in the interactions of the couples in her stories points to her concerns about identity and nationalism. In one of her stories, for example, a man remembers meeting his future wife during a reading of Bengali poets at Harvard. During the reading, he realized, resentfully, that she was more proficient in Bengali than he.
The post-nationalist sensibilities of thirty-something Indian writers see-saw between India and other places, between nostalgia for a familiar, traditional, past and the spontaneous, love-obsessed cultures of the West. Personal choice began with our parents. One may not have done so if economic opportunities had not beckoned from the West. And as India tilts toward even greater economic openness, choices will grow more complex. There are more careers to choose from and more money to be made domestically and abroad. But with opportunity comes the possibility of failure. An entire generation has grown up with an emotional autonomy that mirrors the national one. Once taboo, couples enter new relationships or marriages when the old ones languish. Yet however much the nature of marriage may have changed, people still need someone to cherish; they want, above all, to be loved, and to love.
The characters in Love and Longing in Bombay and Interpreter of Maladies are hard up for happiness. No one seems connected to anyone in particular. Perhaps for Westerners this doesn’t seem unusual, but for better or for worse, extended families form the emotional infrastructure of Indian society. Parents support their children far into adulthood. Weddings are elaborate affairs, with hundreds or thousanads of people and an emcee busily announcing the names of the unmarried. Being single is under suspicion and discouraged. Given that Indian society shuns those without families, the absence of interactions between characters and their families in Lahiri’s and Chandra’s books is particularly striking. Married couples maintain a kind of loveless geniality while adultery takes place behind the scenes. And against the fantasy of conjugal bliss, the unmarried, divorced, widowed, or unmarriageable pass lives of monotony or mild despair. The emotional sensibilities of Chandra and Lahiri are clearly American. Readers in search of spicy exoticism best look elsewhere.
So what’s the hook? The pained, intimate ways these characters handle or dismiss their longings. Weighed against modern Indian writing in English, which tends to frame things in more of a socio-political perspective, Lahiri and Chandra offer suitable and even brave insights into the emotional character of Indians and Indian-Americans. Few Indian writers—and even fewer young writers—bring to their prose the kind of clarity about love and marriage that Lahiri and Chandra do.
Marriage, for Indians, is a complicated affair, one that has grown more satisfying in certain ways while less so in others. Indians plan and discuss marriage to no end, but seldom broach the darker, more ambiguous realm of emotions. While the characters in these stories are uniquely Indian in terms of their humor and concerns, their experience of despair is not. Some unhinge, and others cope modestly. The details that emerge as these characters unravel deserve our attention. We observe our fears and failures in theirs, and feel deeply when they do. We’re all in the same boat, so to speak. Lahiri and Chandra have produced sharply observed, tender stories with marriage at their center.
Chandra’s stories are about people in pursuit of love or who have lost or ruined their chances for love. All five, which take place in Bombay, share a narrator. The throwback to oral storytelling, a folksy device better suited to allegories or religious parables, puzzled me at first. Why not just tell the stories? The prologues launch too abruptly into plot. Chandra’s nod to India’s oral tradition seems gratuitous. But the stories soon fold the gimmick into their intrigues, and the distraction fades. Although Chandra’s writing lacks the nuanced detail which in Lahiri’s book swells her descriptions, these portrayals of restless, intensely repressed men are Chandra’s best work.
Among them is Sartaj, a cynical, Hamlet-like detective unsettled by the stink of foul play in “Kama,” and Jago Antia, the one-legged antihero of “Dharma” who is haunted by his brother’s ghost. Like the Greek warrior Philoctetes, whose gangrenous leg forestalled his participation in the Trojan War, Jago’s tragedy is one of missed opportunities. When the story begins, Jago’s missing leg aches uncontrollably. The phantom pain becomes Jago’s undoing as he tries to cope with the details of his confusion. He lost his twin brother, Soli, through a childhood accident that appears to be Jago’s fault. For years following the accident, the dour Jago lacked desires altogether. His first desire, instead of for love, was a uniform. We learn in passing that Jago Antia never married, the implication being that the loss has ruined Jago’s chances for love. Eventually he becomes a stoic paratrooper who in war amputates his own leg, and, symbolically, this chances for the arousals of love. His only experience of adult love are the memories of his parents’ marriage when Soli was alive and they would read comics and go to Juhu Beach. The lines that grooved his father’s face and his mother’s look of exhaustion evidence how their marriage has been disfigured. Their pain, born of Soli’s death, foretells his own.
As Jago’s phantom pain intensifies, the narrative moves between flashbacks of the war and of Soli’s accident. Once feared by his subordinates for “the cold blackness of his anger,” Jago now struggles to maintain his composure. In his proud, utilitarian way, he despises feeling vulnerable. Nevertheless, there’s something compelling about this tragically Indian man. Because he doesn’t crave pity, he evokes our sympathies. And there’s clearly no one, besides us, to love him. Perhaps it’s the same reason nwhy my grandmother, married at fourteen to a stranger, nevertheless grew devoted to my remote, reticent grandfather with whom she exchanged only a few sentences a day for forty-four years. But our compassion for Jago remains unrequited: he fights for the return of his poise and solitude, not for the capacity to love. What happens at the end of “Dharma” evokes the fantastic, but it’s clear that pleasure is not in the cards.
Robust sex, if not pleasure, inflames Sartaj, in “Kama.” Certainly he feels through the body, and Chandra’s characters have a sensuous, physical presence in the world. Kama, after all, is the Hindu god of love and the star of the Kama Sutra manual on lovemaking. Thank God for this: it’s one of the few stories by Chandra and Lahiri with a sex act that admirably titillates.
She held him and he thought of the other man viciously. Look where she is now. Look. But who is the cuckold, which is the husband, and he felt despair in his throat, like black and bitter iron. But then he cried out in love, from the scaling oily embrace of her. She took him in, a fraction, just so much, so little. His hips bucked and she put a hand on his stomach. Don’t move. He knew her pleasures. Her engulfing would last an eternity, little by little.
The grunts, the aggression, the powerplay: it shapes the lovemaking between Sartaj and his wife into spirited obscenity. But eroticism (pages of it) gives way to despair. This last roll in the hay rouses in disturbing ways, less for the aggression than for the fact that by sleeping with Sartaj he is betraying her new lover in the same way that Sartaj betrayed her earlier in their marriage. Chandra seems fascinated by the ways people who are lost or who have suffered a loss mirror each other. Sartaj’s adultery raises issues about his parents’ divorce and the sexual betrayals—or are they freedoms?—of the couple in the case he’s investigating. A two-timer himself, he’s able to recognize it in others; it makes him a more capable detective.
Though the murder case seems clear-cut, Sartaj suspects the quiet son of murdering his father for his parents’ sexual indulgences. The happy, dissolute couple wanted to be swingers—a comic twist to the Oedipal story. Were their indiscretions prolonging or destroying their marriage? When love is over, should the marriage continue? As India becomes the kind of society in which people can move from one lover to the next without too much ado, these questions complicate the traditional notion of marriage—to build families and seal alliances between them. What’s ruined in “Kama” is not a marariage but a son’s idea of one. As with Jago Antia, Sartaj’s tragedy is that he lacks the emotional wherewithal to cope with the different kinds of love available to him. And mirrored in the son who shakes Sartaj into a fury is Sartaj himself, embodying both the scowling, remorseless son and the lickerish parents.
In Chandra’s India, the distinctions between right and wrong give way to whatever facts happen to be true at the moment. Hindu-Muslim conflicts go on vaguely in the background, and people whom political skirmishes have separated from their loved ones suffer their loneliness with reticence. Easily fatalistic, Chandra’s characters yield to their losses.
In this life, the sub-inspector said, some people just vanish. I said: I know. These facts, and the theories that I made up to explain it all to myself, those plots that gave me comfort and a comfortable kind of terror, they’ve been bleached white by the ferocity of my attention. They rattle around in my head with a dry clicking noise. But the painting is life itself. So I’ll life in my bed and look at the painting. I’ll look at the curve of the hip, the shirt sleeves rolled up on the swell of the biceps. At the shadowed eyes in black, and the curl of hair on the brown forehead. I will lie in my long narrow room and look at the strong fingers holding the white cigarette and wonder what it is in the shapes that is Rajesh.
Chandra’s vision of the world pivots on longing, as the collection’s title indicates. But when love becomes unavailable, solitude suffices. A neat technical trick: in the convolutions of Chandra’s plot-drive stories a lyrical, meditative tone emerges. At least several of these stories end with moments that are tender.
If the well-conceived men in Chandra’s stories lack moral rectitude, the women lack dimension: they are simple, shallow, or easily fooled. “Shanti” features the pursuit by Shiv of the story’s eponymous widow—a woman searching hospitals for her husband, a soldier presumably killed in a border dispute. Pained with his own loss—his twin brother was killed at a political march—Shiv exudes a sense of urgency. Shanti, on the other hand, appears little more than a wistful symbol of loss. Compared with the forbearance of a character like Jago Antia, the irascible Sartaj, or even the impulsive Shiv, Shanti seems impassive. Equally one-dimensional are the women in “Shakti,” a story in which a quest for popularity drives a bitter feud between two Bombay socialites. Their manipulations impel the plot, which hurries to a minute-rice conclusion: off in the wings their children meet and marry (the story bears a painful resemblance to Romeo and Juliet), the feud ends, and the socialite become buddies.
More accurately conceived are the women who, in Lahiri’s stories, suffer malaise, loss, or a husband’s inattention with patience and grit. As with Chandra, marriage factors into all of these stories: the “maladies” of the title are the disappointments of conjugal life. The women around whom the narratives pivot range from newlywed Indian-Americans to impoverished and slightly demented women without husbands in India. In her sharply observed, deeply emotive stories, Lahiri positions food and children as symptoms that describe whether a marriage is working. When women stop cooking or children die, love retreats and marriages crumble. The quality of meals in “A Temporary Matter” reflects the quality of a couple’s relationship before and after their son is stillborn.
The other kinds of sons—an illegitimate son, a son without a father, and someone else’s son—that haunt Lahiri’s tales serve as ironic reminders of loneliness and a guilty conscience. In “Mrs. Sen’s,” for example, a neighbor’s son offers a woman the companionship her husband neglects to provide. The antidote for the luckless epileptic in “The Treatment of Bibi Haldar” is not marriage, which is what the doctor concludes, but a son. “I will never be cured, never married,” Bibi complains. In disturbingly feminine ways, she tries to turn herself into a viable bride. The terrible loneliness in store for her, and anger you feel on her behalf at her mistreatment, is gutting. I will not tell you wy, in a brilliant ironic twist, Bibi is cured. The variety of emotions that Lahiri’s deliberate, unsentimental style evokes certifies the dimension of her talent; she makes her point and moves on.
It’s through the telling gesture or detail, such a cheerfully condescending tap aon the head from an older man to his illicit young lover, that deeper emotional ironies emerge. In the beginning of “Sexy,” a young woman meets her patronizing, married lover over a bottle of wrinkle cream at a cosmetics counter. At first they drink sangria, eat pickled herring with their fingers, and make love “on sheets covered with crumbs.” But while Dev fails to notice the cocktail dress she buys to crown her role as his mistress, her friend’s son Rohin does. He glimpses the dress in his closet and demands that she put it on. He calls her sexy; this detail is key. From what Rohin understands of his own parents’ experience, “sexy” means loving someone you don’t know. His father, he explains, “sat next to someone he didn’t know, someone sexy, and now he loves her instead of my mother.” Like Dev the boy takes naps; this none-year-old who becomes a substitute for her dispassionate lover not only gives her attention, but also calls attention to the perversity of her role.
The payback that betrayal warrants hits hardest in the title story. Interpreter of Maladies concerns a young Indian couple, born and raised in America, who is vacationing in India with their children. In this ironic retelling of the Ramayana—an epic tale of a woman’s abduction and the war it causes—the bored wife confesses to a taxi driver, who is a little in love with her, that her son Bobby is illegitimate. She wants the driver, who works a second job as a doctor’s interpreter, to suggest a remedy for her malady. At a roadside stop, Bobby wanders off and is cornered by a monkey. Bobby’s captor echoes Hanuman, the monkey-god who saves Sita, the heroine of the Ramayana, from her abductor. When Sita’s husband Rama doubts her fidelity she builds a fire and enters it. To confirm her fidelity, Agni, the fire god, lifts her from the flames and delivers her, with his blessing, to Rama. In Lahiri’s version, the monkey beats Bobby with a stock as payback for his mother’s adultery. This is a different India than the one our parents knew.
In that India, traditional marriages produced at least one heir and couples grew old together. “The Third and Final Continent,” the concluding story, features a contented couple that has a legitimate son. An immigrant, who comes to America to work at M.I.T., rents a room from a cranky matron who commands him to bark the word “splendid” during their interactions. This awkward routine, which eventually becomes familiar and thus enjoyable, anticipates a similar sequence he develops with his Indian bride—a stranger her chose for her ability to “cook, knit, embroider, sketch landscapes, and recite poems by Tagore”—when she joins him in Cambridge. Lahiri permits no loose ends: their son grows up and, in a vision of success, attends Harvard. That this is the only story Lahiri narrates in first-person stresses the hopeful, if unbelievable, simplicity of their marriage. The point of view, because it is narrower, lacks the ironic tone of her other stories. And this story in particular shares with Chandra a vision that’s typically Indian: while Westerners try to lead a happy life, Indians try to live an agreeable one. Any discussion of their marriage seems curtailed, as if, given time to explain and probe their relationship, it might unravel. The kind of marriage they develop accurately portrays the course many immigrants follow, though the story wraps up too quickly. Since they were in Cambridge and thus prey to new attitudes, I was curious about their interactions: would they fall in love the way any couple, in an arranged marriage or not, would fall in love? Or would it in part depend on their ability to grow not just into each other but into an American lifestyle? Did being in America add dimension to their marriage, or was the marriage successful because their needs were fundamentally Indian? Because they married for duty, not love, there is less chance for disillusion. But when Lahiri risks sentimentality we must take a second look. The story strains with nostalgia for the enviably simple India our parents grew up in, and the permanent relationships that lifestyle framed. There is a kind of wistfulness about offering this relationship as a parting shot, in first-person, and in a man’s voice. If contemporary relationships were more pragmatic about love, would they work?
Where do Chandra and Lahiri fit in? Set the moist prose of subcontinental writers like Arundhati Roy against R.K. Narayan’s remarkable, satirical tales of Indian rustics, and it quickly becomes clear that even in English, Indian writing diverges. It is on being Indian that Lahiri’s and Chandra’s stories hinge, but their styles and sensibilities seem more American. They face multiple choices, which have bred despair for so many generations of immigrants. As Bernard Malamud said in “The Fixer”: “If there’s not one way, there’s another.” Lahiri and Chandra seem to recognize this particularly American truth: when love tumbles off its burner there is nothing to do but get in line with your loss, and begin again.
