Book Review
“A MARRIED WOMAN” BY MANJU KAPUR
PUBLISHED BY INDIAINK, PAGES 310
PRICE INR 295

Manju Kapur’s second novel is like having a four course meal in reverse. One begins reading a novel but realizes at the end that it was only a political tract masquerading as a novel.

The first three chapters are enticing and interesting, Ms Kapur’s sarcastic and ironic style breezes one through the first three chapters but from then on neither the style nor the content can rescue the book from hara-kiri.

Chapter 1, first the ice-cream: her laconic descriptions of the protagonist, Astha and her parents’ middle class values ring true and are humorous: her father’s adherence to an exercise regime and strictness about homework, her mother’s worries about her only child’s marriage and society, their united concerns about money ( very well brought out in a tiny vignette in a restaurant as they enjoy the tikkis less and calculating the profit the shopkeeper makes, more), her teenage crush on Bunty and the end of that, her heavy petting with Rohan in his Vauxhall and the end of that too and her broken heart.

Chapter 2: the chocolate sauce: Hemant the hero enters, they meet and get engaged; her obsession with him, his obsession with sex, their wealth, his increasing boredom, her increasing boredom, her father’s death after shifting, the arrival of a swami in her mother’s widowed life, the birth of her two children, the second one with fear and anxiety, prayers for a son, yes, it’s a boy, thank God.

Chapter 3 the sweet and sour vegetables, the main course: her husband doesn’t understand her, her attempts at writing poetry are unappreciated, her children don’t engross her, her mother doesn’t listen to her and leaves for Hrishikesh and then what’s worse, her mother’s long impersonal, religious sermon-letters from there. One hundred pages so far so good.

Chapter 4, suddenly it’s the garlic and onion soup: the novel falls into the quicksand of political activism and remains mired there. Surprise, it’s time for Babri Masjid! One smites one’s forehead, oh no, et tu brute, not this hackneyed politically correct one-sided view, please. Astha’s encounter with Aijaz, the nice Muslim (ergo, aren’t all Muslims nice?) who is such a cardboard figure that the writer cannot bring herself to ask him what he has to say about Hindu sentiments vis-a-vis the Ram temple but who miraculously manages to provoke her into research on the subject. Commissioned by a Muslim she does the inevitable, finds not a shred of evidence to redeem Hindus; she becomes agitated and spews fire. (Did she forget to dedicate the book to Romila Thapar? The political activist not in Astha but in Ms Kapur makes sure that Hemant( representing the saffron side) is given weak lines that are easily demolished by no other than an otherwise worldly-unwise Astha. Which leads one to ask the million dollar question: why is L.K.Advani being called, “the Leader” and not L.K.Advani when Rajiv Gandhi gets to keep his name? This squeamishness remains a mystery: was it Ms Kapur’s personal contempt for the arch villain or her reluctance to make the man famous through her path-breaking novel (sigh, better luck next time, Manju dear) or, worse, didn’t Astha, the character, remember that old man’s name? Attempting to win political arguments with such tricks might get one cocktail invites and a publisher but sadly don’t make for even second class fiction.

The rest of the book is the poisoned pill that follows the soup, Chapters 5 to 10. Now lesbianism is the red herring used to deflect attention from the real thing. If only like Jane Austen, Ms Kapur had stuck to the small world which they both know well and can write so well about, the book would have been first class. But Ms Austen, poor thing, probably had literary ambitions, not political ones. And so we trudge through more unashamed secularist propaganda before we can be done with the book. The writer /protagonist upholds pre-marital affairs, extra-marital affairs, minority rights, women’s rights, socialism, artistic self-expression, anti-Hinduism. Great. With such major concerns, is it any surprise that good-natured affection, small joys and love find no room in the book? Those who love Astha must leave her so she might find her artistic voice through politics and so they are all garbaged one by one: Bunty, Rohan, her father, Aijaz, Pipeelika. What remains behind is only a screaming placard,”Down with love, up with the Mosque, down with men, up with art as political expression”.

Ms Kapur fails to share with us Astha’s feelings at her father’s death; she fails to tell us the details about her first meeting with her future husband and their courtship, descriptions she is so good at, there are so many opportunities she could have grabbed to add dimension to her characters. The political activist stunts the writer in Ms Kapur; even the lengthy acknowledgements at the end of the book , which usually accompany non-fiction, provide proof of the writer’s agenda. Ms Kapur should not have fallen into the trap dreaded by green fiction writers: political activism. Her characters languish when they could have acquired depth, the book flounders and the characters remain hazy blurs. The novel is suffocated by its agenda and narcissism.

Ms Kapur hopes we will think it is a tragedy of a nice talented heroine in a suffocating world but we don’t because we are never allowed to forget the other story. Like the loathed “Leader” who the writer despises for using religion to achieve political gains, Ms Kapur, too, uses fiction as a vehicle to gain converts to her political ideology. While one is accustomed to politicians stopping at nothing, when a novelist does this, one can only watch the hara-kiri with surprise.

It is the saddest political tract I have read in a long time.