Author Manju Kapur gives us another evocative tale about middle-class lives in her new work, The Immigrant, this time set during the Emergency. But younger people have different lives today, she introspects with Anoothi Vishal.
As a delineator of middle-class lives in India, Manju Kapur has few parallels. This is obviously a world that she knows well and the familiarity is reflected in all her works. The latest, The Immigrant, is no different. Set partly in Delhi, where all of Kapur’s works have been set, and in Halifax, Canada (why Halifax? Well, that’s where Kapur studied many years ago), the book looks into the lives of not one but two immigrants: There’s Nina, “almost thirty”, a lecturer (like Kapur) in Miranda House, who lives in a one-room house where privacy and individual space are impossible (quite unlike the author’s own house, so sprawling so as to merit an area formally earmarked “reception”), and who is under huge pressure to get married not just from family and intrusive neighbours but also from her own realisation of her biological clock ticking away... Nina is clearly intended to be the main protagonist here.
But then, there’s also Ananda, the dentist Nina marries halfway into the book, who makes his own difficult journeys — from small-town India to self-sufficient White Canada, from being an Indian caught up in the web of familial ties and obligations to a legit “Canadian”, from sexual dysfunction to indiscriminate sexual encounters which leads to the unravelling of the couple’s married life.
Ananda is the quintessential unfeeling, unfaithful husband in many ways and Kapur, of course, is the quintessential writer of “women-centric” stories. But, ironically, one of the high points of this latest effort is the character of Ananda, inside whose head the author has been able to get so thoroughly that he walks off with more credibility and sympathy than the female protagonist.
“Initially, Ananda was a much darker character,” says Kapur, when I meet her and tell her that I much prefer him to her “heroine”— though, of course, this, like all other Kapur narratives, is no grand one, focussing merely on “little”, inconsequential lives. “But I didn’t want the story to be predictable,” she explains. Kapur admits that she had “great fun writing reams of dialogue for the fights she made up between Ananda and Nina”, but had to edit these out and change the end to make it more ambiguous than originally planned, where Nina, her own sexual transgression notwithstanding, leaves Ananda.
For someone who has been teaching English Literature for more than 30 years, Kapur is surprisingly easy to talk to. She tells you that she isn’t “the kind of teacher students get friendly with” but despite that, it is entirely possible for one to spend a pleasant evening with her chatting about this and that — about the craft of writing, beginnings (“often, the last line will come to me much earlier but the beginning always causes a lot of trouble”) and endings, about women, bookish and real, repressed but also spirited, rebellious ones whom she writes about and others we in middle India know. And in the midst of all this, I ask, “Why is Nina so discontented?”
The Immigrant, strangely, reminds me of Karan Johar’s film Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna in so far as Nina’s character goes: You can compare her to Rani Mukherjee — sad for no “reason” at all, as some would exclaim. When I say this, Kapur nods, “Arre, she has to be sad about something.” Besides, “What to do, some women are always sad,” she laughs, but perhaps only half-seriously. She also points out quite practically that there would be, after all, no story without conflict. “I wanted to show the struggle of the immigrants. Another possibility could have been struggling to make it financially. But I don’t know that territory at all so I didn’t want to get into that,” she says.
The author is equally candid when she talks about Ananda’s sexual dysfunction — “a mere plot devise just like the lesbian track in A Married Woman” — there had to be “a reason for the marriage to unravel”. “I actually read Masters and Johnson as part of research,” she says, and then grins, “good for my students if they think ma’am’s getting to read all that!” That after I have reminded her about the incongruity between her role as a teacher in a society where sex is quite the unmentionable and her writing wherein so many of her characters seek erotic fulfilment. “I wanted to show what happens when you marry only to have children,” she adds.
That’s a theme many can relate to even today — the story itself is set in Emergency — but what about the immigrant experience as portrayed in the book? Kapur writes about Nina struggling with her ornate salwar kameezes, discovering Western wear, struggling with vegetarian food, and hankering after the ties of extended family and friends. But isn’t the experience different today with a more confident “global” Indian taking all this in his/her stride? “I am aware of that,” she says, and sighs, “sometimes I wonder if I am dated.”
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Kapur chose the Emergency as a setting because she clearly remembers “what it was like then. The desperation to just get away. The feeling that things were just falling apart…” Since then, she agrees things have definitely changed. In the college where she taught until two years ago (she’s on an extended leave to focus on writing), for instance, girls now come in jeans all the time —even those pressurised into getting married early. “Earlier, only those considered ‘mod’ would wear jeans,” she points out. A less superficial change is that everyone wants to work now, “Even when they get married in second year, come with their bangles, there is always this feeling ki hamein kuch karna hai, we want to work after college,” Kapur observes. “I wonder about their lives.” Indeed, the Karol Bagh setting in Home, her last work, was thus inspired.
“Won’t you finish your nimbu paani?” Kapur asks me as I get up to leave. So I sit some more and chat about ideas and how tales of fiction often begin. Sometimes the seeds can be in real events. Though Kapur says she doesn’t watch TV, she admits to being interested in events such as Pramod Mahajan’s murder. (“I was at the airport when I read about it and bought all the newspapers to get all the details.”) Or, the murder of the pregnant Madhumita, a poetess with political ambitions. Or, the mysterious suicide of Natasha Singh, who jumped off a building leaving behind two sons. “What could be the motivation? I wonder,” Kapur says. And then she’ll get under their skin.
THE IMMIGRANT
Author: Manju Kapur
Publisher: Random House India
Price: Rs 395
Pages: 334