With her new book and two to follow, Jaishree Misra, says Anoothi Vishal, aims to be an Indian Danielle Steel.
Would you accept an Indian Danielle Steel? Now that author Jaishree Misra is attempting commercial fiction, you may get just that. With a three-book deal with Avon, UK, an imprint within HarperCollins that is “aggressively commercial”, Misra is no longer going to be straddling genres, something that she says she has always done — attempting “accessible literary fiction”, if you like. Beginning with Ancient Promises (a thinly-disguised autobiographical work), Misra’s works have always looked at life within the Indian family with all its stresses, faultlines and, well, faulty marriages. Secrets & Lies, her new book, sticks to many of these themes. Yet, there is a difference.
Anita, Zeba, Bubbles and Sam are friends whose ties go back to their days in a girl’s school in New Delhi in the 1990s. But the friendship is based as much on belonging to a common “top” clique in school as on a shared feeling of guilt. A secret that involves all of them has its roots in their envy of Lily, a newcomer in school — and Lily’s mysterious death in the final term. Murder or suicide we don’t quite know. Neither do the girls, each of whom has a “good enough” reason to kill the outsider. Now, almost two decades later, the women (one a Bollywood actress, three settled in London leading Sex in the City-lives with indifferent marriages, weight issues, and shopping sprees to bond over) are called by their former principal for a reunion. But the trip back will involve more than a dollop of nostalgia.
If this synopsis reads like a cross between I Know What You Did Last Summer and Sex in the City, you are not the only one reacting as such. When Misra asks me for my “honest opinion”, I tell her as much. To her credit, however, the author graciously accepts the comment and is candid about her wanting to attempt “out and out” commercial fiction. “When you straddle genres,” she says, like she did, “those are books that a literary editor is not going to look at because they will not win a Booker. At the same time, I’ve always enjoyed writing for a wider audience.” Misra points out that the sales numbers international publishers look for in this genre would be pretty much incomprehensible to even those writing assured “bestsellers” in India.
Once you have established the fact that this is a no pretense book, it can be quite an entertaining read. The plot, says Misra, came to her from her observations that “women in their 40s start depending a lot on their women friends.” Misra, who stays in London (but is contemplating a move back to Delhi soon), says she sees this happening all the time: “By that time many things have already gone wrong. They’ve been let down by their men or children, who, in any case, are independent and don’t need them any longer. So you tend to form female friendships.” Despite resonances from Carrie Bradshaw’s life, this is apparently not a foreign or even metropolitan phenomenon. Misra talks about her mother, who chose to move back to Kerala after the death of her husband, and formed a circle of friends all of whom were in a similar situation — enforced singletondom.
It is easy to chat on in this vein; so, what about the author’s own group of friends? “I resisted the urge to be part of cliques in school, I was never comfortable with them,” she says. But the memory of these “top cliques” in school (in Delhi and Bangalore) has clearly lingered on as you may perhaps sense from the book’s chatty style.
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In London, however, Misra, found herself to be quite the outsider, especially “since it wasn’t as if I had grown up there or had a British degree”, she points out. “Initially, it would be superficial things like not being able to understand the local accent or colloquial phrases. But after a while, one would resent not being understood by even those behind the till, particularly them, even though you were speaking better English than them… and, there was always this expression on people’s faces that you were an outsider, an Asian,” she says. Secrets & Lies is hardly about immigrant angst, more fashionable in a certain type of “literary fiction”. (Misra’s publishers, incidentally, are wary about her move back to India lest what she write becomes “too Indian…” ) But Misra does draw upon these experiences even as she builds her story around the motif of jealousy.
The book may equally be about “unhappy marriages” — a theme that has remained with Misra since her debut; her next book too is about that, she chuckles. For someone who has routinely touched upon all these familiar themes of Indian writing in English, how tough was it to attempt supposedly breezy “chic-lit”? And how does she react to being classified as such?
“To my mind”, says Misra, “that would also imply elements of humour and romance, it is the equivalent of a rom-com on screen,” she trails off. Even as we are pondering over genres, she points out that some “extremely clever” writers are tackling serious subjects under that — “always a tough thing to do”.
Given that she was writing bang in the midst of the global recession, did it ever bother Misra to be attempting “aspirational” writing; tackling the high life filled with Pradas and Jimmy Choos that her “international-Indian” characters are comfortable with? Misra is once again candid when she says that “in her mind, the kind of women reading my work are ordinary, struggling with mortgages”, but that publishers demand some voyeuristic thrill.
“I have always felt that poverty has become so unfashionable in Bollywood because of filmmakers like Karan Johar and I have complained about that.” Nevertheless, having succumbed to the demands of the genre (though there are occasional references to the economic crisis in her work), Misra went about glamming up her content in a fairly unusual way. “I sat with a copy of Tatler and took down the names of expensive brands… like jewellery by Boucheron... I didn’t know the brand.”
Moving back to India is what Misra is looking forward to. But it may not be easy. For one, her publishers are worried that her work — regardless of its formulaic setting — may get more “Indian”. Two, it will be tough for her differently-abled daughter. For now, Misra, the author, will be taking a back seat to Misra, the mother, out to locate a suitable home for her child, where she can live independently and with dignity with similar companions. “India has changed, but has it changed enough?” she wonders.
SECRETS & LIES
Author: Jaishree Misra
Publisher: HarperCollins
pages: viii + 406
Price: Rs 275