Rebel without a pause

Literature has the habit of throwing up interesting dysfunctional characters with a range of oddities, problems and phobias, but for their money, it would be hard to beat Meera. She stalks her sister's lover, then seduces him (in the saint Salim Fazl's grave yet) and, to spite perhaps Roopa, her sister, or Paji, her father, or Dev, who is to be her husband, she marries him.

But she reserves her eroticism not for her husband, with whom she despises sex, but her son, about whom she fantasises as a lover, suckling him at her breast as an infant, cuddling him as he grows, clinging to him like a lover till he loses, well, control. Later, she will punish him by reminding him of this when he is most vulnerable. Our dear, screwed up Meera knows how to crush spirits, and she does it wantonly.

Her elder brother-in-law too is in lust with her, and when he finally pins her down, she is not an unwilling participant for most of the act. This, after all, is the same Meera who tramps around Bombay looking for a former classmate who had once dogged her footsteps, hoping to be loved by him.

Dysfunctional, dispirited, disheartened Meera is an unlikely heroine, but in Manil Suri's new book, it is she, not Shiva, who is at the centre of a pedantic story that is redeemed by the brilliance of its prose. In the everydayness of its telling, there is a fascinating wealth of observances that cause the reader to chuckle, to be stunned into nostalgia, a simple enough story that becomes monumental in the way it is interpreted against the unfolding drama of a newly independent country.

As an outline, the story is as weak as Meera herself. There is little that is new, after all "" a failing marriage, a dictatorial (but benevolent) father, a doting mother, sundry flawed relatives "" all of them etched like cliches. But what might have been banal in the hands of a less skilled writer comes to life in Suri's elegant hand.

Here, then, is Meera who, for all that she might choose to blame her father, husband or son for her disquiet, is a victim of her own making, a rebel without a pause, but worse, a rebel without a cause. Her wounds are often self-inflicted. From her fatal marriage to the copycat singer with dreams of Bollywood, to her in-laws (endearingly middle-class), to her obsession with her son, her insistence on not paying heed to her father's attempt to model herself on Indira Gandhi (while accepting his largesse), his opposition to the Hindu Rashtriya Manch (clearly modelled on the Rashtriya Sevak Sangh) as nothing but a bunch of "communalists, thugs, murderers", the complacent middle-class Hindu view of all Muslims as anti-nationals...reduced to piecemeal bites, the saga lacks drama. Yet, Suri digs into family rituals with the sagacity of the cook who knows how to leaven a meal with enough interest to keep the pages turning more swiftly than you might have anticipated. That Suri, who is a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, draws on the excitements of karva chauth, of touching feet, of telephone calls made from the store round the corner, of marriage rituals and illnesses and Muslim divorce laws, is the surprise.

There are some nicely etched cameos too "" such as Meera's sister-in-law Sandhya, a Partition refugee who marries Arya, the Muslim-baiter and Hindu Rashtriya Manch acolyte who, later, recruits Meera and Dev's son, Ashvin, into the fold; and Hema, Dev's sister, who comes alive as a layered person who, though neither intelligent nor particularly perceptive, does not lack a certain naïve charm.

Towards the end though, Meera's winging and weeping tend to drag, and you want to tell her to stop wallowing over her adolescent son. Ashvin's flight from those closest to him because they hold him in claustrophobic thrall, is hardly unexpected, and Meera's own attempt to re-establish herself (finally, phew!) rings down the last folios on this, Suri's second in a touted trilogy. Don't read it for all the Vishnu, Shiva, Parvati, mythology eyewash, however: this is a page-turner for all the small things that warm the cockles of your heart on a winter's evening.

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THE AGE OF SHIVA

Manil Suri
Bloomsbury
Rs 495; 453 pages