Treading the beaten track

The small circle of the wedding band and the slightly larger perimeter of the jaymala encompasses a mini-universe of writing on the subject of marriage, Indian-style.

Jaishree Mishra came before the Kavita Daswanis and the Cauvery Madhavans, opening her oeuvre promisingly with the three-hankie-weepie (happy ending, however, guaranteed) Ancient Promises.

It's best to draw a discreet veil over the novel that followed, Accidents Like Love and Marriage, which wasn't so much an accident as a full-blown disaster.

Mishra's attempt at social comedy fell flatter than an eggless Gobi Manchurian souffle, and the peek into Delhi's drawing rooms told us nothing that the worst of Page 3 hadn't already revealed.

The new Nancy Mitford, suitably redefined for Indian conditions, still seems elusive; we don't even have a desi Diane Johnson yet.

Johnson's contribution to the genre of social comedy was to dust off the old tale of Americans in Paris, and to repackage the well-worn groove of trials and tribulations within the ties that bind and gag as three crisp novels: Le Mariage, L'Affaire and Le Divorce.

In some editions, these are not packaged in the shrieking pink cover with lipstick scrawl that seems to have become the default design template for 'women's novels'.

Neither is Mishra's Afterwards, which eschews fuschia and other shades of pink for a Serious Cover, an indication that she's not fooling around any more.

And Afterwards sidesteps the whole formula of boy-meets-girl, boy-marries-girl, girl-beats-wings-against-bars-of-gilded-cage quite neatly, running a set of variations on that tired theme instead.

Just a statutory warning, though: beware of all novels where the heroine's name is Maya. The novelist will usually tell you that 'Maya' means illusion, and the plot will usually turn on this squeaky pivot in one way or another.

It's enough to make you yearn for the days when heroines were called Labanya or Hemangini or something a little less open to obvious symbolism.

Mishra begins her story in the winter of a great romance; Maya is dead; her erstwhile lover, Rahul, is looking back at the past unable to free himself from the grip of a terrible sadness.

The last rites for Maya have been performed twice; once when she actually died, once three years before that event, in a rite of excommunication carried out by her family.

As Mishra fills out the tale, invoking destiny and fate as well as happenstance and chance, we learn that Maya and Rahul met accidentally, that he helped her flee a claustrophobic marriage almost equally accidentally, and that they settled down in a new country, to a new life, with as little planning on either side.

The romance between them is sketched in quick, nostalgic lines; the meat of the book concerns a different kind of loss, when Rahul is faced with losing not just Maya but her child as well.

Anjali is not his daughter but he feels he has more claim to her than Maya's husband, Govind, ever did. Legally, though, he has no place in her life and just as the first part of the book is driven by accidental forces, the second part is driven by the need for acceptance.

But to a great extent, Mishra is doing no more than mining her old sources. The spectre of the Pulayil Varmas, the 'illustrious clan from which Maya hailed', is a faint ghost of the Marars in Ancient Promises ""a family that destroys not by being overwhelmingly bad, but by insisting on a suffocating rigidity.

The halcyon days Maya, Rahul and Anjali spend in London as a nuclear family clinging to their bubble of separateness mirror the happiness felt by the protagonists of Ancient Promises when they finally escape, and Govind, the pursuing husband insistent on his rights, could be the twin of the husband in the earlier book, no more than slightly faded.

The difference is that the 'happily ever after' in the first novel was meant to last; this happy ending has an ominous question mark hanging over it.

Mishra's prose has matured, and she tells her story simply and evocatively. But this novel, like so many kindred books, raises almost as many questions as it answers.

For decades, male critics and writers have sneered at the 'domestic' novels and the narrowness of its concerns: the truly big themes, they imply, are to be found on the battlefield, in the workplace, in the pages of history.

Traditional 'women's narratives' retaliate by implying that good prose need not consist just of sound and fury: who was the greater writer, Dickens, with his knobbly characters and his soapbox oratory about social causes, or Austen, with her two inches of ivory so deftly covering the inner lives of the inhabitants of a blinkered world?

Perhaps it's not the subject that matters so much as what the writer does with it, and here while Afterwards tries hard enough, it never ventures out of its well-worn rut.

Mishra explores the dilemmas of her male narrator with great sensitivity, but this is not a story you'll remember for more than half an hour after you've set the book down.

She's created a lengthy meditation on loss and recovery, on the fact that lives must continue even after being shattered. But there are few new insights here, and her characters stay with us only as long as the book is open.

The problem with most Indian novels that centre around relationships like marriage is that they do no more than hold up a mirror in which readers can, if they so choose, identify their own reflections.

Very few writers can capture the angles and surprises, the quirks and peculiar satisfactions of a relationship that requires two people to create an intimate world of their own.

Carol Shields had this ability, and so did John Updike, who created an unforgettable portrait of a certain kind of suburban American marriage in Couples.

Mishra has the skills to get there; but in order to do that, perhaps she needs to jettison the one story she seems to need to tell, over and over, in only slightly different form. The saddest thing about Afterwards is that it could have been written by anyone; it has no signature, no aftertaste.

Afterwards

Jaishree Mishra
Penguin India
Pages: 276
Price: Rs 250