Book Review | Rewriting the Aunty Code in New India

If you were to judge Anuradha Marwah’s Aunties of Vasant Kunj by its cover the way I did, you’d be sadly disappointed the way I was — at first.

Both the title of the book and its back cover blurb suggested that the story within would be light and fun, but it turned out to be the opposite. Yet, I rather enjoyed it. It’s a perspective on women that few people in India write and as an auntie myself for the last 20-odd years, it made me grin with unholy glee.

Aunties of Vasant Kunj is about three women in their late thirties, each dealing with issues they never could have imagined existing even 10 years earlier. The first and the most stereotypically auntie-like is Nilima Gandhi, a blingy woman with three bratty children, a mother-in-law from hell and an indifferent husband. But Nilima has no idea how she wound up like this. Marriage just swept her into this life, the way an earthquake might turn the whole world upside down.

Shailaja is a contract teacher at a Delhi university college and moved to Vasant Kunj after her live-in documentary filmmaker boyfriend of 13 years fell for a young actress. Shailaja has always believed she’s strong. After all, she did overcome her family’s resistance to her live-in relationship. But since then, she’s merely coasted along in her personal life and in her career. Now she has no idea how to deal with life.

Finally, there’s Dini, a single mother and a social worker. Dini’s principles have led her to believe that she’s overcome the labels that most people live by. But when she falls in love with a fellow social worker who is both poor and dalit, she begins to realise that her life is built on lies.

As residents of the building complex in Vasant Kunj, the three women know each other as neighbours. But while Nilima manages to make her life better via Buddhist chanting, Shailaja and Dini become the kind of friends who support each other through difficult times. Unfortunately, just as these two are figuring out how to work through their challenges, the author breaks into the story with a chapter on womanhood in middle age, which feels completely out of place in a work of fiction. An epilogue brings the three characters back in focus, but the momentum of the story is lost.

Still, though Aunties of Vasant Kunj will never feature on a list of the best books I ever read, I did enjoy it. It did not feel like a waste of my time.

Aunties of Vasant Kunj

By Anuradha Marwah

Rupa

pp. 295; Rs 395