The cover says it all: Greeted by a close-up of a young woman sporting a scarlet pout and fashionable sunglasses, one instantly guesses that this book is out to explore the feminine mystique of the modern Indian woman. Gajra Kottary’s new book, Girls Don’t Cry, traces the lives of three generations of women hailing from a traditional family, a family simmering with dark secrets and forbidden truths.
Amala is a small-town girl who lives in Mumbai and works in the big bad world of advertising. The fact that she wears ankle-length boots, smokes when working on a campaign and has adopted a kickass attitude towards life assures the reader that the protagonist is well entrenched in the Mumbai style of living life in the fast lane. Her live-in boyfriend, Mukul, having helped her find her feet in the city is now over-possessive about his girlfriend and exhibits pathological-level jealousy from time to time. One of the chief causes of the gent’s jealous rage is Aabhas, Amala’s gentle, poetry-spouting colleague who is secretly besotted with her but accepts the situation as it stands. The story is linear and simple so far: A loves B, B loves C and C loves only himself. So far, so good…
A tragedy of badly timed events involving all three — Amala, Mukul and Aabhas — on an anniversary evening culminates with Mukul slamming out of Amala’s house in a fury and it is left to a contrite Aabhas to get into damage control mode. Almost simultaneously, Amala receives news that her beloved grandfather has passed away and she is urgently required to be present at his funeral. Amala leaves Mumbai with a solicitous Aabhas seeing her off but not before she takes a last shot at meeting Mukul. The meeting is a miserable failure and Amala leaves for Jalandhar with a heavy heart. Mukul sees the two of them leaving his building together and his jealousy multiplies manyfold. Underlying all the tumultuous happenings is the niggling hint that all is not well between Amala and her mother, Disha.
Amala has an emotional reunion with her bereaved grandmother, Veera naanji, and even as the funeral is under way, shocking truths about her much loved grandfather tumble out. If the grandmother-granddaughter union is warm and sentimental, the mother-daughter equation continues to be icy with Amala ignoring every one of her mother’s attempts to reunite. She can never quite forget the day she caught her divorced mother in a compromising position with a male colleague. It is an uneasy household with Amala’s maternal uncle making his displeasure evident as Amala dons skimpy clothes and is caught smoking. There is a headlong clash between provincial and urban lifestyles even as the power play for the post of patriarch after the senior member’s demise rears its ugly head.
On a night of conversation and confidences, Veera naanji reveals certain happenings in her daughter Disha’s life that are unknown to Amala, truths that leave her stunned. Amala immediately sets forth on a journey of discovery and closure in an attempt to make amends for her earlier behaviour towards her loved ones. The journey brings her face to face with some key figures: her mother’s boyfriend and his daughter by marriage, her father’s daughter by his second marriage, his second wife and a vital person whom she had presumed was dead. In her efforts at excavating the past, Amala succeeds in changing the topography of her present family forever. But just as she has managed to tie up all loose ends and is getting ready to celebrate her newly-expanded family, destiny (and the gynaecologist) drops another bomb on Amala. Here is a situation that will prove to be the ultimate litmus test for the two men in her life, and reveal to her whether Mukul is her true love or Aabhas. Once again, in the face of male disapproval and social stigma, the three women — grandmother, daughter and granddaughter — join forces to meet a challenge head on.
A plot revolving around misogyny, gender politics, feticide, the feudal mindset of traditional India and the shifting nature of family relationships could have made for a powerful story, but the novel falls short due to inept handling.
Gajra Kottary is a well-known name having penned many a popular television serials and she transfers her small screen sensibilities to the novel. Consequently, there is a hurried touch to the story-telling, a distinct feeling of a 100-episode saga running on steroids so that it could be crammed into a 200-odd paged novel. With no nuances and layers to the characters, they emerge more as cardboard cut-outs rather than men and women of flesh and blood; the villains (chiefly male) are alarmingly villainous and the women, unanimously, pure as driven snow. Instead of etching everything is stark blacks and whites, a judicious use of grey would have lent the story a degree of credibility. The family atmosphere, uneasy at times and jubilant at others, is well described and Amala’s bonding with her Jalandhar cousin — pop-eyed at her urban ways — is heart-warming. The characters exhibit rather odd behaviour occasionally; people meet as strangers (Amala and her father’s second wife, Amala and her mother’s boyfriend’s daughter) and offload the story of their lives (with intimate details) within minutes of acquaintanceship. One presumes that such disconcerting behaviour could be the result of hurried story-telling. There is too much hugging, kissing, caressing, weeping and apologising happening between the female characters in general, and the syrupy nature of the reconciliations could give the reader an unpleasant sugar rush. The editing of this novel leaves a lot to be desired with typos, repetition of exact sentences and other bloopers (“the air cracked with tension”) marring the text, and then there are those lines with painful convolutions that could leave a reader totally stumped, “And also I think that the shirt you are a shirt that is the wrong size, maybe for a younger girl — it does not fit you too well”. Huh?! Readers hungering for crumbs of literary brilliance are likely to be disappointed as the prose rarely rises above the mediocre; Aabhas’ poetry makes one cringe. Without these irritants and leaving aside the overdose of mush, the story line is riveting and the book sends out a strong message of women’s emancipation. There is no effort made to whitewash the heroine who is brash, hasty in her decisions and with a penchant for disastrous behaviour and attire selection, kudos to the author for that. Disha, Aabhas, and Mukul are hazily etched figures who leave no mark on the reader but the oldest member, Veera naanji, stands out with her poise, wisdom and progressive thinking. Simplistic, dated and slightly out-of-sync with an age characterised by edgy relationships and fast living, the book charms, nevertheless. Girls Don’t Cry is strongly recommended for readers who enjoy sniffling over saccharine sentimentalism, it is strictly not prescribed for people suffering from diabetes.
Kankana Basu is a Mumbai-based writer. Her published works of fiction include a collection of short stories, Vinegar Sunday, and a novel, Cappuccino Dusk.
