Most of us long to be swept away and live passionate lives! Yet, when life shows up the dents in the road, the roadblocks, we feel dejected. We want to find love and passion at a safe distance and in small doses, so that we can sip them slowly till life ebbs away. That’s why so many of us are drawn to soap operas, celebrity love affairs and juicy stories. We choose to believe passion is wild, over the top, chaotic and indulgent. That passion is running naked with the wolves... Manju Kapur’s latest novel is woven of the everyday fabric about everyday people who live routine humdrum lives, not unlike ours. This is the predictable story of Raman and Shagun, till Shagun meets Raman’s boss Ashok, who is the face of that unpredictable passion. Their illicit relationship, his corporate image, his success, their lovemaking, their risk, his embrace, his power over her, that passionate impulse that resonates and lives through all lovers damages her marriage and causes havoc in Raman’s life and that of their children, Arjun and Roohi. “When she turned inwards where her life was waiting to be examined, she blamed Raman for her predicament, thinking of the years she had been satisfied with his lovemaking, tender, attentive, pedestrian, as so much wasted time... Now the destroyer was in her heart, threatening what she had once held dear. All her energy was spent in keeping secrets...” Ashok the alpha male, corporate success story, whiz kid, and a threateningly attractive single man, lead Shagun to that head-on collision between desire and duty. We are the choices we make, and Shagun struggling to keep passion alive and be a good mother at the same time, comes across as full bodied. Raman as the slighted husband, however, falls short of gaining the reader’s sympathy, even though he is a pained husband and father. “At the end of it all Raman recognised neither himself nor Shagun. His love for his wife was lost in a maze of lies that infected even him. To mourn for a woman whose life could be constructed in this way was to reveal all the hidden ugliness beneath the beautiful exterior...” Raman treated his life, his work, his marriage, his children in a brusque way. Moving through them sometimes almost like a stranger, so that the desire of wanting to engage deeply became an obsession, branching out like a choking vine on his life. He turns to Ishita, the loveless, luckless woman whose marriage had turned her into “a non-person, certainly a non-woman”. Both Ishita and Raman fell into a relationship to salvage what shreds of self-esteem and sanity they had left. Since both society and the legal system were cruel to them, Raman was “ashamed of his devotion to his wife, so little had it been returned. In future he would be a different person, harder, wilier, less easy to deceive”. Some cameos in Custody are heartrending, like Ishita hanging onto Roohi, mothering her, nurturing the child she never had. Mrs Kaushik, Raman’s mother, “Her hackles rose, her eyes gleamed, and the knife she had in her heart, so far too little used, came out”. The supporting characters play their part, lending layers to the story which is slow and a bit long. It is a simple story told straight, in a language comfortable to all, of lives in cities... a paper thin construct of deceptions and differing expectations. There is a recurring theme of relationships in all of Manju Kapur’s novels, as if the protagonist, always the quiet, convent-educated woman, will one day dangle off the side of a cliff when she confronts marriage and love. Or the lack of it. Or the search for it. The heroines who live through her stories lose themselves, not all at once, but day by day through the maze of marriage and its trappings. The starting point is always marriage. Then motherhood, then the commotion, crisis, confusion and chaos of losing and finding one’s own identity. Difficult Daughters was well written, had all the little signals that mark us for life. An everyday cameo of life well stitched together. A Married Woman had a broader canvas in that the heroine who had a marriage that was peeling and fading in public view forced herself to find love in a lesbian relationship. The protagonist who asked so little from life and excused so much learned to hide her stalking shame in loving another woman. Characters like that who live and lie every day in little ways are real and fragile. But the supporting characters in this novel fell into a predictable pattern, as if the author was loathe to deviate from the norm. Custody too falls into a predictable pattern. Now that Manju Kapur has established her readership, she could try going beyond the woman who always makes others comfortable, leaving nothing for herself but a spiky corner. The reader would happily travel with her to other shores, zig-zag across India, even as far as the backwaters of Kerala (maybe) in the quest for love. Forcing ourselves out of our comfort zone and backpacking could throw up a story twice its size.
Bubbles Sabharwal is a well-known theatre personality and writer
