<b>UNACCUSTOMED HEARTH</b>

The Immigrant
Manju Kapur
Random House India, Rs 395
Manju Kapur travels to the 1970s Delhi and the loneliness of its displaced women

Manju kapur’s novels are about women trying to build lives for themselves, within or outside the conventional family life. Her first novel, Difficult Daughters, set in pre-Independence India, was the story of a spirited woman caught between her head and heart. In A Married Woman, the woman protagonist rebels against the hypocrisies of her conventional middle-class life. Kapur’s third and finest novel, Home, is the story of a Karol Bagh family and how the life of a beloved daughter was scarred without their knowledge.
Her latest, The Immigrant, opens with Nina, a college teacher, celebrating her thirtieth birthday, but celebrating is not quite the right word, for both she and her mother are weighed down by the burden of her unmarried state. But that is soon to change: an astrologer is consulted, an alliance received, a match made. Ananda is an NRI dentist, practising in the Canadian town of Halifax. Marriage lets Nina escape life in the mid-1970s India where free speech is under attack, but married life in a new country brings its own difficulties of communication. With problems in their sexual life, no child to channel their dissatisfaction and a growing rift between them, husband and wife turn to other pursuits. Nina joins a women’s group; Ananda has an extramarital affair.

The Immigrant is about the loneliness of an entire generation of women who went as wives of Indian men who had immigrated in the ’70s. They faced a double loneliness: “If work exists for her, it is in the future, and after much finding of feet. At present all she is, is a wife, and a wife is alone for many, many hours. There will come a day when even books are powerless to distract. When the house and its conveniences can no longer completely charm or compensate. Then she realises she is an immigrant for life.”
The part of the novel set in Canada is somewhat uneven, with some sections reading more like research; but Kapur’s keen eye for middle-class atmosphere brings the 1970s Delhi to life. No detail is too small to mention, no space too cramped for understanding laced with gentle irony. The price of mangoes, the dal for the dahi bhallas, the bumpy taxi ride; the stray remark, the innuendo, the tiny barb that finds its target with implacable accuracy. Every day, after a 20-km bus journey, Nina returns to the tiny Jangpura Extension house that she shares with her mother. With its “sagging iron gate and scraggly lemon tree”, its dreary concrete space, and front steps that provide the only extra seating for a mother and a daughter who have come down in life, the flat is too small for their dreams and desires: for Nina’s mother, fretting away with worry about her daughter’s declining marriage prospect; and for Nina, weighed down by the burden of her mother’s sorrows as well as her own solitary status.
The apartment in Halifax is larger, with softer pillows and springier mattress, but also emptier: “There was nothing to disturb her. No landlord, no sound of traffic, no vendors, no part-time help to clean and swab, no mother who chatted while she worked.” And there is just one book in the apartment, a Canadian novel that Nina finishes in two days. When she wants more reading material and Ananda tells her to watch TV in the meantime, we get a hint of what is to come: “Nina had never watched TV in her life. She required the printed word to fill the spaces in her mind, the leisured turning of pages, the slow absorption of words, the occasional rereading. She wondered whether this suggested some rigidity of outlook.”
The reading life actually plays a critical part in Kapur’s novels. Her female protagonists read, introspect, question and sometimes find answers. In Halifax, Nina misses the sustenance that teaching and reading had given her — until she discovers the local library and decides to study library science. This decision gives her an identity other than that of the Indian dentist’s wife.

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