Ties that Bind

Motherhood is not always natural or fulfilling—it can be arduous, boring and often simply the wrong decision for some women. In recent years contemporary literary fiction has enthusiastically interrogated motherhood, warts and all. From the visceral experience of new mothers (Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder) to the suffocating demands of childrearing (The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante) to parental responsibility and guilt (We Need to Talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver), mothering has increasingly become the subject of rich and variegated scrutiny. In Shape of an Apostrophe, debut novelist Uttama Kirit Patel wades into similar terrain, raising questions of maternal ambivalence and daughterly guilt.

When the novel opens, Lina Solanki, a 32-year-old Dubai-based brand manager, is grieving her beloved father, the single parent who raised her. When she unexpectedly becomes pregnant, Solanki finds herself smack bang at a fork in the road. Abort the foetus or choose to give birth? “As if she should want them by default,” Lina thinks of babies. She does not “ache to procreate, had no longing for that place within herself others seemed to have colonised with expectant enthusiasm”.

Parenting was never part of her life plan but jettisoning the baby does not feel that easy either. To complicate matters, her husband Ishaan is keen on children, and doesn’t know she is pregnant.

Shape of an Apostrophe is set in a wealthy enclave where fabulous housewives wear expensive jewels and are waited on by a retinue of staff. Lina and Ishaan live with his parents, the Hiranis, who have built their wealth off the diamond business. Lina’s mother-in-law, Meenakshi, who likes to be called Aunty M, believes “there is no more important job than being a mother”. Aunty M is not above rummaging through the trash or rifling through drawers to keep tabs on her daughter-in-law. Meanwhile, fearful of upsetting his mother, Ishaan has been delaying their move from his parents’ home to their own place.

Life in the Hirani villa is a series of indignities and negotiations for Lina. In the expat bubble, the patriarchy is intact.

Patel gives Lina an unusual backstory—a dead mother, a male domestic servant who practically raised her—and an interiority that ably reflects her growing dilemmas. Yes, she loves her husband, but can she really afford to share the truth with him? Her father was wonderful, but was there something else lurking beneath their harmonious relationship? Much of the novel is steered from Lina’s perspective, with occasional chapters through the eyes of the others. There is a throbbing secret that burns brightly at the novel’s centre which will torpedo Lina’s life by the end. But the engine room of the narrative emerges from within: Lina’s conflicted feelings and increasingly complicated family life.

Patel, born to Gujarati parents, has lived in the UAE, US and UK and has worked as a journalist, editor and education consultant. The novel is readable, even though it sags in places. Patel makes a sincere effort to ask the big feminist questions bedevilling a certain kind of educated, urbane, sexually liberated 30-something Indian woman. But the novel gets derailed by cliches and missteps. It falls into a few traps of the diaspora novel of a certain vintage: descriptions of spices (“saffron, ground pistachios, and a pinch of cinnamon which she revealed as the mystery ingredient”) and rituals (“the sandalwood incense, the stupid hairy coconut”). The cunning mother-in-law avoids turning into a caricature, but the other characters feel undercooked: the spineless husband, the sassy best friend, the devoted domestic staffer. That man, called Raja, would have been served better had he not been stuck spouting broken English. “Not to mind… Your papa is being happy your news” he says at one point; and then later, “special powder for baby to make strong”. Novels featuring Indians who speak other languages can surely do better than this.

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