Aunty Kapoor

Manju Kapur’s reviewers, like her many readers, are almost invariably women. Here’s looking at HenLit from a male perspective

The couple lay among stained sheets and rumpled quilts, eyes closed, legs twisted together like the knotted branches of a low-growing tree…

As I read the first line of Manju Kapur’s Custody, I realised I could not do this alone. Not at my age. I paced up and down, thinking of a cunning plan that might trick my senses into going through with the otherwise simple act of reading. I settled on a rum and Coke.

I’m not particularly in the mood for confessions, but here is one anyway. I am pretty familiar with what inevitably flows from a first line such as that. In my adolescence, I had access to my elder sister’s Mills & Boon collection, and even a few period romances from the likes of the formidably-named Victoria Holt. Not being a chick, however, I haven’t kept abreast of the copious chick lit that’s descended on us in the intervening years. That landslide isn’t happening on my hill.

Custody is hen lit, literature for chicks who’ve grown up, learnt to brood, dwell upon what marriage and family have done to their minds and waistlines. Lay eggs, maybe. But the same rules of writing seem to apply.

Unless legs were entwined botanically, people were not lovers. And ‘light’ must always give things a ‘bath’. Emotional distances have stellar units, referencing such rare celestial bodies as the sun and moon. The ‘sea of life’ has to be ‘stormy’. Hearts have to be ‘heavy’, and then, for emphasis, ‘leaden’. The form must be maintained even as the poor organ is failing.

As I entered the kingdom of clichés, I wondered what kind of trees had these ‘low-growing branches’. Aware that Custody had a corporate backdrop, I had jump-read part of the first line as ‘low hanging fruit…’, which execs are always so keen to get their hands on. I thought this was a bold, if slightly cruel, way to describe breasts in a lovemaking scene in this genre. But of course, I was wrong in the first place—getting ahead of myself, and the book.

So here is the story in (very) brief. A mid-level manager who works for something called The Brand (a soft drinks company that starts with ‘C’, the alias is as easy to see through as a plastic bottle) has a wife who is a composite of Aishwarya Rai and Waheeda Rahman, and two lovely children.

He also has a boss who we are told is dynamic, charismatic and a bachelor. He plucks Aishwarya Rahman (low hanging fruit, since the husband is uninteresting, and an East Delhi type) from her family’s tree in the space of a couple of coffees. They are now in love, and the battle to get the children begins. The rest of the cast is made up of in-laws, cousins, wimps and a woman with fertility issues, all of who fit neatly into stereotypes.

And this brings me to the voice. Who is telling the story?

Imagine a play being staged at your community centre, a senior citizens’ social initiative undertaken by ‘the ladies’ who are tired of playing Tambola (the more gentile name for this fine game is Housie). Aunty Kapur has written the script and will do the voiceovers, play the conscience. Aunties Malhotra, Sobti, Juneja and Vaish have the leading roles, both male and female; shorter aunties Sengupta and Aggarwal get the children’s roles.

If you are in the audience (and not on drugs) the collective camouflage of shirts, trousers, jeans, moustaches, shorts, skirts, low-cut blouses or whatever shouldn’t really prevent you from seeing the aunty underneath. At the very least, you will hear her in every character: the voice is always, unmistakably, aunty’s.

The players merely move their lips. You wish they actually spoke, because you’re stuck listening to a pretty boring ventriloquist reciting the thing.

That voice isn’t masked even in the mercifully brief dialogue about ‘hesitant’ introductions to oral sex that throw in the indelicate word ‘dick’ (employed once) or the random use of profanity (‘fuck’, said a couple of times). You always know who is doing the talking. You know because of the obvious worldview, the allergy to humour and the uncompromising banality.

Aunty Kapur doesn’t spare anyone, not even children. They have cliché nightmares (wolves), and 11-year-olds talk of upsetting ‘apple-carts’.

Withdrawn young women regard elders of the same sex as a ‘cornucopia of prying questions’. (At times like these, you feel like saying, boss, if you want to say they’re overly inquisitive, just say they ask too many questions. What is this cornucopia shit? )

Semi-finally, a young step-mother tells her little daughter: “Destiny. Nobody can change it. Yes, another woman gave you birth, yes… but now you are with me.”

Sometimes, as Stephen Fry says, there isn’t enough vomit in the world.

To the boys, then. Doon, where The Boss was school captain, is dressed up as Sanawar here (I do not know which will feel more insulted). The boy is dumped in Shivalik house, a Sanawar thing. I know a few ‘Shwalkains’ and I went to boarding school too. Although to a more Dickensian set-up than the ones mentioned, unsparing of both rod and child, where ‘Oliver aksed (sic) for more’ fairly regularly.

Boarders speak differently within months of confinement. Learn senseless chants. Like this one, from Sanawar: “Wahi guru, Wahi guru, Wahi guru bol! Vindhya House score a goal!”

Perhaps I would connect with the boarding school episode, with its special language. ‘Fagging’ wasn’t ragging where I went, it was smoking; and ‘shagging’ was a solitary activity. Our troubled hostel-returned fellow, however, started talking about upset apple-carts instead.

His step dad, The Boss, the guy who snagged the fine specimen, should logically have this (chick) magnetic field around him. Apparently, the woman he is courting is unable to ‘block off the scent of desire that rises from between (her) legs.’ It is incredible that he has this effect simply by saying “You only have one life”  (to her) and “Stuff it up your ass” (to others). In Auntyland, he may well be considered a brilliant conversationalist. In the poorest imitations of the real world, if this is what you’re working with, then you must get very, very good at leg entwinement. Or, buy Axe deo.

Custody being a study of the Indian middle-class family, we don’t really know how good The Boss is in bed. That part is touched upon but not explicit. Mrs Vaish’s lips would freeze while syncing that sort of dialogue.

I really wanted to like this book. Honest. I strip-searched it for novelty, perhaps in the modulation of voice, an interesting aside, or a twist in the plot. Even a line in the 415 pages that could reassure me that Auntyland hadn’t sentenced humour to death.

The story has a kidnapping included. That had possibilities, but not if you just say that she came and took the children. One real aunty I am acquainted with had similar problems with custody. Her children were subjected to multiple, hilarious, kidnappings by their parents. This happened an odd number of times, and she started it, she told me smiling, so the children were with her! The Lovely Detective Agency, which the wronged husband hired, had potential. The name has a recall given all the advertising by an eponymous ‘professional university’. As things go, Custody may well be considered for the literature curriculum at the institution.

Every piece of writing on broken marriage cannot, and should not, be Kramer vs Kramer. What I looked for most in this book is a story, however poorly written, with a beginning, a middle and a coherent conclusion. I was way past the middle when I realised that the only way this thing could be salvaged was by a stunning ending. The author, however, opted to not have any clear conclusion at all. This threatens the possibility of a sequel, with the same characters—played by aunties in a community centre who only move their lips—and the same ventriloquist. It is not a happy thought.

I have not read Kapur’s other work. But what concerns me about Custody is that it might just inspire the entire poultry farm to start writing, once they consult the thesaurus for ‘cornucopia’. The impression the book gives is that that’s all it takes to be a writer.

Kapur’s success with Difficult Daughters would no doubt have thrown open huge publishing possibilities for her as much as marketable clones. But on the odd occasion, it makes sense to slaughter the goose that lays the golden egg.

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