House of Spirits

“One may as well begin with Helen’s letters to her sister.

“Howards End,

“Tuesday.”

 These are the opening lines of EM Forster’s Howards End, a novel about conflicting cultural conventions in Edwardian England, a penetrating exploration of lives lived in different social registers and internal rhythms. At the heart of the novel, amidst the symphony of events and the discordance of fates and attitudes, is the house itself—Howards End. At the end of Forster’s novel, the house survives but one is left with an uneasy awareness that its time will soon be over. The era has turned.

 Aruna Chakravarti’s latest novel Suralaskmi Villa begins with the imminent death of the eponymous house, poised precariously between a fraught past and an uncertain future.Suralakshmi Villa is temporally and spatially dense, moving between and through intertwined lives and historical moments, individual stories and entangled histories, exceptional trajectories and ordinary tragedies. 

 It is the spirit of Suralakhmi, the chief protagonist of the novel, a doctor by profession and the second of five daughters of Indranath Choudhury (who belongs to a patriarchal kulin Brahmin family of Bengal), that pervades and permeates Suralakshmi Villa. When Indranath’s eldest daughter becomes a widow at a tender age, after only ten months of marriage, his wife, deep with grief and anger, extracts a promise from him. She forbids him to push their other four daughters into arranged marriages and demands that they all be educated, independent and enabled to make their life choices. The year is 1931, when educating daughters to become financially empowered was not the norm, and marriage was considered an inescapable destiny for women. Brought up in Delhi, all five daughters of Indranath choose their futures and inherit an independent villa each, left to them by Indranath. The eldest, a severe and cold widow, is committed to a life-long project of running a home for destitute women. Suralakshmi, the brightest of them all, becomes a gynecologist, and is the primary care-giver of her grief-stricken mother and later, her ageing father. The other three are self- serving but independent minded women who balance their professional lives and predictable marriages. Indranath, the most materially successful and intellectually evolved member of the Choudhury clan decides to adopt his motherless nephew Pratul, the sole male heir of the clan; and rescues him from the decadent, ritual-ridden family and its brutalities. True to his abilities and character, Pratul goes on to become a success and is married to the loving and sensitive Tara who is Suralakshmi’s closest friend and confidante.   

The unfolding history of the kulin Choudhury family is inter-cut with that of Moinuddin’s and his four daughters’—their desperate poverty in ironic contrast to the names they bear—that of queens and princesses. In a nondescript village in the Malda district of Bengal, these four Muslim girls with distinct characters and voices, tell their tales of struggles, stifled aspirations, and inevitable providence. In a masterful narrative move, Chakravarti weaves the stories of these two families, one upper-caste, upper-class Hindu, and the other, desperately poor Muslim clan, sutured by fortuitous happenstance and mirroring arcs. The novel is non linear with multiple narrators whose lives are determined and interconnected by choices and constraints. Like her other novels, Chakravarti gives voice to women—those stories that remain unnoticed or lost in  the archives of familial, social and national grand narratives.

The crisis in the novel is precipitated by Suralakshmi’s decision, at the age of 31, to marry an already married man Moinak, 18 years her senior, who has a wife and four children. Suralakshmi is an extraordinary character—strong, unbending and ethically motivated. Tara invites Sura to join her for a month-long cruise on the Ganges through Plassey, Murshidabad, and Malda— where Bengal’s once rich ancient, medieval and modern histories, its glories and ruins, are veneered over with contemporary neglect. This trip might, Tara believes, make Sura rethink her disastrous decision. The many stories that the touring family (and the reader) hears from strangers and guides allude to a communally syncretic culture which is our collective inheritance; and that we are in danger of losing. This syncretism is narratively achieved by juxtaposing the life-stories of the Muslim and Hindu families which come together by a quirk of fate when Suralakshmi, during a brief sojourn in Malda, decides to adopt Eidun, the sexually abused and battered second daughter of Moin-uddin, the domestic tyrant. Unlike her sisters who battle convention and cruelty in their home and marriages, Eidun’s life is transformed after she comes to live with Sura in Delhi, in Suralakshmi Villa.

 In a series of mirroring events and characters, the novel creates a complex tapestry of lives that are tied together by emotions and conventions, cruelties and redemptions, fates and deliberations. In Moinak we see the corruptions of Moinuddin, and in his first wife we see the desperation of Ruksana. The novel is not about heroic acts but about the human condition, where the weak can show strength and the strong have vulnerabilities, which is the defining sensibility of the work. As Sura walks out of Suralaksmi Villa with Eidun, leaving her son with Moinak and his suffering first wife, to lead a life of penitence and service in Malda, for the first time we hear the story of the house in her own voice, as an objective witness to the vagaries of her inhabitants. A house is a living entity—with feelings and memory, love and longing. Sura’s son Kingshuk, a sensitive man, with his own frailties and psychological burdens, forfeits his ownership of the villa, which is left to him by his mother to ensure his legitimacy as the son of a bigamous father. The new owners, Kingshuk’s step-brothers, decide to demolish the house and convert it into an apartment complex. And the house does not protest.  There will be a corner yet for her with Deepa, Kingshuk’s mild-mannered but resilient wife. In her farewell song the house says: ‘Somewhere, in the huge gleaming apartment complex that will stand in the place where I stood once, there will be a niche for me. Where Deepa will live. Where, who knows, Suralakshmi may come back again…’

The author of the novel Aruna Chakravarti, winner of the prestigious Sahitya Akademi award and many international and national accolades, has surpassed herself in her latest creation.  As the world begins to look dangerously monochromatic, tensions between communities rise to a destructive pitch, and the filiations between peoples and their shared histories are steadily erased, a novel like Suralakhmi Villa reminds us that we can only be human together. This is our story. Only connect.

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