The real deal

This elegant novel about young people in Delhi is a quietly subversive commentary on urban Indian life—and one of the most original voices in recent Indian fiction

Tender, acute and pulsing with real Indian life, Close to Home is the tale of Mrinalini, a young woman who floats through a life of privilege—in the tradition of many a south Delhi lovely—with flashes of concern for those on its margins. One of these outliers is Jahanara, dear friend and would-be lover, a useful foil and counterpart. It all begins with a small, affectionate kiss between the two young women in their Jangpura barsati full of soupy Maggi and idly puffed marijuana, the playful imagining of a future together— more seriously conceived by the besotted Jahanara— and then a casual betrayal: ‘Since it was clear as a blinding June afternoon to anyone except Jahanara that Mrinalini wasn’t throwing her eggs into any kind of lesbian basket, ever, Mrinalini hardly thought it necessary to mention that she was also going down to call Siddhartha.’ Young urban utopia was never so carelessly dismissed.

A few months later the dotcom Mrinalini thought of joining goes down, Siddhartha returns from England—as always just the right height (5 foot 10) for her to rest her head on his shoulder and she decides to moot all her lazily considered options (publishing, journalism, advertising) and settle down with this nice boy with the nice (albeit termite-ridden) Jor Bagh house. She is won over by how he won’t flaunt his privilege, how ‘his light brown eyes brimmed with a nameless, ahistoric, empathy—particularly when he bought, like everyone else, his cigarettes by the stick and drank cheap, warm beer from the bottle’. Of course, this doesn’t mean Siddhartha won’t tease her, though winningly, about the awful hooch she drank with her old girlfriend in their den of iniquity (‘Whitehorse is not a nice whisky’). Meanwhile, Jahanara takes up with queer groups and the PhD world, dismissing romantic love as bourgeois, heterosexist, politically regressive and making do with ‘a girl who liked to fuck Jahanara but not only Jahanara, abjuring as she did not only marriage and family but also monogamy’.

Five years later the girls meet and all is not lost, though Mrinalini worries Siddhartha will dismiss her friend (‘JNU?’) and, awfully, asks Jahanara if her new girl is ‘a real lesbian’. Jahanara is understandably furious—‘Do you want me to take out my lesbian handkerchief? Oh, but wait! Will it fit your big straight nose?’—and Mrinalini is left yearning for her one-time intimate, even as she continues to enjoy the absolute love of her amiable husband. Only the blank Word document of her unembarked-on novel haunts her, and the consideration of the value of money in her drifting life, when her husband leaves his job: ‘With all this time and freedom at their disposal, how would it hurt to splurge a little less on whatever citronella-scented establishment serving dainty helpings of water-chestnuts by another name surfaced in South Delhi next? But by the time Siddhartha returned, she wasn’t sure whether to curse or console him—him and all his eating-out-at-home business. Well now she knew, didn’t she: they couldn’t afford the real thing.’ The commentary is sweetly perceptive in these moments of self-realisation, and relentlessly honest about the economics of choice.

Of course, after Siddhartha considers cooking classes and other Renaissance man options, privilege asserts itself and his father finds a government position for him at the Planning Commission. All is well for a while. But when Mrinalini begins to take Anjali—the maid Beena and cook Chhote Lal’s little daughter—on bored excursions in the inlaws’ old Maruti 800 and an interest in her education, real trouble begins to brew: where do the lines between the woman of the house and her help blur? When Chhote Lal gets into a fight over his wife’s suspected infidelity and his employer has to intervene in an all-too-familiar scenario, this upper middle-class household finds its casual balance upset.

Little Anjali has been given the run of the television in her memsahib’s bedroom, enjoying the Little Ganesh show that causes Mrinalini embarrassment and making Siddharth wrinkle his nose at her smelly hair oil. Suspicious, Beena is convinced her mistress is just trying to fill the space of the child she won’t have. But how can she ever broach the subject with her employer? And so, the young couple, possessed of a comfortable sex life and great camaraderie, begin to quarrel over class and caste, facing up to the sociopolitical reality of modern life in India. Even they, cocooned as they are from the world, cannot deny society its way with them.

And others notice. Jahanara surfaces, only to return to her allotted corner. Brajeshwar, their tenant, who tells his Aurangzeb story at every dinner party, puts the couple into his own book, making Mrinalini wonder yet again what the world thinks of her; she herself hasn’t quite figured out.

‘Caste is fraught’, his book begins, telling of his encounter with a ‘dark young student of Political Science… dressed in the kind of shiny, tight-fitting T-shirt favoured only by the very poor and the very ironic… Rakesh—that could easily have been his name’. The Brahmin-hater, whose poetry ‘sucked’, is quoted extensively: ‘Today one fellow says we are living in a “post-caste society”. I said, you’re living inside your own asshole, bhai. Look around. They’ve made Mayawati “reactionary”, that is the latest. Arre, you can’t take it if a Dalit has a handbag?’ The man is lying about various caste-related woes, Brajeshwar asserts in his book, moving to Simran and Raj (the Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge reference is intentionally snide, Mrinalini is sure), the fictionalised versions of his landlords, who he says tiptoe around caste like an NRI introducing ‘a white girl to green chutney’. ‘Raj’ says, ‘India was littered with crutches and anyone—anyone who wanted—could stand up and walk’; perhaps one of the book’s most topical messages. And ‘Simran’ says if he is ‘going to be involved [he] should be responsible’. The situation in her own home has dissipated, but in a way that leaves us in no doubt that ‘responsibility’ is much more complicated than anyone wants to admit.

Parvati Sharma, a journalist, is also the author of a quiet short story collection (The Dead Camel and other Stories) that earned her a niche cult following four years ago, if more GaysiFamily (a queer desi forum) than Literary Foundation of India (a private literary club in Delhi). Earning praise from the likes of Girish Karnad with her debut, she has grown into a mature voice of her own. Her eye for the fine lines of relationships is superb, as is her gentle laughing at our vulnerabilities and keen ear for young Indian concerns and idioms. Most of all, her ability to wryly question every underpinning of our quasi-feudal yet modernising society is unsurpassed. Everyone has their India book, of late more likely to use the voice of the underdog to tell the nation’s story; Booker prize- winning The White Tiger, for example, which did not quite manage to translate class authentically. Sharma manages to use the voice of the elite to tell that story more convincingly.

Only the book’s length—it has the potential a larger book might have made even more use of—takes away from its success, though perhaps the author, wonderfully spare, has kept her lessons brief and poignant on purpose, making big game of the small story. Close to Home brings us one of the most authentic voices in Indian English literature of late.

EXCERPT

The quarter’s door was closed – foolish idea in stuffy weather – and Mrinalini stood a moment, debating what to do. The low mumble of Chhote Lal’s voice filtered through the wood and since Beena seemed to offer no audible rejoinders, Mrinalini thought there was no harm in hurrying the process along a bit, and raised her hand to knock.

As if on cue, Beena spoke up.

“Bastard! Drunken bastard! So easy to fall at your bhaiyya’s feet! So easy to get rid of me! Murderer! You think I don’t know what you’re planning! What does it seem to you? I don’t know what your plan is?”

If Chhote Lal tried to interject, he wasn’t successful.

“You think you’ll get rid of me so easy? Bastard! Only you can talk-talk to your memsahib on the phone? Who gave you that phone, haan? Get rid of me, keep your money, then what-what – you’ll get a new woman? You think it’s so easy? Falling here and there from drinking! Do you have any shame left? Any izzat? Bastard, say, why are you silent now? Shall I give you the phone to cry into? What stories you told! Putting me to work, giving your daughter as a toy to your owners! Haan?

“And your great didi! What, she can’t have her own, so she’ll snatch at mine? Whenever she wants, Anjali come here, whenever she wants, Anjali go away – and you show your teeth like a monkey! Did you tell her, who will pay this month’s fee? All forgotten after two months of playing no? You and your didi – what a jodi!”

Mrinalini, her legs paralysed and her cheeks burning, might have stood there indefinitely if an elderly neighbour hadn’t shouted across the wall in tones as stentorian as Beena’s were wild. “Quiet!” said the voice. “This is a shareef area, not some mohalla! Quiet!”

Close to HomeParvati Sharma