The Private Life of Mrs Sharma by Ratika Kapur
At first blush Renuka Sharma seems like a docile Indian wife. For an American audience uninformed about changing India she is practically a caricature. She is a dutiful mother and daughter-in-law, living in a one-bedroom flat with her teenage son and her husband’s parents as he works in Dubai as a physical therapist.
She shares her husband’s goal of saving enough money to have their own place.
But this is the new India.
The modern, developing India.
The India of aspirations.
She may be a living a traditional life but she is also living an aspirational life.
She works outside the home as a receptionist to a famous Delhi doctor and she has aspirations to be office manager.
She aspires to have her own training academy one day for “Office Management, Computer Proficiency, Personality Development and Grooming, Business English, everything.”
She takes pride in the new modern development of her city, of the brand new Delhi airport she muses “Terminal 3 is well and truly something that our nation should be proud of, like the Taj Mahal or Rashtrapathi Bhavan (home of the Indian President).”
Imagining her teenage son growing up to take an office job "in one of those very modern new buildings in Guragon" was “the picture that would bring me peace and allow me three or four hours of sleep.”
She is in awe of “the thinnest laptop I have ever seen in my whole life.”
In short, Renuka is in pursuit of the Indian Dream.
She rides the brand new Delhi metro to work and that is where she meets Vineet who chivalrously intercedes when some boor interrupts her in the ladies line at the metro stop.
She sees Vineet several more times at the stop before they start to talk. She projects upon him the India of her aspirations. “I thought that he worked in office, some fancy air-conditioned office with cubicles and carpets in one of those new steel and glass buildings.”
Soon she is sipping coffees at the local Barista and they have become friends.
Even in modern India, such a friendship might be considered a revolutionary act for a married woman. But she sees herself as living the life of a modern woman “It is the twenty-first century. Even a good woman can be friends with a man.”
In Ratika Kapur’s new book, The Private Life of Mrs Sharma, Kapur grapples with the contradictions of modern India, where old social mores clash like tidal waves against the newly constructed edifice of India today.
Renuka is looking for a way out of her current circumstances. “Poverty is a type of punishment. And like so many other families, the poverty that my family suffers from is punishment for a crime that we did not commit. It is a jail, a jail. “
But therein lies the conundrum, Renuka repeatedly reminds the reader that the temptation she is exposed to in the world outside, her path out of that jail, is not at odds with who she is, a traditional woman “I am thirty-seven years of age and a married lady. I am a respectable married lady who hails from a good family, and I have a child and respectable job, and a mother-in-law and father-in-law. I am not a schoolgirl.”
Yet somehow, she has become friends with a younger man, single, and as aspirational as Renuka herself, but they only have “become something that is a little bit like friends, and that is all.”
Herein lies the appeal and the pathos of Renuka. Her conflict is real and her ability to justify her actions are completely reasonable.
The book oscillates between her defensiveness about her wifely role and her ability to defend her actions as she has a small taste of life outside the confines of her prescribed life.
In this first person narrative Renuka is trying to convince you the reader, that everything is fine, she is just friends with Vineet and this does not really interfere with her other life. She’s like that friend who is smart and analytical and uses those skills to justify heading down a path that you sense is not going to end well.
Spending time with Vineet provides an escape from her jail. He works at a boutique hotel and when she visits she is mesmerized by the luxury. She goes to the mall “not to buy things, but to find peace.”
Her time with Vineet is like a vacation, where she can forget every part of her challenging life as a wife with a husband gone for eighteen months and counting, a mother of a recalcitrant teenaged son, and care giver of aging in-laws. These brief interludes seem to be enough for her. When Vineet suggests that he wants to take her away, on an actual vacation, she wants to shout “this was already a holiday for me, these moments alone with him, away from all my problems.”
Of course her parallel lives are fated to collide. Kumar deftly manages the unravelling of Renuka’s carefully constructed but separate identities. As a reader you are holding on to the idea that she can still work it out but as Renuka counts the days until her husband’s return for a visit home, that seems more and more of a challenge. Without giving away too much it is fair to say that the reader will be captivated by Renuka’s continued examination of her predicament and how to manage it.
As her prescribed life as a wife, and all that entails, hangs precariously in the balance and as she sheds the invisible cloak of docility to become a bold woman she questions the whole notion of being bold. “What is a bold woman? What does she do? Isn’t she just a person who, like the men around her, does certain things without feeling scared.”
Author Ratika Kapur has introduced us to a woman who turns out to be fearless in ways you least expect. And for all that you have heard about the explosive economic development in India, Kumar also introduces us to the inevitable social changes that come with that development and its profound impact on a culture that doesn’t quite know how to handle it yet.
BEFORE YOU READ:
Length: 185 pages
Genre: Fiction
Themes: independence, female identity, relationships, social change
Commitment: Short in length, long in staying power and impact.
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