The House of Hidden Mothers by Meera Syal
Shyama is a 48-year-old divorced British-Indian business woman, lucky to have found love again after her disastrous first marriage. Her lover, Toby, is 14 years her junior and is white. Although she has a 19-year-old daughter, Tara, from her first marriage, she desperately wants to have a child with Toby. At her latest appointment at a fancy and discreet fertility clinic she gets the bad news that she has an “inhospitable womb.”
Soon Shyama is convinced that the only root to go is surrogacy and the core of the novel concerns itself with the emotional, psychological and exploitative challenges of “renting” a womb.
Mala, is a bright and ambitious young Indian woman living in a village married to a man who cares not for their relationship. The promise of pursuing an education was thwarted by the early death of Mala’s father and she was “lucky” to have found a husband who would marry her without an extortionate dowry. Soon, following the example of a village neighbor, husband Ram realizes the potential riches available to Indian women who act as surrogate mothers and Mala is set on a collision course with Shyama.
In this thoroughly engaging and compellingly written novel Syal takes on India’s newest lucrative business, international surrogacy, still largely unregulated there. But that’s not all she deals with. The book concerns itself with a whole host of issues – divorce; the emotional rollercoaster of teenaged kids; the biological clock; aging; inter-racial relationships; land disputes and corruption in India; rape and sexual assault; female friends; parents getting old; May-December romances; liberation and opportunity.
Phew, that’s a lot to cover but in the deft hands of Meera Syal it works because it reflects real life – we are never ever dealing with one thing at a time in our lives and the cast of characters in The House of Hidden Mothers reflects that juggle of everyday life.
Shyama’s parents Prem and Sita are two beautifully drawn characters, supportive of their daughter while not fully understanding how her life turned out quite this way. Their lives are lived in close proximity to their daughter and granddaughter, literally as they live in a house that abuts the bottom of Shyama’s garden. They have harbored a desire to live part of the year in an apartment in India that they have owned for more than a decade but are involved in a long drawn out legal case to throw out the current occupants, a family relative who was only supposed to stay for a short while. The case would do Jarndyce vs Jarndyce proud, the constant corruption that has foiled their efforts have taken a toll. This storyline is richly told, with a level of authenticity I was completely convinced by. This is an all too common story amongst the middle and upper classes in India, the removal of “upmarket squatters,” something I have seen in my own family and Syal writes as if from first-hand experience. Shyama is enraged by the treatment of her parents by “so-called” family members. As a British born and bred Indian, this is part of her heritage that she cannot wrap her arms around.
The surrogacy story is a complex one. Shyama herself is clearly conflicted by going down this road, something that was “a business transaction, fundamentally. Money made it possible, money was the incentive. Supply and demand, the basis for all successful trading, India had fertile poor women; Britain and American and most places west of Poland had wealthy infertile women. It had begun with companies moving their call centres towards the rising sun, so what was wrong with outsourcing babies there too, when at the end of the process there was a new human being and a woman with financial independence? It was a win-win situation wasn’t it?”
Older daughter Tara is a roiling cauldron of hormones, incensed that her mother would want to have a baby at her age, and also trying to figure out her own Indian identity and her activism in support of exploited women.
That exploitation is not lost on Shyama herself “What would they think of her now, her old lefty student friends, coming back as a fertility tourist? Was she now the colonial memsahib? The benevolent bringer of bounty or the ruthless trader, smiling her way back home?”
If the owner of the surrogacy clinic, Dr. Renu Passi, has any qualms, she is quick to justify the positive side of the work she is doing, bestowing a new child on to a family that desperately wants one, and economic freedom to the women who carry the child. “In wasn’t so very different from the people whom Dr Passi’s own parents had used to pay to queue up for them in interminable lines at post offices, bank counters and government offices. Time is money, hena, so if you have the money to save some time, spend it on those who don’t mind doing the running around and form-filling and are themselves making a living in the process. Everyone gets what they want and the wheels of this flourishing industry keep on turning happily.”
Syal’s portrayal of Mala is particularly effective in demonstrating the ambivalence of this business. She is not painted as a weak pawn being used by her greedy husband and the needy surrogate parents. She is discovering her own liberation, she is brought to the city, she reads and explores and through a plot twist ends up going to England with Shyama and Toby for the duration of the pregnancy. Her world is opened up by being part of this business and she sees an opportunity to direct her own destiny. Many feminists might see Mala’s plight as the continued exploitation of women, but Mala’s only reference point is her life in the village and the possibilities presented to her now.
For those of you unfamiliar with Meera Syal she is a true renaissance woman. A British actor/comedian/writer she was one of the earliest and most successful artists to draw upon the British Asian experience as part of mainstream culture. She was behind the late 1990’s BBC sketch comedy series Goodness Gracious Me that explored the integration and assimilation of British and Indian cultures to hilarious effect. American audiences who love British drama would have seen her in Broadchurch and Doctor Who amongst others. She has starred on stage, screen and television her whole career and has also managed to find time to write novels about the British Asian experience, The House of Hidden Mothers is her third.
Perhaps as a result of her acting career The House of Hidden Mothers has a voice for the ear. I can easily see a television series out of it. The dialogue is, for the most part, real and I love the fact that she does not translate the Punjabi words she uses, but relies on context. The issues she is dealing with will be familiar to many people - families, friends, parents, kids, love. Taking on surrogacy is a fraught topic but Syal does it with an empathy and sense of moral and ethical conflict that feels true. My only complaint is that towards the end of the book she rushes to address some issues plucked from the headlines that feel out of place in the narrative structure, and the plot twist might not satisfy everyone.
But to me a good read is one that paints authentic characters with whom the reader can empathize if not identify with, one that entertains and one that makes you think. After a 16-year hiatus from books, Meera Syal is back with a novel that does all that. For those of you unfamiliar with the talent that is Meera Syal – please acquaint yourself with her. You will not be disappointed.
BEFORE YOU READ:
Length: 419 pages
Genre: Fiction
Themes: family life; aging, surrogacy, British Asians, immigrants
Commitment: A thoroughly compelling, lively read with a true sense of place.
Buy HERE and support this site AND indie bookstores
