Murmurs Of The Heart

Every family has its own secrets, some more deeply hidden than others, many relating to love and loss. Sandip Roy’s debut novel is about the things people keep from each other for varied reasons. Don’t Let Him Know spans Calcutta and San Francisco and the lives of three people—Romola, Avinash and their son Amit. The book opens with Avinash’s death and with Amit showing a letter to his mother, who is living with Amit and his American partner. For Amit the letter means one thing, for Romola, who knows the truth, it means something else, and the tale of her marriage flashes back before her eyes. Romola and Avinash’s is an arranged marriage; Avinash is studying in the US. Romola does not care for life in America and after a year persuades her husband to take her back to India.

Roy’s story is told through a series of incidents, some independent, some int­erlinked. Many people would, in fact, call it a book of short stories, except for the fact that the stories all have the same characters and, barring a few, seem to complete each other. The first three chapters are the most vivid and sensitive in a collection that is alive to many issues of sexuality and East-West divisions. Everyone has their own kind of closet to climb into and none of the doors are opened wide. While most readers would imagine Roy’s sympathies lie with Avinash and Amit, the character his imagination seems to inhabit most is Romola—starry-eyed and surrounded by pink Patola saris, strings of jasmine and hopes of romance. Her marriage is not what she hoped for, though it’s not regrettable, except for a widow’s longings for meat and fish and the stolen snatch of a McDonald’s ‘Happy Meal’.

Loneliness haunts much of the book—no giggling friends, just encounters with outsiders, or solitude experienced in a crowd and in the heart of the family. Chhotopishi, boromashi, grandmothers and great grandmothers—sometimes the oldest and most distant relative may be closer than anyone else simply because of the proximity of death.

Roy’s language is fresh with poetic attention to detail in the descriptions of neon-coloured Fanta, ‘concrete box’ life in the US and India, even in the crush that attends the death of a Tollywood superstar in Calcutta. One might detect a Didi hangover somewhere, because Romola floats around in a white sari with a blue cardigan or a blue and white striped sari, but that just might be a coincidence.

The difficulties of life in the Bengali diaspora are told only as someone who has experienced both lifestyles can. Roy is keenly aware of the issues that elderly parents face when stranded in their children’s homes in the US, separated from everything that is familiar. Don’t Let Him Know carries an even balance between the problems of the US in Calcutta and Calcutta in the US.

Roy tells his stories simply, without too many twists, just an end stop that makes the reader think. One might compare Roy with Jhumpa Lahiri, except that much of Lahiri’s Bengali experiences are emotion recounted in tranquility. Roy’s experiences, on the other hand, have the lived feel of being real, seeming almost autobiographical in places, but then that could also be the gift of the writing.