Out Of The Family Line

A squidgy-waisted daughter of a dulcet-voiced beauty, Shari has always felt like "the stitch that slipped out of a cosy pattern". Her Family is a veritable paragon of the Saturday morning glossies, Shari has no desire to excel and finds bliss in slipshod attire; her Family gazes at distant Delhi for role models and is ashamed of being Tamilian, she finds sustenance in the Madras sea breeze and surreptitiously consumes murukkus. But now, for the first time in her life, they—the Family—have endorsed 22-year-old Shari's decision to marry an upwardly mobile computer whiz. Inevitably, this hearty familial support sets off the warning bells and she pulls back from the matrimonial brink wracked by anxiety and flees to visit friends and relatives in, where else, north India.

And as she spends the next couple of months pondering over her impending marriage, memories and visions of other relationships glide in: her parents' quarrel-free yet passion-less partnership; her surrogate parents, Uncle and Aunt Paru's unglamorous yet instinctive togetherness; her brother's volatile yet oddly satisfying married life in Vrindavan; her best friend's marriage of convenience into Delhi's ritzy set; and, of course, her affair of the heart with an idealistic, blind friend.

However, it is her Dark Secret which threatens to bubble over and upset her meticulously charted future. "A vision of the weekend with Aunty and Uncle stabs my memory. That weekend when I crashed from one world to another. I learned a lot about suffering then," Shari declares early in the novel even as she muses about all else in an attempt to suppress the un-negotiable. But, of course, there is nothing as fortifying as the perspective offered by distance and solitary ruminations, and she gradually musters up the courage for a cathartic emptying of the soul.

In the process, Nambisan summons all her linguistic tools to make what could have been an excruciatingly laborious confessional a witty and resonant quest for identity. Especially endearing is her way with potential non-sequiturs: "I have my own theory about hard work; and about other things. The watch, for instance. I never wear one because I don't want my life chopped into bits by a monster ticking on my wrist...If it were a little more accommodating, if only it would let its hair down once in a while or take a nap and leave me alone."

The only problem is, no matter how appealing, atmospheric and warm your prose, if you promise a Dark Secret, it had better be stupendously dark and traumatically exotic; the weekend with "Aunty and Uncle", in the end, turns out to be something of a damp squib, due less to the stylishly executed plot than to the stereotyped destruction wrought by alcoholism. Besides, it comes as no surprise that Shari breaks off her engagement after her period of soul searching, marriage too is a much-flogged metaphor, its rejection an expected expression of revolt. If only Nambisan had ventured into the secund fictional terrain beyond family quib-bles...she would have stumbled upon a treasure trove of simmering rebellion.