"The Age of Shiva" by Manil Suri

I stayed up until midnight to finish The Age of Shiva by Manil Suri. This distinguishes me from the reviewer in the Washington Post who said he had trouble keeping at it, when he read the book. I found both the book and its narrator compelling.

Meera, the narrator and very central character of the book, addresses her interior monologue to her son, Ashvin. The first words of the book describe to him how she felt as a nursing mother. At the end of the book, her son has escaped her by going to high school in a far-away location. She receives a letter saying that he wouldn't be coming home for a holiday: her concluding words are imagining his hike in the hills and symbolically, his entire future without her. The unusual narrative technique was sometimes a little mannered, but all in all, I was impressed.

Indian history from Independence until about 1980 is a central feature of the book, though its impact on Meera is entirely personal. Among the members of her family and her husband's family are adherents of virtually every political side in the political struggles of the nation. They also represent a variety of Hindu religious piety and practice, which provide an interesting insight into both ritual and ways that people can hope that religion can bring desired results.

Both families had been refugees from the Pakistan side of the partition. Meera's father subsequently managed to found a successful printing business, thus providing generously for his daughters. He had been friendly with Muslims in his early life, and did not turn on them. He was anti-religious, and particularly hated customs that subordinated women, such as the requirement that women show their inferiority by touching the feet of their fathers and husbands. Her mother, in contrast, was illiterate and -- in her husband's view -- narrow and stupid.

Meera's father-in-law was unlucky: he never regained the status he had had before, though he eked out a living. Her sister-in-law, unluckiest of all, belonged to a family that had to walk the long distance, live in a refugee camp, and eventually, all die of the experience. Meera's husband and his family became pious Hindus and very anti-Muslim in a variety of ways. Every individual's politics felt to them like a response to what they had suffered. Each war and election affected these relatives, though Meera seemed to have no passion about the events, only to feel the consequences from the family members' actions.

In many ways, Meera seems able only to react, never to control what happens to her. Her attempted rebellions are often self-destructive, beginning with her marriage to Dev, a handsome and winning singer who was originally her sister's boyfriend. When her sister chooses marriage to a much richer and socially higher man, she goes after Dev. Her reward is to live with his large extended family in a cramped apartment, where two brothers and their wives share the single bedroom. Repeatedly, she asks her father for financial help, and then rebels against him as he tries to force her to exert herself and become a more liberated woman. Eventually her father buys them an independent apartment far from home, offering her a new life -- the subject of the book.

Finally, after around a decade of marriage, Meera gives birth to Ashvin, and begins her main experience in life: obsessive adoration and love of the boy. As she describes her growing emotional dependence on him, she shows herself to be a complex character. She tries for self-awareness, but doesn't seem to possess much.

This is the most amazing feature of the book: a narrator who knows her weaknesses but really can't grasp what to do or get the big picture at all. Eventually even Meera's mother makes a more effective move towards self-actualization, as does a neighbor woman in a brief sub-plot about Muslim marriage and divorce. The contradictions in Meera's life seem illuminated by her narrative without her actually grasping exactly what they were, and this makes the book quite fascinating.