Straightforward Sojourn

The Immigrant continues this saga of narration. It tells us about Ananda, an Indian immigrant in Halifax, Canada, who has saved and studied his way to a career as a dentist, and Nina, a thirty-year-old lecturer in Delhi. It tells us, with quietness and conviction, about Nina’s mother, worried about her daughter’s marriage prospects, and Ananda’s married-in-Canada uncle. It narrates, sometimes directly and sometimes tangentially, Nina’s past infatuation with a man who abandoned her, Ananda’s failed attempts at sex with women, the meeting and correspondence of Nina and Ananda, and their marriage. With Nina finally joining Ananda in Canada, the novel not only covers some older landmarks of ‘immigration narratives’ but also engages with the less often narrated matter of infertility and sexual dysfunction among men.

Many of the events and people narrated in the novel remain memorable, even though the India of Kapur’s narrative is mostly the Emergency period of Mrs Indira Gandhi, which imparts to the novel a touch of sepia: Nina’s physical discomfort at wearing a pair of jeans, phone operators, garibi hatao etc. But just as garibi is still very much around in India, many of the stories and issues—not least those relating to gender, which is always an unobtrusive strength of Kapur’s novels—remain pertinent.

Kapur is good at gently nudging the reader into the heads of her female Indian characters. She manages to do so in The Immigrant too. She also provides a complex, if more ironic, portrait of the men in this novel, particularly Ananda with his unacknowledged sexual limitations: "He knew he still had miles to go before he reached his goal of pounding some woman to sexual pulp, but with marriage, he had gained in confidence. One day he might try again with a white woman. He loved his wife, but he didn’t want to feel that she was the only one in the world he could have sex with." However, while Nina comes across as the deeper character in many ways—her negotiation of Ananda’s ‘limitations’ and the immigrant’s ‘possibilities’ are best left to the reader to savour—neither Ananda nor the other men in the novel are reduced to caricatures. Kapur is, in her own way, a generous writer.

She is also a careful writer. Both in terms of language and structure, she takes few risks, and the ones she takes are carefully calibrated. Her subject matter, too, remains within the realm of ordinary middle class experience. And yet her novels are surprisingly engrossing. They are read not only by thousands of ordinary readers, they can also provide much material to literary critics, especially (but not only) from the gender perspective. She is what literary journalists commonly hail as "a talented storyteller", but unlike some other such ‘storytellers’, her deceptively simple narratives also engage subtly with issues.

The Immigrant will not be a disappointment to Manju Kapur’s many fans, or the critics who have engaged with her work in the past. One can complain that, once again, this is a novel about middle-class Indian immigrants in the ‘West’, not about Indian immigrants in, say, Dubai or Jamaica, let alone the Bihari or Tamil migrant in Delhi. One can be churlish about its placement in the sepia-’70s or its use of a linear narrative, something that has come to be disturbingly associated with Indian English ‘women’s writing’ with the years. But that would be to criticise it in terms that are foreign to it and its writer. The Immigrant is a novel with a straight, broad, seemingly-placid narrative flow, under whose surface lurk the currents of significant and, at times, disturbing issues. There is something about it and Kapur’s novels in general that reminds one of a broad river flowing down the North Indian plains in the winter, well after the monsoon floods have subsided but also much before the meagreness of summer. It has to be admired on its own terms.