This third novel of Sahota’s is mostly set in rural Punjab, in 1929; whereas his first two novels were British-based for most part. However, there is a parallel storyline happening in 1999, of a British Asian 18 year old who travels to his great-grandmother’s home, the same farmstead in rural Punjab, pre-university and to recover from drug addiction.
The 1929 tale features Mehar Kaur as the protagonist, married off as a teenager to a family of three sons (Jeet, Mohan and Suraj). 2 other brides are also brought into the family at the same time, Harbans and Gurleen. The three daughter-in-laws labour ceaselessly together all day, and at night, often one of them would be called by Mai, their mother-in-law, to the China Room, so called because Mai keeps her wedding china there, and her husband will visit her in that totally dark room.
It is 1929, summer is erupting, and the brothers do not address her in one another’s presence, indeed they barely speak to her at all, and she, it goes without saying, is expected to remain dutiful, veiled and silent, like the other new brides. Spying from her window, she sees only the brother’s likeness: close in age, they share the same narrow build, with unconvincing shoulders and grave eyes, serious faces that carry no slack, features that follow the same rules. The three are evenly bearded, the hair trimmed short and tight, and all day they wear loose turbans cut from the same saffron warp. Most hours the brothers will be out working the fields, playing, drinking, while she weaves and cooks and shovels and milks…
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The three brides apparently do not know which of the brothers is their husband. It takes some suspension of disbelief to accept they continue not to know even weeks and months after they are married and sleeping with their husbands regularly. However, it is a very different era, and Sahota clearly wants to show us how women were subalternised and the extent to which they were disempowered. He writes a very lively, charming, strong-willed Mehar as protagonist, but he also portrays her as trapped and a victim of her positionality.
Trouble begins when Mehar mistakes which of the brothers is actually her husband, and accepts one who is not, who deliberately deceived her because he prefers Mehar to his own actual bride/wife, and moreover, feels his eldest brother unfairly swapped his own bride for Mehar. Even though in the beginning, Mehar is the duped innocent, Sahota spells out for us readers that she will be the only one to be shamed if anyone ever found out:
She won’t say anything. She can’t. Her own obliteration would result. Her head shaved and her naked body paraded through the village on the end of a rope. She would be made into an example. Or, if not that, if Mail decided to show mercy and not throw her out, then at the very least her status in the household would be no more, No more the respected wife of the eldest brother,. Everyone’s Bhabhi. She would live at the bottom of the pile. Constant insinuations from the sisters-in-law. Sly put-downs from Mail. No right of reply. And inevitably, the story would leak out to the village and into people’s homes. These things always do. Whenever she ventured into the bazaar for some small thing – a handful of okra, a dozen eggs – it would be there, the opprobrium following her at every turn. Not letting her ever rest, not lending her mind any peace at all, but suffocating her, the small village and their small minds tormenting her until she slinks back to the farm and has to face it all again, for ever, until she dies and even then it will become a thing spoken about, a legend passed on,. […]
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Even when Mehar finds out she has been deceived, she does not alter in her affections towards her deceiver, and her real husband is quietly furious with his brother, as is their mother, who is not just a matriarch but a dictator. Sahota then tries to wrap this powder keg of a domestic situation into the wider political context where there is the start of demands for self-rule and militant resistance stirring. However, this is not done convincingly, only on the most surface of levels, and seems more a plot device than actually engaging with the politics of the age.
Also, the parallel story of the contemporary British-returned 18 year old, never quite dovetails with Mehar’s story, despite her being his great-grandmother, and his mild interest in her life. Perhaps Sahota intends for the two parallel stories to show how much change has come to rural Punjab, that a woman doctor can visit a single young man and smoke and spend much time with him and another single young man and get away with it, with impunity in 1999, compared to how restricted a woman was just 70 years or 3 generations before. The reader is left always waiting for the two stories to connect, but they never quite do.
This is not the strongest of Sahota’s writings. It does not seem as well thought through or as properly structured or finished, and for various reasons, is slightly unsatisfactory. The depiction of rural Punjab life in the 1920s-1930s is what gives this novel its worth – the exchanges, the expectations, the practises, the deeply rigid gender roles, are well depicted. Sahota’s touch is light, and perhaps even too light, one may say, almost but not quite glossing over the harsher realities of rural life. Certainly the storyteller feels slightly removed from the place and period, rather than immersed. However, the storytelling is still good, the novel is still a very good and interesting read, even if flawed. I shall just have to look forward to his fourth novel, hoping for better.
I liked Sahota’s Year of the Runaways. I have this one on my reading pile, let’s see if I like it any more than you.