The Consequences of Choices Made

The title of this book is singularly apt. Choice is not a novel, rather it is 3 long, short-stories, 2 set in London and 1 in Bangladesh, which all show individuals making choices, and the constrains and consequences of those choices.

The first story is of Ayush, a publisher living in London with his affluent partner, Luke, who works in Economics, and whose mantra is economics is life, life is economics. Luke wanted children, and eventually Ayush yields to his wish and Luke has twins through surrogacy, and Ayush, as the lower earning partner, does a lot more of the day to day care work. Luke and Ayush are loving and mutually supportive, but their values fundamentally diverge. Ayush is starting to want to espouse more green actions and climate change mitigation actions, but Luke is not like minded. He is not keen for Ayush to influence the children with adverse effects on their emotions and behaviour. In the course of Ayush’s job, he often sees authors selling out and accustomed to the cynicism of the marketplace, and has even learnt to put aside his literary priorities, substituting them for market priorities. However, he is confronted by an author who refuses to play the game, and this as well as Luke’s take forces Ayush to rethink his life choices.

In the stories, Mukherjee is able to insert a lot of pointed social commentary, particularly about race, integrity, and poverty. For instance, Ayush reflects,

The job of a gatekeeper is perhaps the only job in which there is the biggest gap between talent and power. […] Now, enough black people had been murdered by the police in the US for these good white people, who think of themselves as the good, the best, to hang on to the coattails of a newly imagined civil rights movement in a country they genuflected to on all matters and signal, ‘Look, we’re progressive, we’re forward-thinking, we’re with the oppressed and the downtrodden. Look how good we are, look, how right.’ It requires them to change nothing, do nothing, except the thing they have always been extremely good at: signalling (p38).

In the second story, our protagonist is Emily, an ordinary academic who is returning home after a social evening with other academic friends, and whose life is changed by the uber ride she takes home. There is an incident in the ride, which leads her into the lives of refugees, which has surprising impact on how she changes as a person, and in her life priorities. In this story, Mukherjee raises the spectre of cultural appropriation, amongst other issues.

The third story is perhaps the most memorable. It is set in a poverty stricken rural part of Bangladesh, near the border. Sabita is our protagonist, a mother of 2 young  children, whose husband is away for long periods, and itinerant labourer, who sometimes sends money and sometimes does not. Sabita has to shift for herself and her children as best she can, going out to the nearest town which is 2 hours walking away, to work as a domestic in several homes. One day, she is given a cow, perhaps by some charity or NGO. The cow brings unimagined complexity to her life, and new hardships, although the gift of the cow was with the intention of alleviating destitute poverty.

The story is so well told that readers gradually come to appreciate how an asset like a cow, given to people who have so little, may cause them more harm than good. Sabita does not know where to find grazing for her cow, and the starter hay she is given soon runs out. She does not know how to make and dry dung cakes. When she learns to, they dung sells for very little. The children are withdrawn from school to take the cow to graze, since Sabita is busy working as a domestic to earn money. When the cow becomes ill, the family are thrown into disarray and have few sources of help. The cow came with a mobile phone, which Sabita can charge at her employer’s houses but which she does not actually know how to use. Their illiteracy and lack of education, and consequent lack of confidence, impede Sabita and the children’s ability to take instruction, or even to ask questions when they do not understand. Sabita is even in despair wondering where she would get a metal bucket with which to collect the milk, because such a purchase is wildly beyond her means. Even when she is given supplies of food for the cow, it presents a further problem because she has nowhere to store it in her tiny hut, out of the rain. In fact, even partial storage of the supplies means the family are pushed out of their sleeping quarters. And when Sabita’s daughter learns how to milk the cow – Sabita never manages to do this – often they cannot sell the milk before it curdles, and when they drink it, their bodies which are not used to milk, get the runs. Moreover, Sabita husband is bitter about the cow because he feels it is a reproach to his abilities to provide. The introduction of a cow in their wretchedly poor lives throws them off their already precarious balance.

“No, Boudi, what can I say, that cow is making us see mustard flowers! The children are still small, they cannot look after all the things you need to do when you have a cow. Grazing, feeding, cleaning out the shed, collecting dung, making and selling fuel cakes, […] They said the cow was going to make us money. Rubbish. All lies. The cow is costing us our blood. We have to give her our rice and eat half-stomach ourselves. We have been going to bed hungry every other night” (p257-8).

Sabita struggles to cope with the cow and also do her domestic work. She ends up giving her 7 year old daughter into half pay as a full time live in servant into one of her employer’s houses, so that Sabita can spend more time attending to the cow. Sabita says the cow is ruining her, but when one of her employers suggest she gets rid of it, she cannot countenance such a choice; indeed, for Sabita, she doesn’t even perceive it as a choice. Which perhaps it one of the most salient of points Mukherjee makes about choices – that we may perhaps not want to acknowledge some of our choices as such, which makes it even harder then to choose them. Even in a dire situation such as Sabita’s.

As with all of Neel Mukherjee’s writings, this is insightful, intelligent work, calling out hypocrisies, of systems and of individuals. Very readable indeed.