Its a bit like the Delhi dust. The pale ochre dust that creeps on stealthy feet and hands through the interstices of stone, brick, mucilage and bone and creates a pattern that can be called a home, or a life. Manju Kapurs writing has some of this quality. It is brilliantly evoked on the cover of her book, the curtained window sucking the grime, the jail filtering the heat and the sunlight leaching the walls so that the title of the book appears bleached and bone- white as desolate as the emptiness it seeks to hide. It is difficult to resist, even if it causes the mind to gag in feeble protest at what exactly is being depicted. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala has been here before, raged at the subcontinents Heat and dust that causes both minds and heart to atrophy, or at the very best engage in predatory forays that bring no joy to any of the combatants.
After the grand upheavals caused by Partition and its aftershocks depicted in her first tow books, Kapurs family saga is set in the comfortable environs of the middle class locality of Karol Bagh in Delhi. This is a family that has been scarred and diminished by dislocation from its moorings from a prosperous past but which has made up its mind to survive, in an environment that is not hostile as much as static and sterile .
The small deviation from the norm of arranged marriages carefully balanced as to availability and status is what causes the first of many tiny cracks in the already badly shaken family prestige. Just as they hane survived the major quake be clinging on to what may be seen as eternal values, the wifes jewellery to be sold in times of crisis, the presence of sons to carry the line, an unquestioning belief in the words of a Holy Man, or Babaji, thrift and hard work. Kapur steers her family expertly through all their only too human turmoil while keeping these grim sentinels of middle class values firmly in her sight.
The most winsome of her characters is the young girl Nisha, who is born to Yahpal and his wife, Sona, after a long period of yearning for a child. The girl grows up in a family of young boys. One of the cousins, the proverbial bad egg in the family, attempts to molest her. The way in which Kapur deals with the episode and the familys response to it are brilliantly conveyed. She is too young to know what is happening to her. Kapur traces the trajectory of these only too familiar childhood sexual explorations between close members of a joint family with a delicacy that is compelling. It does not ruin Nishas life. She survives. Kapur seems to suggest that this is all that really matters
