Walking a thin line between two worlds

For a debut novel to be this entertaining is impressive. Missy by Raghav Rao is a novel whose time had come in the 1990s but no one ever thought of depicting the Indian experience in America quite this way, with so much lived experience, honesty or skill. This is Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake territory, definitely a step up from Inscrutable Americans. The only other novel that comes close is The Laughter by Sonora Jha though that is specific to the academic community. As a bonus, this story is brimming with masala.

Every choice around and within a novel poses its challenges. This one straddles two disparate worlds and strives to walk that thin line catering to both Indian and American sensibilities. It isn’t easy to write in a language to does justice to both. Even an attempt boggles the mind. There are fumbles and caricatures on the Indian side of things and sometimes the author gets facts wrong but overall he does carve out a story, not the simplest to tell.

“Yellow, like the throat of the bulbul, the words ran along the steely grey Lexus: Dancing Shiva Driving School.” Except that the more common bulbuls in India have white throats, and the black crested one is yellow except for the head and neck. And the author does choose to go with dal, roti and sabzi whereas the authentic South Indian kitchen offers idli, dosa, rasam and curd rice. On American soil, the author finds the familiar and his touch is surer here. That he does it with considerable style and its beautiful language makes the book an asset to any collection. “Heaven was the warm inside of her thigh. Her typing was steady and full like a monsoon shower. Her skin was a portal to our world with no sickness or hospitals, leaving him free to love her.”

The plot is quite like a Bollywood movie on steroids. The molestation and subsequent murders are detailed in ghoulish attention to minutiae. Though a foretaste for this is given when Akash the older son of Savi’s patrons falls and hits his head. It is probably haemophilia but keeping it vague adds to the arcane and the mystical aura the author intends to build up about India. The novel chooses to crunch a life into eight chapters that serve as a precursor to the action later. However, one does wonder if it would be such a loss to forego this segment altogether. It is at its most unsure here.

Missy traces the evolution of Savi, a young girl who lands up at an orphanage after an exhausting trek. At 18, she is placed with a wealthy family but a driver has designs on her and to escape his clutches one fateful night, she has no choice but to kill him. But there is another victim too, Akash, whom she cannot help as she has to get away with her gravely wounded lover, Ananda.

She surfaces in America three decades later as Missy, the owner of a driving school, with two daughters, and now divorced from Ananda. As Missy, she is a successful business owner and a fiercely independent woman. She is troubled by her younger daughter’s record at school, for her daughter wants to race bicycles. Into this imperfect world comes the perfect Varun Sora, who falls in love with the older girl, Mansi. When Varun takes her to India and his family’s estate, Mansi gets bitten by a venomous snake. Missy has to return to Nandiyar Estate, a place she’d forsaken. With melodrama befitting OTT platforms, all is revealed now. Missy is accorded her redemption.

What is new though is the author’s clear and committed exposition of the Indian class system. Rarely has this topic been central to a novel and it is quite militantly done: the contrast between Lalita Mukherjee and Missy, Aditya Nandiyar’s class hostility or the journalist seeking Missy’s story because she’s an outlier among the affluent and the “cultured”. This isn’t an earth-shattering work, no matter what the cover blurbs say. It is well-written, fun and a feel-good story despite harrowing bits. Most importantly, it tells us more about ourselves than we would care to know.