Home

This is the third book by Manju Kapoor. I have read her first one Difficult Daughters and was quite impressed with it and what prompted me to pick this one up at Ahmadabad Airport.

Home weaves a story of three generations of Banwarilal’s family. The books tries to weave in many themes, some which are explored well others just get lost. What Manju Kapoor successfully manages to tell is the relationships and complexities of women in joint family.

The novel starts with two sisters: one is attractive and the other merely plain-looking. The fairer Sona is married to the Banwarilal family while the unlucky Rupa is attached to a junior government officer of no consequence.

In the first few pages the story traces the lives of these two sisters before it finally makes up its mind and shifts focus entirely to the goings-on in the Banwarilal family. Some more episodes of manipulations and politics of the joint family, and of the tale, diversify into the second generation when Sona gives birth to children after ten bitter years of barrenness. The sister Rupa however stays childless, but in many ways remains much happier.

The plot then twists around these second-generation people, but not before causing a little perturbation to this critic. While most of the characterizations are finely etched, it is difficult to sympathize with any of them. The sisters are selfish. The husbands are lethargic. The mother-in-law is a sassy old woman. The family patriarch is too mild. The children are self-absorbed and conventional.

There were encouraging possibilities of developing some empathy with a second-generation son — the only child of a deceased Banwarilal daughter dumped by her drunkard husband back into the family after her suspicious death — but it is spoiled when he starts sexually abusing his cousin sister. However, in spite of many characters and the sub-themes of various lives, the novel finally lurches into a single strand and fortunately stays there.

The story that had started with the tale of Sona and Rupa finally finds its calling in Nisha - Sona's daughter who spends her childhood, scarred by incestuous abuse, at Auntie Rupa’s home. But it is her later pursuits in life - studying English Literature in an university, falling in love with a low-caste boy, forcefully standing up to her conservative family, despairing at being jilted by the lover, her courage in struggling with the meanness of life, her attempts at finding her place in an uninformed society that refuses to recognize the promise of her merits, her petty jealousies, unarticulated complaints and simmering frustrations that inevitably accompanies a life riddled with disappointments — that become central to the concern of the readers.

Home quite fascinatingly, if not very eloquently, shows the choking closeness and destructive limitations of Indian family values. It is a closet dark world where any hint of individual expression is swiftly trampled to death, to be substituted with deadened conformity.

Manju kapur has tried to put a lot of issues in this book which are commonly encountered in a joint family and are usually kept under the carpet to protect family honor and name. A lot of scheming and bantering usually goes on behind the curtains while maintaining the outer sham of a big happy family. The author has tried to bring some of those issues to the fore and due to this, “Home” does not remain a simple story of a Karol Bagh sari seller, but gets a more universal color and makes an invigorating family saga.

But despite the forlorn lives of its characters, Manju Kapur's novel has an undertone of humor that comes across effortlessly, an attribute that must be traced to the easy style in which Ms Kapur frames her sentences and to the uncomplicated narrative in which she structures her plots.