The brain is capable of remarkable flimflam. We act on impulse, and only later start looking for a logical justification for it; we somehow find ways to intellectually defend what’s in our gut. As the psychologist Jonathan Haidt likes to say, we rely on an inner lawyer, not an inner scientist, to do our moral reasoning.
This lawyer works overtime when we make a mess of our love lives. (It is, arguably, one of the best reasons to keep that bulldog on retainer.) Renu, the mesmerizing narrator in Ratika Kapur’s “The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma,” has a gift for self-deception. It is baffling, then funny, and then quite poignant to witness.
The novel opens with a chance encounter between Renu and Vineet, a gallant, self-assured man, at a metro station in Delhi. He’s 30, single, a striver; she’s 37, married, the mother of a teenage son. The two start spending time together — no lying to her husband involved, he is hard at work in Dubai — but it’s innocent stuff. They split samosas at a sweet shop. They munch on momos outside the train station. Then Vineet invites her to ride with him on his motorbike. Hmm.
“I was not born yesterday,” Renu says. “I know what it can mean, I know how it can feel, to ride behind a man on a two-wheeler. I know how the man could slowly lean back into the woman sitting behind him until his body is pressing against her chest, while the woman’s hands could move from the handlebar behind her to the man’s waist and then finally rest on his thighs as she leans forward against him.”
But would she ever allow such untoward physical contact? She would not. She is a respectable woman from a respectable family! And Vineet is far too upstanding to play any games, she is sure of it. “That is why I agreed to go out with him,” she says. “I agreed to go out with him and I don’t think that it was wrong.”
Other things that Renu does not, as this story progresses, believe are wrong: Visiting Vineet at the upscale hotel where he works as a manager. Visiting him at his house. Concealing from him that she has a husband and son.
You can see how slippery this slope is. The two of them eventually slide right into bed.
This is the second novel from Ms. Kapur, who lives in New Delhi. (Her first, “Overwinter,” was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize.) The story it tells is taut, focused; its wider setting, the new India, pops with life. But the real star of this show is Renu, the Mrs. Sharma of the book’s title. She starts in one dimension, then gradually plumps into three.
Renu does not make a sympathetic first impression. She’s judgmental and pious, yet not above demanding kickbacks at her job if the cost of groceries has gone up. One of her favorite expressions is, “I don’t like to boast, but …” and then, boasts she does — about her son’s good looks, about her inner strength, about her sexiness. “My husband could never keep his hands off me,” she says. “He actually thinks that I have the most beautiful bones in the world, and he is a physiotherapist, so he has seen many, many bones in his life.”
She’s both full of guile and guileless. A woman-child.
Yet as the story hums along, we learn that Renu’s boasting belies an ocean of distress. She is lonely, broken, exhausted. She misses her husband. (When the story opens, he’s already been gone for 18 months.) She is a font of stoppered dreams. (She wanted to be a schoolteacher; instead, she’s a medical receptionist.) All around her, Delhi is blooming with gleaming new shopping malls and luxury apartment complexes. She lives in a rented flat with faltering electricity.
“It is a jail, a jail,” she says of her financial condition. The dream of breaking free is why her husband works in Dubai. He and Renu want a piece of the new India. But they will not be able to buy their apartment unless he stays in Dubai seven more years.
And her brain has been annexed by worry. She cares for her in-laws, one of whom is fragile and diabetic. She cares for her 15-year-old son, Bobby, who’s indifferent to his studies and has recently discovered alcohol. “Who else is standing in line, waiting for my attention?” she asks. “I sometimes think that the head and heart that God gave me don’t actually belong to me.”
As much as anything, “The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma” is about the limits of self-sacrifice. Even good teenagers make crash-test dummies of their parents, conducting blithe experiments in casual cruelty. “After all the work that you both have done,” Bobby asks, referring to Renu and his father, “do you actually think that your poor bodies will survive long enough to enjoy these great things?”
Renu has to restrain herself from running to the bathroom to cry.
So what she craves, really, is escape. Vineet is an escape. A vacation. She has never gone on a vacation, except her honeymoon. “When I am near him I feel calm,” she says. “I feel like I feel when I see photos of snow.”
But does she find release? I cannot say without revealing how the novel resolves itself — it takes a couple of turns I didn’t expect. But we know, from experience, that someone’s desires must be thwarted for this kind of story to end. Affairs seldom last in perpetuity, and the shot-clock, in this case, is running: “The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma” marches toward Renu’s husband’s return from Dubai for a long overdue family visit. As the days wind down, the tension builds. We may all have stories to explain ourselves. But others are much harder to figure out.
Follow Jennifer Senior on Twitter: @JenSeniorNY
The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma
By Ratika Kapur
185 pages. Bloomsbury. $16.
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