Review: Summer of Then by Rupleena Bose
With a protagonist who rages at the injustice of patriarchy and motherhood, this is a novel that captures the fears and ambitions of Indian middle-class women
In Rupleena Bose’s Summer of Then, we follow an unnamed protagonist as she grapples with feelings of loneliness and inadequacy as she contemplates her relationships with cities and the men she loves. The narrator, an ad hoc professor at Delhi University, marries her boyfriend, Nikhil, though she is full of doubts. She marries into a different class and caste and is afraid of the consequences. She refuses to be tamed. She knows her husband would have been better off with another woman, a simpler woman, as she says, one without hollow cracks. “A good mother probably makes a better wife,” Bose writes, “I was not sure I could be either. One had to be consumed in the person. Consumed to the point of forgetting oneself, playing the role of a good wife. I wanted to leave the country when I was a student. I wanted to study on a campus where the grounds turned white with snow. I wanted to spend nights working extra hours at the library and waiting tables at the downtown bar. I could have left if I had taken the exams and spent hours practising maths and reasoning. I didn’t when I had to. And now it was too late.”
An outsider to the world of posh dinner parties and get-togethers at luxurious homes, the protagonist is, nevertheless, a keen observer of this world, which collides with her own one of middle-class parents struggling to make ends meet in a run-down Kolkata house. She had taken on freelance work to sponsor her stay in New Delhi as a student. “I wish the divide between privilege and art was not so much. It was different from being poor. The poor were a statistic in this country. They are whipped into resilience. We, the middle class, could drown in debt in a month and forego our art,” she thinks. “If our monthly salaries did not reach the bank, we could stop pretending we were not like others. I did not have the resilience to survive like the poor. Instead, I pretended that I was just like my friends. After a few years you start believing that you would never die of starvation or beg on the streets.”
Rupleena Bose’s many little stories breathe life into this book: A Muslim boy, Salman, is shot dead for being in love with a Hindu girl at the college where the narrator teaches English Literature. At the scene of the crime, the narrator notices the copy of Saadat Hasan Manto’s Mottled Dawn that has slipped out of Salman’s open rucksack. Witnessing the violence makes her recall her grandmother’s words about Delhi never having recovered from Partition; about it being a city of daily violence, of angry men and women left with only half of their selves. Cut to riot-ridden Yamuna-par Delhi in 2015 where the river is frothing with waste and the air is thick with smog. Those who can afford it are lining up to buy expensive air purifiers.
Bose’s protagonist is in love with her husband’s best friend, Zap. Both Nikhil and Zap are film-makers but they are vastly different from one another. Nikhil’s mother had raised him to be disdainful of everyone else and had spent her life nurturing his rage. He claims the moral high ground when he learns she has been having an affair with Zap. The affair exposes the unfair burden placed on women and their bodies; the real consequences – such as unwanted pregnancy – of acting on a fantasy.
At times, Bose’s writing can feel like she is going through a checklist of social evils instead of telling a story. Her protagonist marries outside her caste but refuses to take on her husband’s dominant-caste surname. Her mother-in-law wants her to get gold facials to make her skin look fairer. There are numerous arguments about class, caste, and gender but the protagonist herself isn’t constrained by the social structures that dominate her thoughts and arguments. Characters on the periphery of this book embody those struggles. She observes them from a distance and thinks about the injustice of this world.
The author has captured the fears and ambitions of middle-class women and her protagonist rages at the injustice of patriarchy and motherhood. At times, though, the text seems to move from one theoretical discourse to the next. The book jacket compares Summer of Then to Sally Rooney’s fiction and it is evident that Bose is attempting to emulate the Irish author’s style as she rushes through her checklist of themes that include caste inequality, class difference, religious conflict and the moral degradation of society. In that way, it is reminiscent of Rooney’s Conversations with Friends. Sample this: “If the government is right wing, the people are no longer scared to admit they were religious. And they were always fucking bigoted. Now the state is bloody giving leverage to middle-class Indians like our good old classmates...”, “I hate the word apolitical.”
However, Bose leaves little to the readers’ imagination. She does not want us to arrive at our own opinions.
Still, her prose also cuts through the noise. While on a writing residency in Edinburgh, the protagonist writes about her dead grandmother, a widow who always wore white to mourn her husband’s death, and fried fish for her granddaughter but never ate any herself. “Meat, garlic and fish lit the fire of desire. Widows were not meant to desire,” she said. But it wasn’t the whole truth. As a married Bengali woman, the grandmother had been forced to eat fish, which she detested. Her husband had left her and their children to live with a man he loved. When he died, like a dutiful wife, she followed the custom of giving up meat, freeing herself of the one thing she hated: fish.
Despite its occasional shortcomings, Summer of Then is an insightful exploration of the inner life of a conflicted Indian woman.
Sharmistha Jha is an independent writer and editor.
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