Book Review: Family Values by Abha Dawesar

(Both this review, and the following interview with the author were first published in i.witness, The New Sunday Express last Sunday)

SOME HOME TRUTHS ABOUT RELATIONSHIPS

With a plucky, precocious little boy as its protagonist, Family Values delivers some home truths about the illnesses that pervade Indian society. Narrated from the point of view of a child living a queasy, claustrophobic existence in an one-room house where his doctor parents practice, it simultaneously exposes the feuds that run within an urban family, and fraudulence that runs through the country’s administrative machinery.

Even as the little boy strives hard to strike friends at school and struggles for space in his home, he finds himself lost in the large-scale drama that enters his lacklustre life. His parents plan to expand their practice by buying a new clinic, so they drag him along on their visits to bank managers, lawyers, policemen, architects and astrologers.

Soon, the boy (who has so far entertained others only by names-dropping clinical conditions and talking about female monthlies) starts coming up with some shrewd observations. Meanwhile, there’s plenty going on in their extended family: his paternal uncles Psoriasis, Paget, Sugar Mills, Six Fingers, Poop and aunts Self-Sacrificing Sister and Pariah set out to find a bridegroom for his cousin briefly setting aside their squabbles for a share in grandfather’s property.

The novelist has painted a doomed story of sons who turn against their own fathers and grandsons who go astray choosing guilty pleasures — Sugar Mills’ son Flunkie Junkie is on the road to ruin with his drug addiction, Six Fingers’ son is a local hoodlum. Interspersed with this narrative are disturbing stories of missing children and multiple organ-theft at the Milkwoman’s nearby slum, the kidnap of an industrialist’s kid at the boy’s school and several instances of the police brutalising the poor.

In the risky intersections where the individual-and-the-particular meets the universal, we learn of a model-bartender being shot to death in a shady pub owned by an arms-dealer who has links to the ruling family who use their influence with the police to get the children-eating cannibals of a Delhi suburb get away scot free.

The boy’s family can’t condone these clu­msy happenings not only because it is all over the papers, but also because this arms dealer in question is the illegitimate father of the boy’s female cousin who is getting married. It is a mean and miserable world alright, but Abha Dawesar shows us that it is a small world too.

Unlike the characters who bear weird nicknames, the capital city, its streets and its suburbs are left unnamed and the author succeeds in her refusal to be specific. However, the novel’s monotonous and sparse prose style is capable of eclipsing the meticulous effort that has gone into producing it. One has to acknowledge that the slack-and-straightforward storyline, and the many stylistic innovations, successfully serve to maintain a small boy’s point-of-view.

This novel may take a great deal of time to read but to the novelist’s credit, forgetting its insolent (or in other cases, innocent) character-cast will take even longer.

In a society where it’s taboo to talk ill of family and an act of transgression to question its role as an institution of economic and emotional exploitation, Dawesar has displayed enormous gumption in spilling the beans about this constantly glorified system. Her clear and compelling voice will provoke any reader to have a fresh look at the so-called “family values” that are zealously upheld, but never lived up to.

INTERVIEW WITH ABHA DAWESAR

Why are men, women and children in your novel identified only by their quirks, deformities or excesses? For a novel where everything has been penned down in microscopic detail, why this decision to name no names, but only stick to epithets?

The first few pages came out that way and it made intrinsic sense to me. The boy is exposed to the adult entourage of his parents but he doesn’t necessarily know a lot about the individuals who are familiar to him. At least not in the sense that adults know about one another; instead he has an impression of them based on a fact or a characteristic he’s heard of. Once I decided to name the characters this way, it would have been jarring to have the city or its streets named either. The other day one of my cousins told me that his son refers to me as Macy’s bua because the last time they were in NY we had been to the department store and that’s stuck with him. It’s the way one looks at the world at that age. The microscopic details goes with the book, I don’t think that the book could hang together without them.

The story is seen from the point of view of a small boy. It is written in the present tense (which is too tiring at times). It shies away from using quotation marks, or dates. Much of the story actually revolves around the use of the family toilet, and personal histories are often little more than medical conditions. Why did you choose to deliberately overthrow aesthetic considerations?

There is a rigorous anti-aesthetic that informs every page of the book. It is the only kind of style that makes sense for the book. In all my work, style and content have been very closely wrapped together because I don’t separate form and content. The humour in the book too is very measured. It would have been possible and even easy to write this same story with a splash of colour that made it all entertaining and palatable and let the reader and the writer glibly sidestep any inconvenient questions that arose about the nature of our complicity in this system. That’s not the kind of book I wanted to write. The exigencies of writing in the present tense were a challenge as were the lack of quotation marks. Since neither was intended to be confusing I had to work through several drafts of the book. I learned a lot more about writing from this book than from all my other novels put together though many readers who were attracted to the more classic style of That Summer in Paris might find Family Values distilled and stark in comparison. But the book, not just in its content but also through the way it is written demands pause.

Babyji, about a desi Lolita, was so different in tone and theme compared to‚ Family Values. Why did you choose such a conventional storyline for your fourth book?

I disagree. The other day one of my editors in Delhi said Family Values was more subversive than any of my other books and I think he is right. It is an unflattering portrait of ourselves and asks about what is broken in our world. On another note, I think Family Values is as visceral as Babyji was sensual; I am talking here about disease and health in which are metaphors for the illness and health of our society but which are treated close to the ground and pinned to the flesh.

Sometimes the family is portrayed as a bunch of scheming siblings, at other times, it is the only saving grace and support system. As a woman, and as a writer, what is your opinion on the institution of family?

I think we are in the habit of glorifying the institution all too easily and as a writer my job is to burrow underneath the convenient notions of family values we like to pay lip service to. Family can be claustrophobic and it can stifle the personal desires of its individuals. It can also step up to support an individual in times of distress. There is a constant tension between these roles and we see the boy’s parents, the doctors negotiating these tensions. There is also another consequence of family ties that is deeply buried in the book the love of one’s own has consequences for a nation and its health. It is the root of partiality and nepotism and therefore injustice; the boy’s mother tells him this. Both the other boys in the family, Flunkie Junkie and Cousin are protected by their parents when they do wrong things.

The large-scale effect of this sort of partiality is to promote injustice and contribute to the larger scale problems we see in the book.

The fictionalised accounts of the Nithari killings, the model-bartender being shot to death, the arms deal scandal: events that have rocked the national capital dictate the fate of the boy’s family. Why did you take the decision to play with history and therefore flatten out the timeline of these events to fit just a few years in the boy’s life?

To an extent these events have become types of events, events we probably have seen before the ones this particular book is echoing and some of which we might see again in some form. The corruption scandals, I think no one needs convincing, are repetitive though they may repeat on larger or smaller scales, in state capitals or the national one. The time scale is fictionalised because the book is a work of fiction and as a novelist I am not interested in writing a journalistic account of the events but rather hearkening to what is in our common national consciousness. All that said, the nature of the horror and the injustice in the book are real. That, much to our shame, is not fictional.