It's strange how a whole life can be changed in an instant. A dozen years later, I'm still haunted by that moment when I might have reached down and touched Father's head as he passed before me. If he'd known I was there, or if I'd jumped down instead of staying to see the tablecloth, I believe he would not have done what he did.
We Shiny eds are always pleased when people tell us that they've been inspired to buy the books we review. But of course sometimes we are similarly inspired ourselves. And when I saw Victoria's review of Belonging in the latest Shiny, I was immediately sure I wanted to read it. And the lovely publisher, Myriad Editions, kindly sent me a copy so I was able to read what Victoria called 'one of the most gripping, engrossing, heart-in-mouth novels I’ve read in 2015'.
Covering three generations of a family, and spanning a period between 1855 and 1920, this is a big, serious, absorbing historical novel with a mystery at its heart. It deals with important questions about the relations between Britain and India, and between the British and the Indians (not always quite the same thing).
Central to the novel is Lila, whose story begins with her childhood memory of being removed from India, where she was born and grew up, to be sent to England to live with her great-aunt Mina. Her father, as we soon discover, has shot himself, and her mother, always strange and troubled, has been removed to who knows where. The trauma of the events that led to this, and the shock of being uprooted to a cold, colourless, unfamiliar environment far away from everything and everyone she loves, renders Lila unable to speak for a long time. But what exactly the events were is something we have to wait for until practically the end of the novel. And by this time we have discovered the whole trajectory that led up to them, by means of dips into the past in which we learn about Lila's ancestors.
So we meet beautiful Cecily, initially as she's on her way by ship to India, to marry a man she hardly knows who is more than twenty years her senior. Then there's her son Henry, Lila's father, who knows his mother died around the time of his birth but doesn't know how or why and is afraid to ask his silent, remote father. These two have their own stories to tell, alternating with Lila's own as she grows up and struggles to come to terms with her sense of difference from everyone around her. In fact the only person she feels really close to is the Sikh boy Jagjit, who spends his summer holidays with the unusually open-minded mother of a friend from public school. As the years go by, Lila and Jagjit fall in love, but convention and the pressures of the past make it seem unlikely they can ever be together.
In the early years of the twentieth-century, even to befriend an Indian was an unconventional act, and throughout the novel we learn more and more about the tragic and unforgivable way that the British conquerors treated their Indian subjects. When Henry's father is finally able to talk to his son about the mysterious, beautiful Indian woman who lived in a small house in their grounds known as the bibighar, he explains that she was his lover (his bibi) when he first arrived in India. In those days, the first half of the 19th century, the British settlers were encouraged to befriend and start relationships with Indian women. But after the terrible mid-century Mutiny, all this changed, Western women started to travel over to India, and those relationships went underground. This central fact lies at the heart of much of the tragedy that underlies the novel. Also primary are the appalling facts about the Siege of Cawnpore, in which 120 British women and children were massacred -- all part of the Indian Mutiny (1857), a violent uprising by the subjected race against their oppressors.
There's so much food for thought here, and certainly no easy answers. But though I called it a serious book, don't get hold of the idea that it must be boring. Umi Sinha doesn't preach, nor does she allow the important issues the novel raises to overwhelm the excitement and interest of the story. I was completely carried along by the need to know how Lila's story would end, and indeed how and why it began. I already knew quite a lot about India, and about the history of its occupation by the British, but to see it all in the context of the lives of people you come to care about makes it extremely vivid. I think this book should be required reading for anyone interested in India, or in colonialism in general. But it's also a brilliant and absorbing read for anyone who loves good novels. Could that be you?
