Rupleena Bose’s debut novel — about love and longing in India in 2010s — explores the grief, desperation and hunger of a modern woman, and her fluidity of desire
Indian writing in English, in recent years, has become increasingly nebulous with the flourish of translated fiction from various Indian languages. Readers now look for the next Vikram Seth or the next Arundhati Roy. In such a scenario, Rupleena Bose’s debut novel, Summer of Then (Penguin Random House India) provides a glimmer of hope. Centred on hope, longing, and desire in the India of 2010s, it resonates with contemporary times.
Set mostly across Calcutta and Delhi, it’s narrated by an unnamed protagonist as she tries to find a place for herself in academia and writing. The story begins in Calcutta in 2010, when she meets her boyfriend Nikhil’s friend Zap and his girlfriend Lila. They get talking about work. Nikhil, Zap and Lila are in the media industry and she is an ad hoc faculty in an English Literature department at a college in Delhi. For all their amusement at her being a lecturer, she is embarrassed to admit how the job barely pays.
The degrees of rebellion
In the span of the night, she feels a sense of unease — of her career and the presence of these friends. Lila makes her feel lesser about her looks and Zap makes her body uncomfortable with desire. But life beyond that Spring in 2010 would change for her. Her parents’ sad retirement, the perpetual lack of money, perils of Indian academia, and the pulls of desire and romantic loyalty are about to upend the protagonist’s life as she nurses the hope to be a writer.
In the dust jacket, the novel is compared to Sally Rooney’s Normal People and Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation. The comparison sounds fair what with its sparse prose and observations of living as a woman in India. Bose examines the vicissitudes of womanhood and the ways in which a woman is perceived in India with a fine attention to detail. Right from her schooldays, university life, to growing up to be a mother eventually, Bose’s story emphasises how social structures dictate a woman’s path more than her own choices: “It was now all about her body in its functional aspects. It was returning to the base, the idea that a woman’s body was only about reproduction.”
Bose explores the unspoken hunger of women like Moshfegh. The hunger is borne out of constant deprivation when she eyes other women's stilettos, ease with money, airs of a writer, and men’s luxury of simply living without an effort to change themselves. The slow-burn rebellion that unfolds is akin to Cathy Sweeney’s recent novel Breakdown where a mother leaves her home one fine morning instead of going to teach and get her children and husband ready. Bose’s unnamed protagonist is calm, and confused with her rebellion as the middle-aged mother in Sweeney’s work. Bose does a good job at exploring the degrees of rebellion a woman has to exhibit in her life.
The apathy of being woman and queer in India
Cities are important to the novel and the protagonist. The city she is in defines her temperament and the decisions she is bound to make. Bose skillfully draws distinction between Delhi, Calcutta, Bombay, Edinburgh by allowing the reader to be with her protagonist: “But there is a devastating beauty about this city. Calcutta has got a bit of all the great modern cities of the world. It is like a Marquez novel.” The novel constantly refers to the city as Calcutta over Kolkata. This is a remarkable telling of the character’s sense of nostalgia of the past, and her inability to come to terms with change in the city especially for the Bengali community outside Bengal.
Delhi is the city where she starts ‘having trouble breathing’. It is the place she’s grown up, experienced the cruelties of life and yet managed to survive in it. It is in Edinburgh that she is able to write and hence it becomes ‘difficult to leave.’ I wonder if this was to satirise the Indian middle-class mentality of seeking freedom in the West. Her gay friend and colleague also end up leaving India for Norway to be safer and find love. It’s difficult to pinpoint the intention of these narrative motifs but Bose has justified the apathy of being woman and queer in India, especially within academia.
She writes with ease. Bose’s sentences flow seamlessly, creating a mosaic of images held together with care. The story’s lack of extended scenes with dialogues does not compromise the experience of reading it. She weaves images and studs the text with references to cultural elements of the early 2010s. Not only does this give the novel its rhythmic cadence, it also helps the reader locate themselves in the world she’s trying to recreate.
The grime beneath the gloss
The most exciting part of the novel is its portrayal of a writer. Bose leaves no stones unturned revealing the vulnerabilities of being a writer who hasn’t written anything that is out in the world itself. Throughout the novel, the protagonist is unsure if she should introduce herself as a writer. “…I could not understand mornings that began with rejection emails. They always arrive the first thing in the morning leaving me with a long day of pretension to normality.”
The protagonist daydreams of being interviewed as a writer, of viewing one acceptance in the mail for her short story collections reveal the desperation and struggles of a writer excellently. The hot-girl/sad-girl genre of recent fiction where a troubled woman from the literary field is doing things wrong with her life is stunningly reproduced by Bose. She does not make the protagonist gimmicky. She brings out her interiority alongside the constraints imposed by the world to chalk a character that teeters on the threshold of being likeable and detestable at the same time.
At 343 pages, the novel is longer with details distracting the reader. While the intention to address the social ills of contemporary Indian society is well-recognised, at some places, however, they add little to the protagonist’s story as a woman, a writer and an academic in search for a meaningful existence. Contrariwise, Bose’s analysis of the intersection of gender and class inequalities are what truly stands out. She is able to make the reader feel the pangs of not having a fancy career as she traverses the murky lanes of Delhi’s academic life. The reader could understand her transgressions in love and desire and yet remain uncertain of its implications because Bose brings the personal and political into a broader conversation.
Bose’s novel is an urgent read. It lays bare the grime behind the glossy life of an academic in India. It makes evident the fluidity of desires women feel without voicing it. It makes the life of a writer sound as hopeless and non-glamorous as it is. Most importantly, it clears the air to make Indian writing in English remain relevant without pining for another Roy or Seth. It is a fresh voice that deftly captures yearnings, memories, grief, desperation and hunger of a woman.
