Book Review by Meenakshi Malhotra
Title: The Magnificent Ruins
Author: Nayantara Roy
Publisher: Hachette India
The Magnificent Ruins is a brilliant debut novel by diasporic writer, Nayantara Roy. The plot centres around an intriguing inheritance bequeathed to Lila De by her maternal grandfather. Busy in her life in Brooklyn, with her father and his family close by, a charming occasional boyfriend and a rewarding job in a publishing firm, Lila is jolted back to her ancestral roots in Kolkata when her dying grandfather leaves his mansion to her, bypassing quite a few blood relatives.
Lila inherits a decaying yet stately Kolkata mansion, and on her return to Kolkata, gets sucked back into the life she had left behind with all its complexities, secrets and half-truths, issues she is forced to confront. She can no longer relegate these concerns to the backburner of her comfortably diasporic existence, once she returns to Kolkata. The novel does not let Lila slip back into diasporic nostalgia and in that sense moves away from sentimental “homecoming” narratives to explore the weight of an unhappy, traumatic childhood and inherited emotional baggage.
As the story unfolds, Lila, a twenty-nine-year-old book editor, finds herself in a complex situation that was at the same time legal, familial, and deeply personal. The time is August 2015, the place Ballygunge, one of Kolkata’s sought-after locations. While the house is a grand one, it lacks modern conveniences and we see its inhabitants teetering on the brink of precarities of varying kinds, including bankruptcy. Her return to India for an eight-week break stretches to a longer one. Lila expects to deal with legal paperwork, but instead finds a house teeming with memories that she had pushed away and a family that balances affection with a sharp eye for personal benefits.
The competing narratives are many as Lila’s mother, Maya, and her mother’s uncles, Hari and Rana(especially Hari), are all shown as potential heirs with claims to Tejen Lahiri’s house. What complicates the situation and embitters the already bitter Maya, is the fact that Tejen Lahiri’s widow and Maya’s mother, Geeta Lahiri, seems to support the claims of her brother-in-law, Hari, who is like a surrogate son to her and a kind of replacement in her eyes of her dead son who had died in his infancy. Generations of mothers with a distinct son preference seem to lead to alienated daughters and that is just one of the subplots of the novel.
And this is only of the multiple subplots which circulates in this smorgasboard of a novel, that at times tends to go overboard with its many layered narrative. The heart of the story is Lila’s struggle to understand her abusive and distant mother, Maya, and confront a family legacy of suppressed emotions among its women. Her troubled relationship with her own mother is a replica of her mother’s relationship with her grandmother, Geeta, and so we are faced with an inter-generational saga of neglect and trauma, abuse and emotional distance, which colours the relationship between mothers and daughters.
This, in turn, casts a long shadow that Lila struggles to process in therapy with Dr Laramie who encourages her to go through a process of transference. Roy observes how the women in the Lahiri family have learned to suppress their feelings, leaving them with only the faintest traces of their true emotions. As Lila observes to her cousin Biddy, a candid podcaster getting ready for her wedding, they have become “generations of Lahiri women, perfumed with the barest trace of what we truly felt.” This list includes Mishti, Hari’s long-suffering wife, who is notoriously prone to ‘accidents’ that do not really fool anyone, but serves to stave off unpleasant confrontations.
Roy vividly captures life in Kolkata and uses the crumbling house as a metaphor for the fragile family. For someone who is at home in both Kolkata and New York, comfortable in her skin and in her professional life, Lila has to negotiate her own personal messes and hitherto unresolved relationships. Once in Kolkata, she meets her first love, a married lawyer called Adil and gets entangled in a relationship without any future. Simultaneously, her professional client and occasional date, Seth, arrives in Kolkata from NY, determined to take their relationship to the next level. These distractions only intensify Lila’s sense of shame and dislocation as she tries to make her way through the labyrinth of her old home. Meanwhile, she finds that while it is easy enough to make cosmetic repairs to the crumbling house, it is far harder to address the dark family secrets linked to a tragedy that takes place on the terrace, a mystery that looms over the whole story.
In a manner reminiscent of Greek tragedy, the novel works both through prospect and retrospect, as it circles around the plot climax. We, as readers, are led into it in ever-widening circles which includes the larger conflicts between political parties.
Even as the inhabitants of the house prepare to challenge the grandfather’s will in court. Roy captures the rhythms of quotidian domestic life with solidity of specification and sensual precision: peyaj kolir chochchori (spring onion), keema (minced meat) fragrant with cinnamon and mustard oil, chingri (prawns) and malai kofta (cheese balls), side by side with the fishmonger’s melodic cry of “katla, bhetki, parshe[1]” in the bazaar. Food becomes both comfort and strategy, a language through which love and rivalry are expressed.
The characters of the house are memorable-from Hari to Vik, Biddy, the You-Tube sensation to Bari, the home help. Sharply etched, many of the characters act as contrasts to each other. The author uses psychoanalysis where a surface social self is ravaged by savage episodes of rage, often revealing that it is not our loves but our hates, which characterise us.
And last but not the least, the novel is a paean, a love song to the city of Kolkata, not in an idealised vein but with a full awareness of the creeping danger of narrow nationalism and parochial provincialism which has engulfed the city. The novel does not celebrate the feudal vestiges of Bengali society, but the secular reimagining of its multicultural past. As Lila returns to her more organised life in Brooklyn, the various bits of this novel resettle and find their place in the jigsaw, finally falling into place. This is a novel in the old style — a loose baggy monster of a novel — and an eminently readable one.
[1] Fishes that are part of popular cuisine
Meenakshi Malhotra is Professor of English Literature at Hansraj College, University of Delhi, and has been involved in teaching and curriculum development in several universities. She has edited two books on Women and Lifewriting, Representing the Self and Claiming the I, in addition to numerous published articles on gender, literature and feminist theory. Her most recent publication is The Gendered Body: Negotiation, Resistance, Struggle.
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