AVNI Doshi’s second novel is narrated by an unnamed woman in suburban America who is shocked to hear her husband announce that he is leaving her. She does not truly love him, but she sees their marriage as a structure or “container” for her own existence. A former novelist, his writing has stopped since the birth of his children. Her husband controls her finances, and doesn’t tell her why the credit card keeps failing. She suspects that he is sleeping around.
After he leaves her she tries to isolate herself not only from her former partner, but also from her family, whose well-intentioned interference becomes another form of domination. She is a practicing astrologer – the “First House” of the title refers to both the couple’s house and the astrological division of the heavens that has an impact on the body, physical appearance, and early life experience: the foundation for the self. This self is exposed through abandonment. First House, as a whole, is the story of its rise: a harsh, sometimes bitterly funny rejection of the narrator’s personality and relationships. Marriage, she says, requires “a terrible fear of the consequences”; “If either person in the couple stops being afraid, they will definitely separate”. His parents bully him. Her cousin tries to set her up with other men. Her daughter just wants a phone. Relationships, like devices, promise engagement and create alienation. “The cramped, airless room of the wedding created the conditions for us to feel that we were alone, always alone.”
These hurtful encounters, or failure to face each other, extend beyond the family. The narrator’s parents came to America from India. The First House does not overt racism, but it manifests in misunderstanding. “It was difficult to be certain of the age of the white people,” the narrator said astutely. When she tells a pest control man that her family is Jain, he calls her Jain.
His elder sister Didi has made a different kind of life. Didi lives with her parents, has a job and does not have a partner or children. She buys diamonds for herself and gets work done on her face. As the sisters spend more time together, however, the narrator sees parallels between the sheltered lives they have created for themselves, both driven by “silent fears and dormant desires. We wanted to be safe at any cost in exchange for any sacrifice.”
Doshi’s 2020 Booker-shortlisted debut novel, Burnt Sugar, was also interested in female fear and sacrifice. In that book, Antara, an artist from India, has to take care of her elderly mother Tara, who is losing her memory. Antara narrates the painful, often brutal history of the relationship between the two women. Both the novels are completely different but they have a lot in common like relatives. In both she deals with and excavates the same intimate relationships (mother-daughter; husband-wife). Short scenes link back and forth in time, highlighting the broader family relationships and past encounters that have made this relationship what it is. There is a feeling of intensity. As I read these novels, I realized that something was slowly being built, or destroyed.
In Burnt Sugar, a story of shared memory and its failure, this method of moving the action back and forth through time has an increased capacity for change and unfolding. First House is more concerned with the present, and its core experience – that of a woman engaged in the painful process of extricating herself from wifehood – is familiar from many other recent novels and memoirs. However, Doshi’s storytelling ability is different. His prose is spiritual, dense and alert. Even a realistic pun on suburban scenes, which may only be functional, is a detached and dream-like picture. “Outside, the sky above me was full of clouds and the ground below was a bed of cotton pollen.”
The narrator is preoccupied with sinister, destructive tales of female figures from the deep past, particularly a statue of the goddess Diana that stands in a neighbor’s garden. Myth, like astrology, is important to him: these “ancient patterns” are capable of finding or applying systematic meaning – “a chart can be a narrative”. In contrast, the real world is chaos. Every attempt to communicate is fundamentally misunderstood.
The novel is also a form of communication, and the messages the narrator sends to his reader have a sense of urgency. “I want freedom, not from life or death or some vast cosmic cycle, but from my own fear, and from the oppression of other people, their opinions, aggression, and perhaps even their love.” Rejecting a relationship is a striving for personal freedom.
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