When the lives of our near ones seem easy on the exterior, we most often tend to overlook what lies beneath. Ratna Vira’s second novel, It’s Not About You, makes this point wonderfully by narrating the story of a teenage protagonist Aksh — a ‘good child’ whose life is far more complex than what it appears on the surface. Aksh lives with his ‘single mother’ Sammy in Gurgaon. His father Rishi and sister Tanya live in london. On an ordinary day Sammy gets a call from Aksh’s school about him being beaten and taken to the hospital.
This is where Sammy’s journey towards understanding the real life of her son begins. Sammy now finds herself walking down a path she hardly knew existed, trying to patch together the events which might lead her to the perpetrators and the reason for her son’s condition.
In a dramatic plot, Vira has woven together a lot. The unfolding of the narrative involves mystery and drama and keeps the reader glued to the book, exploring, with Sammy, the hidden life of Aksh. Many readers, similar to their experience of mystery novels, might find themselves fitting together the pieces of Aksh’s life, sympathising with Sammy, even preempting her next move at many places.
Vira has put forth a simple narrative infused with intriguing intertextual references from varied disciplines. Each chapter begins with an epigraph with quotes from people of varied fields ranging from popular authors, poets, celebrities, spiritual ascetics and working mothers to historians and visual artists. Vira’s incorporation of literature, music, poetry and psychology render the novel relatable and comprehensible to all its readers.
In addition to the interesting structure of her book, Vira thematically puts forth plethora of issues towards her readers. While some situations which she addresses are universal in nature, some are specific to Gurgaon and Delhi — the immediate geographical reference of her book. Though based on an incident of bullying, the novel delves into much more than that. It voices out the pressures of urban life on youngsters, the power attained by economic affluence and political affiliations and the hypocrisy and vulnerability of ‘safe’ social institutions such as schools. It asks, how far are we untouched by power and politics and in doing so also deconstructs the idea of a school in popular imagination.
Vira projects the oft ignored social conditions of Delhi where drugs, money and desire guide actions. In Rishi and Sammy’s quest to understanding what possibly happened to their son, this hidden life of Delhi conditioning so many of its inhabitants — particularly its teenagers comes to light.
With extreme sensitivity, the book reads into the relationship of parents and children. The issues of a granting teenagers a ‘private life’ and the lack of communicating between parents and children become central to the book in this respect. What is privacy, when one speaks of a teenage childIJ How does one understand the life of their children when they no longer speak to the parentsIJ Do you know who your children areIJ These are a few of the many questions which the book urges its readers to think about. Concentrated on Aksh’s disjointed family, the novel exposes the hypocrisy and oppression within familial relations of extended Indian families.
like Vira’s debut novel Daughter by Court Order where Aranya’s fight is as much against her mother as it is against politics of the of family, one constantly finds Sammy in the same places. Tormented by her mother, the experience and memories of being maltreated do not leave Sammy throughout the book. In fact, Sammy’s existence in how she has carefully fashions herself to not be what her mother was, depends upon the trauma she experiences for being born to her mother.
Besides familiar pressures, the book articulates the pressures of motherhood and womanhood. Sammy, for instance, is a woman forever guilty of what goes wrong with her children or life. She is a strong, independent, financially successful woman and yet her image, socially and in her own perception of herself, is predominantly based upon a failed marriage and single motherhood.
The characters are crafted well so as to render them relatable. Rishi, Aksh, Tara and and Sammy, the hilarious Maasiji, the wicked and corrupt brothers Santri and Mantri are characters we often find within the social fabric of the city. The novel is an easy and interesting read and keeps its readers hooked on by the many questions it seeks to put forth or answer.
A sensitive account of many aspects of the contemporary life of ‘changing India’, It’s Not About You takes its readers to the India of social networking, broken families and friendships beyond divorce, the India of successful yet guilty single mothers.
The reviewer teaches at a college in Delhi University