“Summer of Then” by Rupleena Bose: the story of an unpleasant woman

In the world of Bose’s novel, women’s minds and bodies are constantly under scrutiny. The men in their lives want to own them like possessions. The state and society push them to fulfill utilitarian roles, such as producing children or caring for their families. While accompanying a friend to a fertility clinic, the protagonist remembers the first time she had her legs waxed. “I screamed as wax strips pulled hairs from my leg,” she recalls. “The beautician in the room laughed and said to me: what will you do when you have a baby?” She comes to the conclusion that women’s very existence is marked by pain, that they try to conform to patriarchal standards of beauty by having their hair removed or giving birth.

Despite all her wisdom, certain decisions of the protagonist risk leaving the reader perplexed. For example, her relationship with Nikhil is inexplicable. From the first time we meet him, we are told that he is entitled, self-obsessed, and controlling. “Nikhil always used ‘may’ in his sentences, not ‘could’, not ‘can’, like normal people but ‘can’, as if he was the one who had the right to decide everything else.”

Her entitlement, as the narrator reveals, is a product of her class and caste. However, she agrees to marry him, only to realize a few years later: “Marriage gives you nothing even if it takes everything away from you. » When she tries she can’t remember why she chose to marry him. We suspect that it is the security and comfort that this marriage brings him. It’s hard to blame him for choosing him, at the same time, it seems incredible that someone so intelligent and erudite. is not aware of the consequences of such choices. When she ventures into the territory of infidelity, she tries to justify it with arguments in favor of open marriages, even if her actions in no way fall under ethical polyamory.

₹699 ” title=”Summer of Then, by Rupleena Bose, Penguin Random House India, 356 pages, ₹699 “>

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While the protagonist’s artistic and personal journeys are at the heart of Bose’s novel, it is also a “state of the nation” novel, depicting rising inequality and religious conflict in India with empathy and clarity . At the DU college where the protagonist teaches, a Muslim student is also killed for dating a Hindu classmate. When the protagonist mentions this relationship during an interview with the investigating police officer, the latter responds: “He was a Muslim. No good Hindu girl would look at him. » Efforts by students and faculty to ensure a fair investigation are being scuttled by the college administration and police. The tragic outcome for the young lovers reflects the increasingly claustrophobic atmosphere in India, but the episode also has personal resonance for the protagonist.

At the time the incident with the students takes place, the protagonist is in a relationship with Zap, a friend of her husband. The relationship is doubly illegitimate in the society in which she lives: it is an extramarital affair and Zap is Muslim, his real name being Zafar. By the logic of the police officer and, by extension, the state, this makes the protagonist a bad person, betraying her religion.

Later in the book, she finds herself in another controversy when her lectures on the rise of fascism in Europe are recorded by one of her students and posted on social media. The college authorities told him not to associate literature with politics. “How can we disconnect literature from contemporary reality?” she reflects. “What else is literature?… If we don’t connect the personal and the political, time and history… what are we doing?”

Indeed, what do we do? The book refuses to provide easy answers. In fact, by making the protagonist anonymous (although it is indicated that she might be Dalit) and allowing her to make mistakes, Bose deliberately makes it difficult for his readers to sympathize with her. If readers empathize with her, it is because they recognize that she is not an “angel” or a “monster.” She is, like them, human, too human.

Uttaran Das Gupta is a freelance writer and journalist.