BOOK-MARKED
In a novel where Foucault is quoted in love letters, it’s the quiet reader who is finally celebrated
Rheea Mukherjee’s debut novel The Body Myth is an ambitious, emotionally rich story that explores love, illness, family and philosophy. The protagonist Mira, an English schoolteacher, seeks solace in the European philosophers Camus, Sartre, and de Beauvoir’s works after her husband’s untimely death. Her grief becomes blunted after an encounter with a married couple in a park where she sees the wife, Sara, fake a seizure. This incident pulls her into the couple’s enigmatic world and the three embark on a relationship that rejects social sanction and brings with it all the vulnerability and messiness of polyamory.
Mira’s primary love interest is the charismatic Sara with her spirituality (she is frequently lost in “Sufi ecstasy”) and her mysterious ailments. The reader is left guessing the true nature of the illnesses and the implication that it may be Munchausen’s. Mira’s suspicions of Sara’s hypochondria are stoked by husband Rahil’s inexplicable tendency to play along as Sara’s nurse and companion. Mira finds her cynicism overturned by her powerful attraction to Sara’s mystique, while her relationship with Rahil is more mundane, material and one that finally brings Mira solace. The narrative keeps the reader hooked and concludes with more than one plot twist. The writing is purposefully queer and playful in its reluctance to define the triadic relationship.
Even as Mira’s relationship with her gentle, liberal father anchors the narrative in a more relatable context, his revelation of her mother’s mysterious death forms its own little subplot. The unconventional plotline is heightened by a powerful foregrounding of the female voice. Mukherjee gently explores questions of trauma and mental health through philosophy and reflection. She pulls off the enviable feat of looking at institutions and feelings while rejecting their constraints. Mira’s thoughts—“I was not a renegade; I was just a reader”—could well be the reader’s own experience, forcing us to examine our own assumptions about society. Only one trope does not add up: the mythology of the Rasagura, the superfruit from Mira’s fictional city of Suryam, sticks out as a laboured metaphor that does not enrich an otherwise engrossing plot.