Mrs. Sharma takes a lover
In new novel, an affair gets complicated
Ratika Kapur’s “The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma” starts with a cliché: A woman and a man meet cute when they see each other nearly every morning at a metro station. But the brief novel, set in India, ends with a punch to the gut. Along the way, it’s a game to pluck the truth from the narrator’s shifting, spiraling point of view.
Renuka Sharma is the woman on the metro platform, and it’s through her eyes this first-person story unfolds. She is 37 and married with a 15-year-old son when she begins to admire a younger man in the Hauz Khas station in South Delhi.
She sees Vineet most days at the metro train stop on her way to work — watches him standing there confidently in his pressed pants and flawless shirts. Eventually they begin to speak.
Vineet is 30 and single. He never asks questions about her life, so for some time Renu lets him believe she, too, is single. “Actually, I thought that Vineet would ask me some questions,” she says. “But maybe he is too shy. Or maybe he does not like to interfere in other people’s lives. Or maybe he is just scared to know too much.”
At first it is a platonic relationship, but over a single summer it progresses: They meet for ice cream, then lunch, then at the boutique hotel where Vineet works.
Renu — she’d probably prefer that we call her Mrs. Sharma — is not the sort of woman who cheats on her husband. She wraps herself in saris and respectability; she has always clung to traditional beliefs. But from the beginning, she must lie to her family to make time to see Vineet. And, of course, she lies to Vineet.
Renu’s husband is working in Dubai, with few opportunities to return home. Renu, meanwhile, takes care of her in-laws and struggles with her son.
“It is difficult just now, I can’t lie,” she confesses. “I am alone, I am tired, and my husband is far away. But this is how it has to be.”
Her husband has urged her to learn to relax every once in a while. And if it relaxes her to spend time with Vineet, why shouldn’t she enjoy their time together guilt-free?
“I know my limits, and I have set them,” she tells the reader and herself. “I can meet Vineet from time to time, enjoy his mind, enjoy his body. But I am a good woman.”
She learns to compartmentalize: “Anybody is free to call me bold or mad or both, but nobody can point a finger at me and say that I am not still a respectable woman,” she says, defiant. Why should some meaningless extramarital sex diminish her virtue?
Vineet, however, doesn’t compartmentalize quite so well. He’s not content to be her occasional distraction; he wants to come to her house, befriend her son, marry her.
Her account is impersonal at first, holding the reader at arm’s length to prove that she is proper and morally upstanding. By the end, she confesses to behaviors we didn’t see coming, and with the same matter-of-fact frankness.
“I have not gone mad,” she insists early on, and she alludes to madness more often as time goes by. But as time goes by and her narration becomes a loop of twisted logic, what seemed like a figure of speech begins to sound more like diagnosis.
Renu is utterly unlikable at times, but in a way that feels chillingly familiar: We can’t help but see ourselves in her twisted justifications, her desire to have the world just as she wants it.
In the end, she can’t even have Vineet just the way she wants him. She’s a tired mother seeking escape, but the escape she found has become another prison. By the end, when her husband comes home from Dubai for vacation, Renu’s affair has become a miserable snarl of lies and half-truths, and she has to make a decision. The action she chooses is jaw-dropping and weird — and yet, looking back, it seems unavoidable. Watching Mrs. Sharma tangle her life into knots isn’t easy, but it’s impossible to look away.