Novel an erotic twist on arranged marriage
But plot twists back away from answering key questions
“Why did Mindi want an arranged marriage?”
That’s the arresting first sentence of Balli Kaur Jaswal’s “Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows”; its implicit nod to the famous opening of “Pride and Prejudice” hints at what’s to come in this novel.
As with Austen’s breakthrough book, Jaswal’s novel – her third – unfolds in England. This time, though, the community under the microscope is composed of Sikhs, in which both young women and older widows are no more expected to have their own needs and desires than were the Bennet sisters residing in Austen’s Hertfordshire.
The Lizzie in Jaswal’s novel is the similarly smart, outspoken and headstrong Nikki, a 22-year-old whose parents had emigrated from India; 25-year-old Mindi is her more conventional, Jane-like sister. Like Lizzie, Nikki’s most important familial relation is with a father who values his daughter’s intelligence.
But when the novel opens, Dad is dead – killed, Nikki is sure, by her inability to decide what to do with her life.
Nikki is tending bar and biding time when she stumbles on the chance to teach what she’s been tricked into thinking is a creative writing class at a Sikh Community Center. Kulwinder, a woman with a title but little power, is actually looking for someone to teach Sikh women with too much time on their hands how to read and write. So much for theory. The widows who show up quickly transform this literacy class into the equivalent of a 1970s women’s group focused on consciousness raising. The chosen medium? Erotic stories through which they give fantastic form to relationships bearing little resemblance to their more humdrum lives. Several of those stories are included, here; think “Fifty Shades of Grey,” Indian style.
“Whoa!,” one of Nikki’s friends reacts, upon reading one of them. “I thought these were going to be granny romance stories. These are all-out naughty.” They also involve women taking initiative in the bedroom, in ways that surprise the male characters in the stories as well as the husbands of women — not all of whom are widowed — hearing them.
The stories go over less well with male zealots perceiving them — and, by extension, Nikki herself — as a threat to their traditional way of life.
But just as we think we’re heading toward a showdown bewoman tween this warpatriarchy, rior and the Jaswal’s plot takes a convoinvolving luted detour honor crimes of violence against women. The pace slows, expository backstoover ries takes and imrise, probabilities en route to an overly tidy concluIn sion. the procsight ess, we lose of a quartet of women whose stories — both fantastitorical cal and historical — were beginning to develtexture op the sort of disthat played by memorable quartet of mothers in Amy Tan’s “The Joy Luck Club” (1989). But instead of burrowing inward and plumbing psychology, this novel turns outward, plotting — and plodding — toward the finish line.
Along the way, Jaswal not only abandons her widows, but also loses sight of that provocatively posed opening question, involving what it means to choose — and what choices women actually have.
Might a woman choosing an arranged marriage wind up with more freedom than one who doesn’t? Disappointingly underdeveloped subplots involving Mindi and Nikki’s budding romances — with two very different men — ask that question, and then largely drop it.
Is Nikki’s militant notion of freedom just a form of naïve individualism, in a world that needs more rather than less sense of community and family? Might a young woman who feels torn between her Indian and British selves find a way to choose both? Again: These questions get posed, without thereafter being pondered.
All of which is to say that that Jaswal’s book exhibits plenty of potential. But while some of its stories may be erotic, one ultimately feels that the inner worlds of its most intriguing women remain as unexplored by her as they are by the many men shaping the narrative of these women’s lives.