A Murshidabad manor tells a protofeminist tale

Less than halfway through Aruna Chakravarti’s Suralakshmi Villa, you realise the book will haunt you. You know that years later, you will wake from a deep afternoon nap on a sticky summer day, trying frantically to recall when you visited Murshidabad and wondering why your brain can only dredge up scraps of an afternoon at the ruins of the Goud palace in Malda, when it will suddenly strike you that you’ve never visited these places, only read about them in a book.

That’s how evocative this book is: unconsciously evocative actually, because history is merely the backdrop of the story, though without it the book would be meaningless. Suralakshmi Villa swings back, forth and sideways in time between the 1930s and the 1990s through the lives of several people over several generations, all centred on and around Dr Suralakshmi Chaudhury, the woman who owns the villa named for her by her parents.

Suralakshmi’s mother, Lakshmi, was extraordinarily ahead of her pre-Independence times. When her oldest daughter was widowed at the age of 16, Lakshmi insisted that none of her five daughters would be forced into an arranged marriage. They would make their own decisions about everything: careers, marriage, children.

Much later, in a village that was once the capital of the Goud kingdom of Bengal, four girls live in the stinking ruins of a palace that has become a tenement for poor

Muslims. None of the women here have agency over their own lives; they are mere possessions. Sexually abused by her father, Eidun is whisked to safety and a career in nursing by Suralakshmi after a botched abortion, but Jeeni is married off within a day at the age of 11 to save her from the same fate, Meroo is married to the village barber who treats her like dirt and unbeautiful Ojju, still unmarried at 21, takes out her frustration on her mother, Ruksana, a woman soaked in misery thanks to the many still-born babies to her name.

At other times and other places in the novel, you meet Kingshuk, the son Suralakshmi abandoned, Pratul, Suralakshmi’s cousin who had been rescued by her father from a life of small-mindedness and neglect in his village joint family, and Tara, the daughter of a judge, who marries Pratul and becomes

Suralakshmi’s best friend. There are lots of other people, each with some role to play in and around Suralakshmi’s life — not to mention Suralakshmi Villa itself, which picks up the story of our heroine whenever her family and friends have no explanation for what goes on in Suralakshmi’s head.

The only person you seldom hear from directly in this novel is Suralakshmi herself. This means that, like the characters in the book, you get no privileges in your understanding of Suralakshmi other than what the villa has to say. But you don’t really need to know Suralakshmi well. You just need to know that Suralakshmi Villa is an unusual and understated novel that will one day creep into your dreams.

Kushalrani Gulab is a freelance editor and writer who dreams of being a sanyasi by the sea

By Aruna Chakravarti Picador India, `650

Venezuelan journalist Ariana Neumann’s first book, a memoir describing her father, Hans Neumann’s extraordinary wartime existence, as a Czech Jew moving freely throughout Berlin is the talk of the reading circle. When Time Stopped: A Memoir of My Father’s War and What Remains (Simon & Schuster) is a chillingly sad reconstruction of the Holocaust, from the point of view of one family, seen through a daughter’s eyes.