Book: The Paths of Marriage
Author: Mala Kumar
Publisher: Bedazzled Ink Publishing
On a late August afternoon in 1984, my
corn-fed parents packed up the Delta 88 with all my worldly possessions, and
deposited my twitchy little butt into Room 718 of Lawson Hall on the campus of
Eastern Illinois University.
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| American manufacturing at its finest |
For the most part, it was the first time I’d
really left the farm.
For anywhere.
Ever.
My first-year roommate was a born-again,
bible-thumping biology major, I had no clue why Wednesday was “Prince Spaghetti
Day,” and I rocked the big glasses and home perm. I was a hayseed. An outsider.
A freak. I had a South Midland accent that clashed horribly with Chicago’s
Northern-City-Vowel-Shift. I had no clue why the dining hall always served fish
on Friday, and the only Polish phrase I knew was “Warsaw Falcon,” a spurious
brand of kosher pickles stocked in the local IGA.
To say college was a culture shock, is a bit like saying “Black
Death cast rather a gloom over the 14th Century.”
But, over the course of that first year,
things started to sort themselves out. I met a great gal from Northbrook, who was
a fellow outsider and freak. The only difference was that “outsider” and
“freak” were badges of honor for her. She was deceptively smart and well read,
and her sense of humor could sharpen a shillelagh at forty paces. She took me
under her wing, introduced me to REM, and spent more nights than I can remember
sitting under the stars with me, talking about life and everything in between.
My glasses eventually got better, but I would endure another
decade of increasingly bad hair don’t’s before I finally learned to quit loving
the box perm, and get a real hairstylist.
It’s a nice story, I know.
But, as hard as it was for me, I had it
easy…by far.
Imagine what it would feel like being that
17-year-old girl, and encountering a cultural chasm where your religion,
cuisine, family and gender roles, celebrations, marriages, music, clothing,
language, and societal hierarchy—all or in large part—were outside of the
excepted norm.
Yeah, kind of daunting, right?
Pooja, their oldest daughter, grows up an
outsider in her West Virginia town, and learns upon high school graduation that
she is destined for an arranged marriage. While not happy with her parents’
decision, she reluctantly tries to rise to the expectations set for her. After
marrying Anand, who takes a residency position in Orlando, Pooja gets an
opportunity to follow her dream of studying architecture. But soon Anand must
take another position in New Orleans, and Pooja’s dreams are uprooted. Eventually,
she enrolls in a new architectural program, and life rights itself again. That
is, until she finds herself falling in love with one of her professors, and drifting
away from her husband. To make matters worse, the object of her affection is
proudly gay, and has no interest in her other than as a friend. Newly single,
broken-hearted, and pregnant, Pooja walks away from her academic dreams, and embarks upon a journey to give her daughter the
life she never had.
Deepa, is a third generation Indian-American,
and a lesbian. Living in New York City, she is out and proud. However, with her
mother and grandmother, she remains firmly in the closet—understanding that her
grandmother lived a hard life, and that her mother made many sacrifices for
her. After meeting the woman who could be the love of her life, she struggles
to understand what it means to love someone enough to risk losing everything.
Deepa’s eventual coming out is complicated by the circumstances of being a gay
minority woman, and it splits the seams of her family wide open. Each woman must
then find a way to use her own set of experiences to form empathy for the
others.
For the Indian-American community, The Paths of Marriage is a
one-of-a-kind story, and its themes are the fundamental and often universal
ideas explored in literary works of many cultures.
Chief among them
is the challenge of cultural translation—the
various narrators (Lakshmi, Pooja, and Deepa) meditate on their inability to
translate concepts and sentiments from one culture to another—Indian to
American, Privileged to Peasant, First Generation to Second Generation to Third
Generation, Straight to Gay. The barriers that exist between the mothers
and the daughters are often due to their inability to communicate with one
another, sometimes through language, sometimes through life experience, and sometimes
through cultural establishment.
The second is the power of storytelling—because
the barriers between the Indian and the American cultures are exacerbated by
imperfect translation of language and experience: the mothers use storytelling
to circumvent these barriers and communicate with their daughters. The stories
they tell often warn against certain mistakes, or give advice based on past
successes. In effect, storytelling is used to communicate not just life’s
lessons-learned, but also to illumine the basis for decision-making and
steadfast belief. The problems arise when each of the characters has heard the
others’ stories so often that they quit listening, and lose the importance of
the message.
The third is the issue of immigrant identity.
At some point in Ms. Kumar’s story, each of the major characters expresses
anxiety over her inability to reconcile her Indian heritage with her American
surroundings. While the daughters in the novel are genetically Indian, they
also identify with, and feel at home in, modern American culture. Still, as the
novel progresses, the daughters plan a special trip to visit both Paris and the
Taj Mahal—showing, perhaps, that they are amalgams of their unique tastes,
habits, hopes, and ambitions more so than creatures of their genetic sequences.
And finally, the characters use their own sets
of experiences to form empathy toward others. Lakshmi survives a brutal youth. Pooja
gives up her dreams to fulfill the dreams of her parents. And Deepa embraces
life as a lesbian. Each woman becomes so focused on her personal demons, that
she fails to understand and accept the messages she is hearing from the others.
As each woman finds herself poised on a precipice of nothingness, she must
choose either to change her trajectory, or to step forward. These acts of personal
sacrifice speak to the power of the mother-daughter-granddaughter bond—despite
being weakened and tested by cultural, linguistic, and generational gulfs. The
sacrifices these women make prove that the bonds they share will not be
destroyed.
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| Author Mala Kumar |
The Paths of Marriage is
a richly textured story full of bountiful detail, well-defined characters, and unexpected
cultural and social insight. It expresses a rare fidelity and beauty, while
having the heart to show both the dark underbelly of Indian and American
cultures, as well as the bright lights they share. Ms. Kumar speaks to the
ongoing struggle to control our own destinies, the blight of sexism on both
historical and contemporary cultures, and the bonds that strengthen when you
are willing to sacrifice for love.
In the hands of a less passionate writer,
such thematic material might easily have become didactic, and the characters
might have seemed like paper doll cutouts from a Bollywood knockoff of The Joy Luck Club. But in the hands of Mala
Kumar, who has a wonderful eye for detail, an ear for dialogue, a soul-deep
empathy for her subject matter, and a gently colloquial style of writing, they form
the beautiful and compelling story we’ve waited a long time to read. The Paths of Marriage is a must read, not just for members of the Indian-American community, but for lesbians, feminists, and women of all sizes, shapes, colors, and beliefs.
The Paths of Marriage is scheduled for an October 1, 2014 release date.
The Paths of Marriage is scheduled for an October 1, 2014 release date.
