Booker Prize-shortlisted author Avni Doshi’s new novel, The First House, is here. And it is magnificent. A terrifying story of heartbreak, humiliation, and total annihilation of the self, the novel burns through the skin, scorching the very heart.

The novel starts with the narrator’s husband asking for a divorce. She had believed them to be reasonably happy, but after two daughters, the husband would beg to differ. The reasons are the usual – he feels trapped, he’s bored, the wife is too much. She proceeds to remind him of his responsibilities, especially towards his children. It’s a deadlock. The marriage is over.

It happens at a time of cicadas bursting out of their cocoons and the couple’s planets behaving erratically. The end of the marriage, in these circumstances, is presented almost like a natural occurrence.

Bye bye, baby

The immediate aftermath comprises dealing with the children, the possibility of the husband’s having an affair, the narrator’s work-in-progress novel facing yet another setback, and, worst of all, money troubles. Panic shot through me each time the narrator’s credit card was declined (it is managed by her husband) and she dug around for cash. This is the most humiliating position a woman can be in, no matter how good or bad the health of her relationship is – with no job and, therefore, no money of her own, the narrator relies on her husband’s and father’s charity to keep the household afloat. The expenses are closely monitored by the husband, who admonishes her for buying knick-knacks or the more expensive food items at a supermarket. As the “useless” arm of her natal home and, later in her marriage, the absence of money leaves the narrator with little say in her autonomy.

The break-up takes centre stage in the first section of the novel. The narrator fixates on every moment of her marriage with her husband, and calculates what might have led him to dispose of her so easily. She reveals why she married him at all: “to live in a fairytale.” The relationship almost seems to begin with the marriage, with the narrator remembering little from the courtship days, except how they met. The marriage is a means for the narrator’s survival; love a product of habit. Yet, it is the husband who is at the centre of the marriage.

The narrator muses how “relationships [can] only support one whole person at a time. For the other partner, marriage [is] a Procrustean bed.” She laughs off marriage as a “joke”, realising that a “terrible fear of consequences” is what keeps it alive. Her family’s staunch disapproval of the husband stings her still – she’s loyal to him in a way one is to a bad habit. Accepting her family’s help is akin to opening a new portal to hell. After all, only a lifetime of deception can lead a woman to believe that marriage is a “fairy tale.”

The husband’s departure forces the three women to fuse into a single organism, the mother and children experiencing a similar degree of helplessness. There are moments when the narrator is dangerously close to serious harm – the kind that adults ordinarily do not find themselves in. Her newly acquired decoupled status allows the narrator to turn her thoughts to what I’m sure many mothers have painfully pried out of their psyche – what will happen to them once the child, who can still leave, leaves?

Here, there is no pretence of a selfless motherhood. Almost every “natural” instinct of a mother serves a selfish purpose – to keep the child safe so the mother is never truly alone, to care for the child so it might care for her when she’s old, and so on. The mother liberally employs guilt, reminding the child that she stayed behind even though she could have left them like their father. The reader must see it for what it is – the mother’s survival strategy.

Survival skills

The second section unfolds in the present and flashbacks of the past. The narrator’s natal family quite literally pushes a foot through the door, dragging in with it surveillance and judgment. The narrator’s cousin, Sama, remarks that her family is “strange”. It’s a generous verdict. The narrator addresses her parents as infantile “Mommy” and “Daddy” and her older sister as “Didi.” Her sister never married and together with her father, they lord over Mommy and the narrator, their scorn a pretence for protection. Daddy and Didi bypass the narrator’s parenting laws, indulging the children in a manner she strongly disapproves of. This is an all-too-common phenomenon in Indian families, where those who have money band together to dictate to those who don’t, even assuming a moral superiority to do so.

I was reminded of what feminist Bonnie Burstow said: “Often father and daughter look down on mother (woman) together. They exchange meaningful glances when she misses a point. They agree that she is not bright as they are, cannot reason as they do. This collusion does not save the daughter from the mother’s fate.” The narrator, who once saw marriage as an escape route, is catapulted back to her childhood – an equally oppressive time of control and disdain.

It is only the ambitious novelist in her who can make sense of her battered marriage. There is enough material to fill up a book. Her grief and responsibilities pile up, yet she can now see clearly who the husband always was – selfish, a “part-time” father, and a narcissist. She sees herself better too. Had she not isolated herself and indulged in occasional gossip, her friends would have saved her from this fate. Her 13-year marriage concludes on a philosophical note: that we are always alone.

It is easy to mistake The First House for a divorce memoir, a genre that is all the rage and dominated by women writers. Debates about autobiographical details aside, the novel is an unsparing account of motherhood and marriage, banishing once and for all any assumptions that a “good” woman is promised happiness. It does not spare the woman’s natal family either, which often sets her up for a lifetime of incompetence through rigid policing. Through these disappointments, there’s only one thing that belongs completely to the woman, even more than the children she has birthed – her creative ambition.

The First Blow, Avni Doshi, HarperCollins India.

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