CHINA ROOM by Sunjeev Sahota

 

One of my fellow book club girls bought this for her contribution. She reviewed it thoroughly but did feel that she didn't do a great sell on it. No one took it to read - except me. Two reasons - I am drawn to anything that centres on India, plus I really felt that there was a much better story in the book than what my friend was trying to convey. And yes there is! 

In Punjab in 1929, fifteen year old Mehar is married off to one of three brothers. On the same day the other two brothers are also married off, to similarly young girls. Barbaric by our moral standards, but normal for India. Mother-in-law Mai is the typical Indian MIL, very hard on the brides, controlling and dominating of her sons. They all live on a small farm in a busy rural community. Unsurprisingly the girls are expected to sleep with their husbands on demand, and the china room on the property is set aside for this purpose. It is always dark. Mehar, and the other brides, never see their husband's faces, never see their bodies, never talk to them. These are marriages designed to obey and produce sons. The brides are veiled with downcast eyes at all times when they are out of the small space they live in, so their husbands don't know who they are, and they don't know who their husbands are. Mehar wants one of the brothers to be her husband, falling obsessively in love with him, truly believing he is her husband. What unfolds is Mehar's awakening as a woman and a person in her own right, becoming courageous enough to decide her life on her own terms. This is all set against a background of rigid social controls, women as vassals of their husbands and husbands' families, as well as the changing political scene in India at this time - the presence of the British increasingly resented. 

Parallel to Mehar's story is that of her great grandson, who has no name in this story. He has grown up in England, went off the rails a bit, and has been sent back to his family's home town, moving to the farm, now derelict, that Mehar had lived on. This is the perfect environment for him to get his health back, grow up, find himself. He slowly finds his feet, develops relationships and friendships with the locals, and has his own love affair. 

You can see this latter paragraph is considerably shorter than Mehar's paragraph, and that is how the story is too. This really is Mehar's story, and it is achingly beautiful in its telling. Being a love story set in India in 1929 it is of course doomed, but we do know fairly early on with the move to 1999 that Mehar herself is not doomed. I do feel that the story could have stood on its own without the great grandson's story, and I am not sure why he doesn't have a name. But the writing of both stories is very accomplished, atmospheric, so much is said with a glance, with the way the young women carry themselves, the hard life they expected to live, the dry landscape of the farm, the busyness of the local town. As with anything of India in general, so much lies below the surface, beneath the veneer of social expectation and mores. I really did like this, it met all my expectations of a modern Indian novel. Good review for the next book club.