UNACCUSTOMED HEARTH

The Immigrant is about the loneliness of an entire generation of women who went as wives of Indian men who had immigrated in the ’70s. They faced a double loneliness: “If work exists for her, it is in the future, and after much finding of feet. At present all she is, is a wife, and a wife is alone for many, many hours. There will come a day when even books are powerless to distract. When the house and its conveniences can no longer completely charm or compensate. Then she realises she is an immigrant for life.”
The part of the novel set in Canada is somewhat uneven, with some sections reading more like research; but Kapur’s keen eye for middle-class atmosphere brings the 1970s Delhi to life. No detail is too small to mention, no space too cramped for understanding laced with gentle irony. The price of mangoes, the dal for the dahi bhallas, the bumpy taxi ride; the stray remark, the innuendo, the tiny barb that finds its target with implacable accuracy. Every day, after a 20-km bus journey, Nina returns to the tiny Jangpura Extension house that she shares with her mother. With its “sagging iron gate and scraggly lemon tree”, its dreary concrete space, and front steps that provide the only extra seating for a mother and a daughter who have come down in life, the flat is too small for their dreams and desires: for Nina’s mother, fretting away with worry about her daughter’s declining marriage prospect; and for Nina, weighed down by the burden of her mother’s sorrows as well as her own solitary status.
The apartment in Halifax is larger, with softer pillows and springier mattress, but also emptier: “There was nothing to disturb her. No landlord, no sound of traffic, no vendors, no part-time help to clean and swab, no mother who chatted while she worked.” And there is just one book in the apartment, a Canadian novel that Nina finishes in two days. When she wants more reading material and Ananda tells her to watch TV in the meantime, we get a hint of what is to come: “Nina had never watched TV in her life. She required the printed word to fill the spaces in her mind, the leisured turning of pages, the slow absorption of words, the occasional rereading. She wondered whether this suggested some rigidity of outlook.”
The reading life actually plays a critical part in Kapur’s novels. Her female protagonists read, introspect, question and sometimes find answers. In Halifax, Nina misses the sustenance that teaching and reading had given her — until she discovers the local library and decides to study library science. This decision gives her an identity other than that of the Indian dentist’s wife.

She learns to keep an accounts book (including accounts of her personal life and her husband’s infidelity). In the final pages of the novel, husband and wife have a little exchange about novels. Ananda, who claims to live “in the real world”, accuses Nina of behaving like a heroine in one of the novels that she keeps reading. “Which novel are you referring to?” asks Nina. “They are not all the same — or maybe you wouldn’t know.”
Finally, in Nina’s discovery of her own hidden reserves, Kapur articulates her vision of Indian feminism: “You had to be your own anchor. By now there was no escaping this knowledge. Still she had been trained to look for them and despite all that had happened, she had not got over the habit. Marry me, love me, above all, look after me. Somebody had to be responsible for her, besides herself. That was what women had been led to expect and hardly any price was too high.”