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March 13, 2005
REVIEWS: Speaking out through fiction
WITH her debut novel, Madras on Rainy Days, Samina Ali has joined the ever-increasing number of South Asian writers of English fiction. Having grown up in both the United States and India in a strict, conservative Muslim family, Samina’s autobiographical novel offers an insightful perspective on growing up multicultural.
The novel is set completely in India — mostly in Hyderabad, not Madras as the title implies. It is a story of young Layla whose family and circumstances are modelled after Samina’s herself. Though they live in America, every year Layla’s parents bring her back to spend summers in India. The yearly visits deemed necessary by the parents in order to assure that their daughter maintains her sense of Indian culture and is less vulnerable to undue influences of the “loose” American society. The story opens with Layla and her mother staying in India on one of these annual visits. This visit, however, is different. This time Layla’s mother has found a suitable match and arranged her marriage. The novel comprises the series of events that occur before and after the wedding.
Among some weaknesses of the novel are that it contains frequent generalizations about Indian and American Muslims, especially women, and attempts to cover too many subjects — arranged marriage, homosexuality in the Indian Muslim community, child abuse, miscarriage, rape, murder, cultural pressures on Indian men, communal violence. Yes, it’s all there and more. Then there is the writing style that lacks the refinement of a mature writer and gives Samina away as a newcomer to fiction writing. Despite these flaws, the novel is a commendable achievement on her part. It portrays a young woman’s struggle to get herself out of a hopeless situation despite intense opposition from family and community.
Layla, who hesitantly enters the arranged marriage, subsequently falling in love with her new husband, discovers that in fact the man she married could never offer her the ‘happy home’ for which she longed. When she turns to her family for help, they send her back to her husband insisting that she accept her circumstances and learn to live with them. Faced with a desperate situation, Layla does not give up and continues her fight alone.
We know from her many interviews that Samina Ali herself went through an arranged marriage at 19 and afterwards faced the very same situation as her protagonist. Just like Layla in the novel, Samina too fought her battle alone and freed herself from a course that would inevitably lead to a life of depression and unhappiness. The novel contains intimate details that may make some readers uncomfortable. The issue that Layla faces as she learns the truth about her new husband’s inability to consummate their marriage is a serious one. Due to its taboo nature, it is one that most Indian Muslims (or for that matter most Pakistanis) prefer not to discuss, leaving the woman to suffer in silence. While many young women in the same situation would have resigned themselves to fate, too afraid to take any action, Samina chose to take control of her life, as does Layla.
Samina has also said that the novel is her way of speaking out about what she went through at 19. She hopes that it will help other young girls who find themselves being pressured to stay in marriages that cannot have happy futures.
There are also some great observations made in the novel. Referring to the fact that her parents were born in India and planned to retire there, Layla says, “...for them, birth and death occurred in India, but not life.” Speaking of a youthful indiscretion with a boy back in America, she says, “No, I hadn’t the courage to sneak out of the house. But I had found someone willing to sneak in.” When Layla is feeling torn between the two cultures in which she has grown, she says, “Oh, the way each culture condemned and complained. India was backward and primitive, exotic. America was morally bankrupt, a cultural colonizer. The truth was that each place held allure for the other, a fascination and curiosity”.
For her Indian, Pakistani and Muslim readers, the novel may serve as inspiration not only to young girls but also to parents who often feel helpless against society’s pressures. For the non-Muslim readers, it is important to remember what they are reading is one person’s perspective of life in one conservative Muslim community and, particularly, in two specific families. To read this fictional account of real life events as a general representation of all Muslim communities would be unfair to the author as well as the highly diverse Muslim communities of the world.
Madras on Rainy Days
By Samina Ali
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
ISBN 0374195625
320pp. US$10.98
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