JOIN USMothers and daughters. Three generations. Gajra Kottary’s latest novel, Girls Don’t Cry, shows the strong side of women/mothers. Hidden behind a façade or in-you-face, the steely resolve shines through, whether it’s the main protagonist Amala, her mother Disha, or her grandmother Veera Naanji.
Amala is a woman of the times, working in the mad ad world in big bad Bombay. Life is picture-perfect: a well-paying and satisfying job and a significant other with whom she thinks she has a faultless live-in relationship. No ties of marriage bind the Jalandhar girl and the Mumbaikar Mukul, it’s only love that does. Or that’s what Amala thinks.
Her disillusion surfaces when on the second anniversary of their meeting, she gets delayed at work and Mukul explodes. Especially because his insecurity triggers the needling suspicion that Amala is getting close to her workmate Aabhas. His intemperate aggression and walkout from their house and her life leave Amala stunned. To make matters worse, she gets a call from her mother Disha informing her about her grandfather’s death. Talk about timing!
A dazed Amala lets her friend and colleague Aabhas take matters in his hands and make arrangements for her to go to Jalandhar for the funeral.
The sorrow at seeing her beloved grandfather’s body makes Amala ponder and wonder at Veera Naanji and what she perceives as the true loyal love between her grandparents. In her wretched state, she pointedly ignores her mother Disha who had refused to return to her husband, Amala’s father Manas. Manas had deserted Disha and infant Amala and remarried but, after a few years, wanted them back. The close mother-daughter relationship between Amala and Disha took a beating when Amala saw Disha getting cosy with her colleague Jatin at a restaurant. It had enraged Amala and she had broken off ties with her mother.
However, there are unpleasant surprises in store for her. Her grandfather was not the perfect man she had thought him to be. Returning to Jalandhar after a long time brings an objectivity to Amala and she sees her family in a new light, especially her Mamaji; how could she have not noticed this chauvinist side of him earlier!
Disha’s overtures to her daughter go unreciprocated. The wise and experienced Veera Naanji takes matters in her own hands and tries to bring about a rapprochement between the mother and daughter. The proverbial skeletons tumble out of Veera Naanji’s bundle of memories and Amala is aghast and taken aback by her wrong perception of her mother and other family members.
Not one to accept things without a proof, she seeks her paternal family in far-off Rajasthan, especially her father Manas, to get to the bottom of what had transpired between her parents way way back when she was a baby. Is the feisty Amala able to find her missing father? Does she repair the cracks in her relationship with her mother and see her for what she really is? What about Veera Naanji; what’s her story in the game of life where women generally get a raw deal?
Girls Don’t Cry belongs to the new genre of ‘dysfunctional men, strong women’, the buzzword in contemporary fiction.
Amala is mentored by Mukul when she arrives as a naive youngster to Mumbai. But the same Mukul is not able to accept the fact of her becoming an equal and capable of providing for both of them. “It was his male ego, which could not accept her as someone who could contribute equally to a home. It was resentment that had been exuding from him.” And in different ways, the story was the same in earlier generations; whether it was Disha or Veera Naanji or even Ilika, her stepmother. All women coped and handled the situation in a strong manner. And now it is Amala’s turn to be the tough and resilient woman. What is common among these generations of mothers is their strength to stand up for the daughter, come what may; even if it means taking on the men, whether by shrewdness or strong action.
Gajra Kottary has penned strong characters for television and that trend continues in this book.
However, one would have expected crisper writing. Conversations seem stilted and bookish, threatening to off-rail the story that had much potential. The characters don’t seem to be real people but ones that live in a book with their monologues spewed in an awkward way. The editing needed a firmer hand (“Could he been really have so self-centered?” ‘Device’ becomes ‘devise’ et al). With better execution, this tale could have been better told.
Girls don’t cry
Gajra Kottary
Harper Collins
2017, pp 280, Rs 299