Marriage in a Covid vacuum

At the start of the worldwide pandemic lockdowns, a series of articles appeared in the media trying to predict how being in enforced isolation for such long periods would affect personal relationships. Psychologists and marriage counsellors said it would be the super-rich jet-set who wouldn’t survive these conditions with their relationships intact. Spending time in close proximity would make them discover things about each other they didn’t previously know. Divorce rates would skyrocket among the ultra-high-net-worth crowd. Prenups would come into play. Yachts, chalets and vineyards would become bones of contention. Reading Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan’s eighth book, Soft Animal, about a marriage that unravels during India’s countrywide Covid lockdown, it was the memory of those news stories that most immediately came to my mind.

The blurb on the back of this state-of-a-marriage novel recommends it to those who are “readers of Sally Rooney and Curtis Sittenfeld”. Reddy Madhavan came to prominence in the first decade of this century for a frank warts-and-all blog called Compulsive Confessions that charted the adventures of a millennial woman in a rapidly modernising Indian metropolis. Confessional blogs were the medium for young women to examine everything from their fashion choices to their sex lives in the pop culture vacuum that existed between the end of the original Sex and the City series and the start of Lena Dunham’s Girls (Dunham, of course, was as much a Voice of a Generation as Rooney would come to be).

It is inevitable that the confessional blogger who wrote about the caprices of dating life would graduate to, as the years went on, the marital state as a subject for their fiction. What makes books about marriage stand out are whether they say anything radical about an institution that has endured for millennia. Soft Animal (the title of the novel is taken from a line in Mary Oliver’s poem Wild Geese) doesn’t quite succeed in this regard.

The novel is narrated by 36-year-old unemployed marketing professional Mallika Rao. As the story starts, Covid has entered the news cycle and she’s realised she doesn’t like her husband anymore. The husband, Mukund Chugh, is a corporate hotshot from a rich New Delhi family. Mallika’s background is more middle-class. There might be some tension there, of the difference in personal fortunes and wealth and backgrounds (Mallika grew up in Delhi but is of South Indian heritage) but any possible conflict is mostly, frustratingly, inside Mallika’s mind and nothing actually seeps out into the real world.

Mallika and Mukund live in a rented apartment that has an officious Residents’ Welfare Association. Come the lockdown, Mallika is added to the WhatsApp group and is forced to deal with the interfering, good morning message posting aunties and uncles rife in these environments. But even these tensions are not as potent as they tend to be in real life. Whatever arguments happen, take place with such a passivity that the reader is left wondering what could drive this story over the edge.

The one plot point designed to do just this, Mallika discovering she’s pregnant just as the country goes into lockdown, is also painted in beige tones. Though she conveys her internal anxiety about being pregnant and tries to hide it from her husband and in-laws, there again seems to be a lack of any real danger here. If she were to declare it, she’d be stuck in the marriage she wants to exit and her mother-in-law would be oppressive and take over her life. But the obliviousness of her husband and her mother-in-law only seeing her on video calls erases this tension as well.

Mallika’s actions through the novel — ignoring her husband, taking in her mother’s dog (her parents are stuck in Hyderabad due to the lockdown), befriending a neighbour who is a retired Brigadier — are done with minimal efforts to stir the pot. When Mallika imagines throwing a plate at the wall to get a reaction out of her husband, you wish she’d follow through so the book’s pulse would quicken.

And therein lies the core issue with a story that should be about pain and loss and the withering of time: nothing quite makes an impression when something should. These two attractive, privileged thirty-somethings met, had a relationship, and drifted apart. And the world barely noticed or cared.