Sleepless and rootless

With the publication of Rupleena Bose’s debut novel Summer of Then in 2024, Indian women writing in English has set up a certain standard for stories of women in contemporary India. Alina Gufran’s No Place to Call My Own goes on to reinstate that intensity.

Set across cities like Delhi, Prague, Bombay, and Chennai, the novel follows Sophia as she tries to make a career in the films. She is in her early twenties. Fallen for men too many times. Had an abortion. Taken to substance abuse. And is resentful of her broken childhood with her parents disapproving of her life. She marches through life feeling her brokenness and envious of other people’s successes. But life has other things to show as she feels she is not Muslim enough to be pitied or is Muslim enough to be humiliated right and left in contemporary India. We follow her as she navigates these thresholds and the question of not wanting to be dependent on others and learning to rely on herself as a thirty-year-old woman.

The idea of space and femininity is marvellously done in Sophia’s story. From the title of the novel to the way it has been structured by the names of the chapters as cities, the spatial connotation of being a woman is thoroughly vetted out. Sophia’s childhood in Dubai, higher education elsewhere, work in different Indian cities, her unaffordable excursions... the space for her is rarely fixed. Similarly, while she is constantly gendered by those around her, she herself reproduces it and at the same time begins questioning the gender scripts she forces on herself. Both of these speak to one another thought-provokingly in Gufran’s writing.

Anne Carson, in a laudable essay on women’s place in ancient Greek society, has argued that a woman never has a home because her father’s home is one she is fated to leave and the home of her husband is never hers. Her rootlessness makes her transgressive, and porous and hence she needs to be put in her place by men and structures of patriarchy. This idea of woman’s porousness and transgression is evident in Sophia as she lands in a city, sleeps with random men, goes back into her memories and eventually leaves the space questioning why she was there in the first place.

The cities also coalesce with one another echoing the larger ethos of the urban in contemporary times where borders themselves are imbued with uncertainty. Sophia’s rootlessness and her assertion that there is no place to call her own are further reinstated by her persistent self-debasement.

Be it in the context of friends, passing strangers, or an imaginary self, Sophia hates her present and is contemptuous of confronting it. ‘She is everything I am not. Charming, warm, open, loving. I am everything she isn’t. Aloof, snarky, weird.’ Add to it the repeated substance abuse to numb her grief and discontent. This construction of a character is rampant across fiction in recent times. From Bose’s Summer of Then, Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr, to Jen Beagin’s Big Swiss, messed up and character-on-the-move-to-disaster has garnered much fame and Gufran is able to bring out Sophia through it. But the questions that often arise with such a protagonist are: to what end can the character’s self-afflicted hatred convince the reader to empathise with their situation? To what end can such characterisation serve for the story in the larger scheme of a novel?  

Reading Sophia’s story, it is sharply obvious that the hatred she faces is not self-afflicted but political and determined by outside forces. It is certainly the broader case given Sophia’s identity as a woman dodging sexual assaults, carrying memories of a troubled childhood, her parents’s deep insensitivity, her lack of work, of being a Muslim during the rise of Hindu fundamentalism, and her dismembered mental life in the tragic urbanity of her existence. These become clues to understand why her relation to herself is the way it is. However, the inner monologues regarding these issues are jarring and prevent the reader from seeing Sophia from any other lens than how she wants us to. Yes, it reveals Sophia as a character who’s evolving in her thoughts, but it also freezes the plot during various instances making the reader spin in her mind repeatedly.

The most rewarding part of the novel is Sophia’s friendship with Medha. It is written with thought, skill and empathy. The friendship not only explores their relationship as friends but also as two distinct women who perceive life differently and hence do not have the happiest of bonds.

Gufran’s novel is a new voice filled with promise. Her writing will find its place with the reader who wants to empathise with how women survive, negotiate and come to terms with the rootlessness of their lives.