Tackling questions of identity, choice

Identity, choice and belonging are at the core of what it means to be a human being. What if you were to situate questions about belonging and identity in the context of a second-generation Indian American family? Now add more questions to the mix: those of motherhood, fertility, the social media influencer ecosystem and millennial dilemmas, and you have quite an alchemy on your hands. Author Sanjena Sathian captures the zeitgeist of our times in her novel, Goddess Complex, following her coming-of-age novel, Gold Diggers.

Sanjena Sathian’s debut Gold Diggers drew us in with Neeraj Narayan’s (aka Neil) identity crises through his teenage years and much later as a young PhD student who loves history. The pursuit of the American Dream, the Californian gold rush and the burden of Indian American children to succeed at any cost are all themes Sanjana explored in her debut novel. 

While the Goddess Complex also talks about the Indian immigrant experience, it is not the dominant theme.

The book gives us Sanjana Satyananda, who has left her husband, an aspiring actor called Killian Bane, after aborting her pregnancy. She now wants to divorce him, but Killian is untraceable. This takes Sanjana to India, where she has already lived before as Killian’s wife and as an anthropology student, working on her dissertation. It’s another matter that she had dropped out of her anthropology program, much like she has from her husband’s life. 

The mother-child relationship and sibling dynamics seem to be a recurrent theme in Sathian’s novels. While Sanjana (the protagonist) grapples with questions of choice (motherhood or not), identity and individuality, her sister Maneesha is the ‘perfect’ child, baby, career, husband, home, holidays — all checkboxes ticked.

Like Neil in Gold Diggers, Sanjana Satyananda is the perennial outsider, not adhering to notions of what one ought to be. She is trying hard to “adult” and failing, because she is constantly questioning her choices and her moves. She is also acutely self-aware and senses that she is a disappointment to her first-generation immigrant family. Sanjana wants to be seen and validated for who she is, not who her family and society at large want her to be. “I was certain they believed that I was missing out on the Fundamental Mystery of Humankind. So, I kept my choice to myself.”

In her quest to find her husband and get a divorce, Sanjana ends up at a luxurious fertility centre, run by her doppelganger, who also happens to be an influencer. Couples from wealthy families discreetly visit the centre for support on their “fertility journey”. There are also women considering freezing their eggs and seeking emotional support who are counselled by the woman who’s mirroring Sanjana Satyananda with a slightly altered spelling — Sanjena Sathian. 

The atmosphere at the centre and the staff there are all reminiscent of Daphne De Maurier’s Rebecca, with a distinct Gothic theme and an air of mystery.

The Goddess Complex also shares the core theme of Rebecca — a woman’s struggle to find one’s sense of individuality in the face of patriarchy, unexamined societal norms and peer pressure. No wonder then that Sanjana quotes from Rebecca in the epigraph: “The past is still too close to us. The things we have tried to forget and put behind us would stir again, and that sense of fear, of furtive unrest…might in some manner unforeseen become a living companion, as it had been before.”

The Goddess Complex does well to capture the angst of our times; it’s a novel of ‘right here, right now’. While doing so, it stays witty and funny, sometimes dark and melancholic. The characterisation of Killian Bane, now Bollywood’s Kalyan Babar, feels a tad caricaturish at first but may well be par for the course.

The closing lines pithily tell us what lies at the heart of the novel: “A couple of glass flowers poked out, one a gleaming imitation of a red daffodil, the other a fake pink carnation. I loved the vase, but I found the flowers dishonest…I wondered if they were sold separately — If I could leave the store with an empty vessel, then decide for myself if I wanted to fill it, or keep it just as it was.”