Jasoda - Kiran Nagarkar

 Fiction

Read it

I've read a few other novels by Kiran Nagarkar and I am very much a fan. This novel was quite a bit shorter than God's Little Soldier (Whew!) and quite different in content than either of the other two novels I have read. The brilliance of this book is that the main character, Jasoda, could be any one of the millions of poor women in India with little choice in who they are married off to, making due with far too little, and having very few choices.

The book opens, strikingly, with Jasoda committing female infanticide. Its quite shocking. We learn later that family pressure is the major factor, but each time it happens, it is shocking. Jasoda is married to a do nothing man who is obsessed with toadying up to a local erstwhile prince in the hopes that someday it will pay off and he will be rewarded. This leaves Jasoda to manage the house, their sons, and her mother in law. As the water situation in their village becomes dire, Jasoda takes her 2 sons and mother in law and walk until they reach a train station, much like the rest of the village. They travel to Bombay to make a go of it. Being chased off by the pavement mafia and later raped by the "landlord" for their section of pavement, Jasoda learns how to be inventive and make a living for her and her sons. She finds herself pregnant again and her sons end up going out to work begging and sorting garbage. To say the least, Jasoda and her children do not have it easy.

One son finds a patron who helps him get educated, another son gets lost and never reappears, the third son comes and goes like the wind, the fourth son is born with disabilities due to a difficult deliver. The youngest child, the only daughter Jasoda allows to live, is pampered and spoiled and taken care of her whole life. Jasoda becomes successful running a snack cart and invents new dishes. 

After a while, she hears that people have started returning to the village and that development is under way. She also packs up the children who would come with her and heads back to the village. While they were gone, her husband murders the prince and takes his place and bizarrely becomes an oil baron. He re-marries in order to get a male heir. Jasoda's husband finds them a room in another village before disappearing once more. Jasoda again picks up the pieces and opens her own food cart. She becomes so successful that she opens a few restaurants. Jasoda's husband reappears randomly and declares that he is going to stay in their flat. She puts up with him for a while before arranging for him to have a fatal accident when he tries to sell the restaurants out from under her.

Jasoda's pluck, grit, and ingenuity is a tribute to women with shitty husbands everywhere who don't have anyone else to depend on. She's not an incredibly complex character, but readers are definitely able to identify with her. 

Read it!

~Becky~