Women with men
An old-fashioned novel of India, telling truths as new as ever

Author: By Edith Milton

Date: SUNDAY, May 3, 1998

Page: E1

Section: Books

But these eccentricities only add to the novel's charm. Besides, this is India of 30 years ago, and Appachana's fiction can accommodate improbabilities as being mundane; no more remarkable in the culture of Delhi (where most of the novel is set) than orphans in Dickens's London.

Its story is told from the viewpoints of six women. The lilting rhythms, vivid imagery, and exotic contents of their thoughts make what they have to say luxuriantly poetic; but at the same time they are remarkably down-to-earth about everything from the Evil Eye and good omens to the grinding daily hardships of their existence. And unlike other novels of India (for instance Arundhati Roy's ``The God of Small Things,'' with which one is often tempted to compare it), ``Listening Now'' disdains to mask the more implausible details of its unfolding story in poetic technique and epic language. It lets the curses and coincidences stand, unexplained, as part of its characters' lives.

At the narrative's center is Padma, ostensibly a young widow cast out both by her family and her husband's, who are said to have disapproved of the marriage. She arrives in Delhi with her baby daughter, Mallika, and her sister, buys a house in a middle-class neighborhood, and makes a meager but independent living as a university lecturer. She lives an almost Western life, circumscribed by Eastern taboos.

One sees nearly immediately that the story of her widowhood and isolation from the two families is either fiction or at least a vast oversimplification. How much fiction and how vast the oversimplification is a central concern of the women, whose voices, wonderfully differentiated, lead us through the novel. Mallika (the only one to tell her story in the first person) is a confused, brilliant little girl, terrified of abandonment; Padma, herself, is mercurial and passionate; Shanta, her sister, is envious and compulsive, with a tendency to self-martyrdom; while their mother looks back at a life almost over and sees the world darkly -- and in this context convincingly. The other two narrators are Padma's neighbors: Madhu has little feeling for the rich husband who indulges her; Anu, beset by the mother-in-law from hell, is a warm, intuitive woman who hides all her grief in laughter.

Their perspectives, reflecting, contradicting, and at last illuminating one another, come together to form a vivid mosaic of Indian life. As it moves backward from the 1960s to discover Padma's childhood and her tortured romance with Mallika's father, the layers of mystification are peeled away. But the truth brought to light turns out to be rather larger than a mere resolution of the mysteries of the plot (Who is the magic man who writes stories for little Mallika? What happened to her father? Why does someone lurk in Mrs. Moitra's driveway?). ``Listening Now'' illuminates the depth, breadth, and tragic impassibility of the chasm between men and women.

It may be that in India that chasm is even more clearly visible than it is in America. Musing upon her own, Padma's mother summarizes an Indian woman's life: ``Married at fourteen, a mother at sixteen, three children, innumerable miscarriages . . . a tumor within that grew and grew and grew . . . because the doctor said she was imagining the pain.'' But much of Appachana's examination is as relevant to Brookline as to Delhi; and the patient accretion of detail with which she brings vibrant life to her characters is without political bias. We know the women better than the men (the narrative is, after all, in their voices) but we see husbands, brothers, lovers, fathers, as intelligent, liberal, and often generous beings with deep affection for the wives and daughters whom they fundamentally misinterpret and inexorably betray. The women, in their turn, resort to deviousness, manipulation, and emotional withdrawal to defend the tiny, besieged islands of their privilege and freedom. Simply to survive, women, like men, support a system that predates history and that allows them a modicum of power only through their sons. Vicious mothers-in-law are ubiquitous in ``Listening Now,'' which ends with Mallika, now 13, questioning a world whose rules and traditions have loosened, but are still firmly in place.

Appachana measures the distortions of this world less against any feminist ideal than by a far older and more general psychological standard: men, honor-bound to defend their mothers, become their fathers' enemies. Daughters are infantilized by their fathers' love. And since extramarital sex involving a decent woman is entirely unspeakable (and in fact unthinkable), a woman can be violated casually on the bus or at a festival and have no way to make anyone believe it happened. Silence is the only answer to every outrage.

But whenever the silence is finally broken (in Padma's mother's jubilant revelation of familial treachery, for instance), it is with explosive power: ``If her body could have moved, each limb would have grasped this moment with the hunger that only lovers knew. . . . The flower was blooming, its petals unfurling. Such beauty she had never seen.'' This might read as overblown if the calibration of the fury to its cause were less exact. But one accepts it: as one accepts Padma's brain fever as the silent measure of how much suffering is caused when father, brother, lover -- all the men you love -- become your enemies.

Appachana's writing is eloquent in detail. We know what the women cook each day, how they clean house, how they get about the city. But the detail illuminates a larger subject and the writing is in service to something greater than the novel -- a view of humanity, a sense of what is moral and lasting. ``Listening Now'' is a large book in every sense, a panorama filled with insight and surprise, inviting, absorbing, and satisfying.