THE PRIVATE LIFE OF MRS SHARMA

Ratika Kapur (Bloomsbury, £12.99)

The tension between tradition and modernity is a familiar theme in Indian literature, but Ratika Kapur finds her own distinct way of expressing it in the character of Renuka Sharma, who is driven by the dictates of both but remains oblivious to how they’re threatening to destroy her carefully organised life.

She lives in Delhi with her 15-year-old son and her husband’s parents. Her husband, meanwhile, works in Dubai for 11 months of the year so that they can enjoy a decent standard of living. Although she wouldn’t admit it, Mrs Sharma is finding it hard to cope without him. She remembers a story about two lizards on a ceiling. One lizard suggests that they go outside for a while. “But who would hold up the ceiling?” asks the other. That’s how she feels too.

One day, she strikes up a conversation with a stranger on a station platform on her way to work. She and Vineet begin a clandestine friendship, which she doesn’t think of as an affair. They’re only talking, after all. In any case, she’s got him pegged as a goal-orientated person like herself, and “romance is of no interest to him because that type of love always slows you down on the road to success”.

She may not have judged him as shrewdly as she thought, but Mrs Sharma can’t conceive of people being less single-minded than herself. Her son’s announcement that he doesn’t want to do the MBA his parents have planned for him, and all he really wants in life is to be a chef, is like a slap in the face, not just to her but to the aspirational middle class she represents. Confusion being “a sickness suffered by the weak-minded”, when her precious control begins to slip she has to rationalise it as being a sensible move for the best.

Mrs Sharma’s story is written like a journal, a form in which she can be confessional in a way she can’t with other people, although even here she can’t be honest with herself. Kapur captures a voice full of stoicism and determination, but also hidden depths of pain and vulnerability, a lack of self-awareness and a propensity to justify her actions with spurious excuses about her family’s welfare. Both as a portrait of an individual and a commentary on modern India, it’s an accomplished piece, by turns sad, darkly comic and not a little chilling.

ALASTAIR MABBOTT