WRITTEN FROM THE HEART. Review on Difficult Daughters - Manju Kapoor

Set around the time of partition, Difficult Daughters is the story of Virmati seen through the eyes of her daughter Ida, from whom her mother?s past had always been kept a secret. Virmati is a young Punjabi girl belonging to an austere family of Amritsar. A family she defies for the love of a married professor. Because of him, she comes to value education and the higher things in life. She realizes that life?s horizons are much wider than those that have been shown to her.

However she cannot totally shrug off the sense of priorities so deeply embedded in her and doesn?t consider herself complete till she has married. Within a span of few years, through her various experiences, she grows up from a naïve girl to a woman matured by suffering. She might have started on a quest for true love, independence and a sense of self, but when almost there, she realizes that things are not always as they appear to be. Or perhaps, they change.

?The one thing I had wanted was not to be like my mother.? The opening sentence of the book had me hooked. The storytelling is poetic. But without the frills of poetry. The writer?s style of description is refreshing. It is impossible to recreate it. It has to be read. Be it places, things, people, or food, she describes them in ways, which are inconspicuously different and yet realistic, life-like. When she describes pakoras, jalebis, I almost feel the taste in my mouth. When she describes people, she does it three dimensionally. Not even the protagonist is without faults. When she describes dilemmas, I feel as lost as the characters caught in them. From the first to the last page, the book is an aroma to be breathed in, a taste to be savored, an emotion to be felt.

Sensitivity threads the events that form this book. It is so naturally written; that along the way one forgets it is a work of fiction. It feels more like a lifetime unraveling in front of our eyes, with real people in it; experiencing happiness, sorrow, pleasure and pain. And all this comes across with such sensitivity that one is compelled to nod at and understand even the forbidden love affair of Virmati and the professor.

The writer?s sensitivity is reflected even in the other issues that she addresses.

Whether or not a girl has the right to make her own choices in life is an issue dragged this way and that, for a long time in our country. Facing equal assault from the chauvinists who declare that woman?s place is inside the house, and the feminists who condemn the idea of taking the husband?s surname after marriage, the idea finds a middle path here. There is after all a difference between possessing and protecting. The book deals with the idea of education for a girl for her sake, not just to enable her to land a suitable match.

Difficult Daughters is the story of a freedom struggle. While India fights for freedom from the British Raj, Virmati fights for the freedom to live life on her terms. Like so many other Indian girls, she wants to decide what to study and where, whom to marry and when. In the end it appears that she might have achieved all that but it ceases to be important. For in the throes of the struggle, she loses a part of herself. She is torn in two halves, one of which is on the side she is fighting against. All this when India attains freedom. But at the cost of Partition. At the cost of losing half its soul. At the cost of hundreds of thousands of innocent lives, lost in the fire of communal hatred. India?s hollow victory in mirrored in Vimati?s. In all this the professor (fond of everything English) wields considerable influence, although in a catalytic sort of way. Just as Britain did in the tragedy of Partition.

Today is but the day following yesterday. Things might have changed, but how much really? Even today, thousands of girls sit within the four walls of their houses and wonder why they do not have the right to chose their own lives, decide for themselves whether they want to be homemakers or more. Marriage is still the reason for their birth. Freedom is more than just being aloud out for a pizza with friends.

Let us not fool ourselves. We haven?t really obtained political freedom either. If it were so, there would be no Jama Masjid, no Godhra. What is freedom but a state of mind? We may have our land to ourselves but our minds are still locked up in the confines of colonial British India. How can we call ourselves free when we live in fear every moment? We have paid the price of our blindness through Partition. Is it necessary to continue to be blind? True, communalism isn?t a part of our culture. True, the British sowed the seeds then and they grew into poisonous plants. But before they grow into trees with far reaching roots, which pollute the very soil, can we please stop watering them?

Difficult Daughters compels one to think along these lines. We all know about women?s emancipation and the serpent called communalism, but Mrs. Manju Kapur has dealt with both these relatively stale issues in such a manner that you read not just with your eyes but also with your heart. Just the way she has written.