Book Review: Ladies Coupe by Anita Nair

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First things first: Ladies Coupe is published in India by Penguin and has a lovely cover. I'm particularly taken by Namas Bhojani's photograph of the woman in a train window that appears on the Indian edition; there's a North American edition available here but it's got the type of exoticizing Indian-village-belle-cover that I loathe! It's writer Anita Nair's second novel; she's since published a few other things that I'll check out soon.

Now for the book itself: I'd give it a B+, where an A+ is Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things and an F is Pankaj Mishra's The Romantics. (Aside: I liked Mishra's Butter Chicken in Ludhiana, which I actually read while travelling through Bhopal on the way to and from Sanchi my last time in India but just couldn't get into The Romantics.) Dutiful Brahmin daughter and sister Akhila, who has a boring clerical job and lives with her sister and her family suddenly decides she's had enough and buys herself a one-way ticket to Kanyakumari. She finds herself in the "ladies' compartment" on the train and the book explores her story alongside the stories of the five other women who share this space with her.

It's a nice conceit for bringing together six women of different ages, classes, statuses and temperaments. But each of the women's stories are narrated rather than spoken... so what we get seems more of an overview or a summary of each of their lives rather than a sense of how they would tell their own stories. In fact, while the stories are different, the narrative voices and tones aren't distinctive enough for us to identify the character who goes with each story. I found myself turning back to the establishing chapter in order to figure which of the women's stories I was reading.

Anita Nair's style also fluctuates: there's an exquisite passage that chronicles Akhila's furtive introduction to eggs that begins with the line "It was Katherine Webber who brought an egg into Akhila's life" and ends so: "To Akhila, an egg was an egg only when surrounded by a shell and baptized by boiling water." In between, we find out that for Akhila, eating a boiled egg plain, with a bit of the white and a bit of the yolk, is "the composite joy of surreptitious pleasures." We find out how Amma, her chastely Brahmin mother, deals with her becoming an "eater of eggs." Much of the book, though, feels a lot clunkier than this airy bit that flirts with comedy. There are too many lines that make me want to roll my eyes. Take this one, for example: "Dare I dream again? Now that the boys are men, can I start feeling like a woman again?" Or: "it was only natural that he should be the one to show her the wonder of being a woman." Unexceptional sentiments, perhaps, but not expressed either originally or movingly. I know that I'm supposed to feel for Nair's characters at such moments but the triteness of the words simply block that response. It's in the details of the lives of Nair's characters that an original turn of phrase offers an original interpretation of a life or an experience. And there are enough such moments in the book to make it worth savouring.

I'm off to savour something else now: kachoris!