Recommended Reading: Difficult Daughters

Back in 2000, when I was teaching A Level at Fortismere School in Muswell Hill, my star student did her A Level English coursework on this novel: Difficult Daughters by Manju Kapur. It is all about growing up as an Indian girl, in the shadow of an overpowering and interfering mother. The central character has to decide whether to follow the expectations of her family (i.e. education, stereotypical roles etc.) or her own desires (love/lust/independence) - possibly a conflict some of you will share in due course.

Here is an extract:

The one thing I had wanted was not to be like my mother. Now she was gone and I stared at the fire that rose from her shrivelled body, dry-eyed, leaden, half dead myself, while my relatives clustered around the pyre and wept.

When the ashes were cold, my uncle and I went to the ghat to collect them. All around us were tear-stricken people dressed in white, sitting on benches, standing in groups, some with corpses before them, some clustered around bodies burning on daises. The air was smoky, and the breeze blew the stench about. It was not a place to linger in, but I felt unable to move, staring stupidly at the little pile. The inscription on the raised concrete slab announced that a Seth Ram Krishna Dalmia had been burnt there, and his loving widow, brother, and children had labelled this spot in commemoration. On every bench and burning platform, were names and dates, marks of people gone and people left behind. Not a scrap of cement was left unclaimed. I stared again at my mother's ashes and wondered what memorial I could give her. She, who had not wanted to be mourned in any way.

When I die, she said to me, I want my body donated. My eyes, my heart, my kidneys, any organ that can be of use. That way someone will value me after I have gone.

I glared at her, as pain began to gnaw at me.

And, she went on, when I die I want no shor-shar. I don't want a chauth, I don't want an uthala, I want no one called, no one informed.

Why bother having a funeral at all? I asked. Somebody might actually come.

Why do you deliberately misunderstand me? she countered.