Ishq and Mushq
By Priya Basil Doubleday, NZ$36.99 | Reviewed by Laura Fergusson
Ishq and Mushq joins the rapidly expanding genre of novels of the Indian Diaspora. Writers such as Jhumpa Lahiri and Hari Kunzru have in recent years established a new chapter in India’s relationship with colonialism and with literature, though fiction which explores the experience of growing up Indian beyond Indian borders, and examines issues of migration, tradition, language and identity.
Priya Basil’s novel encompasses all of these, but it does so with a certain degree of tokenism. Characters cross oceans and continents without apparent challenge to their sense of self, or questioning of their heritage.
The novel focuses on the marriage between Sarna and Karam Singh, their various moves from India to Kenya, Uganda and England, their relationship with each other, their siblings and their children. The central source of plot is in Sarna’s attempts to forget about the illegitimate child she had before her marriage, and her struggle to live with her abandonment of her baby.
Sarna and Karam are married during the upheaval of Indian Partition in 1947. In this the novel echoes Midnight’s Children, which opens with its protagonist’s birth as India and Pakistan come into being as two separate nations, and while Basil is no Salman Rushdie, few first time novelists can hope to be.
While his motherland is torn apart, Karam, who himself has grown up as part of the tight knit Indian community in Nairobi, succumbs to typhoid and is unconscious for six months. The dichotomy of having been both present at and unaware of the shaping of history haunts him throughout his life, and he desperately tries to recapture a sense of being part of things – flying to London for the Queen’s coronation in 1953 for example, though how he can afford to fly in the very early days of recreational air travel is never made clear.
Sarna’s psychology is explored in greater depth. Her needs and fears are presented through the slightly laboured device of food – she cooks to express herself, and pours her emotions into her recipes. The pervasive imagery of cooking contributes in large part to the mushq (smell) of the novel, although Basil mischievously plays with this theme by inflicting on Sarna a chronic flatulence problem, so that, particularly when she is at her most troubled, Sarna’s own less fragrant smells mingle with the aromas of her meals.
In the reader’s first encounter with Sarna she is gorging herself on mangos, and this motif of excess remains with her character throughout – she eats too much, she talks too much, she wears to much jewellery and colours which are too bright, she is too gaudy, too loud, too emotional. Karam, by contrast, is depicted as almost painfully restrained. At the novel’s opening he is gaunt from illness, while Sarna is radiantly voluptuous. He is cautious, dutiful and calm, while she is tempestuous, selfish, outspoken and manipulative. Their turbulent relationship, and their differing responses to their family and their surroundings are at the heart of the novel.
Where it is less satisfying is in its depictions of the settings in which they find themselves. The family drifts between enormously disparate cultures, and while the ability of Indian migrants to retain a sense of community within alien cultures is examined, we are given little sense of the backdrops.
This aside, it is an enormously fluent, enjoyable read, albeit one which leaves your stomach rumbling.
