The Private Life of Mrs Sharma

November 1, 2016
Renuka Sharma considers herself a proper and respectable Indian woman. She is a dedicated wife and mother, taking care of her son and her in-laws at home in Delhi, while her husband lives in Dubai, where there is more money to be made. But she is not completely traditional. Working part-time in an upscale doctor's office, she is exposed to intoxicating modernities, and she dreams of finding a place for her family, especially her son, in whom she tries to instill a respect for learning and self-advancement in this upward-moving India. Then she meets a handsome young stranger at the train station, and, like an Indian Anna Karenina, embarks on a truly modern relationship that will forever change her life. The battle between then and now comes alive in Kapur's novel of life in an evolving India. Renuka's inner conflict mirrors that of her nation's battle to participate in an increasingly global world while maintaining traditions and cultural heritage. A beautiful, tragic, and highly recommended work by a writer previously long-listed for the Man Asia Literary Prize.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

Starred review from October 1, 2016
In contradictory modern India, an urban womans private confession becomes a portrait, and perhaps an indictment, of 21st-century globalism. The novel opens with 37-year-old Renuka Sharma describing her first encounter with a stylish man at a Delhi metro station. His name is Vineet Sehgal, he is 30 years old, and he works in a boutique hotel in Gurgaon, a rapidly growing financial hub on the outskirts of Delhi. Renuka and Vineet soon become chaste but frequent companions, and she seems to learn everything there is to know about him. In return, Vineet has little curiosity about the facts of Renukas life. She is never forced to tell him that she's married, that her husband works in Dubai, that she lives with her 15-year-old son, Bobby, in a small flat, or even that her mother died when she was 13. Those intimate details are reserved for the reader, details of her domestic life mingling with observations about technology, poverty, ambition, real estate, respectability, and masturbation. As candid as her observations are, there are times even in these pages when she withholds the truth. When her relationship with Vineet does become sexual, it is stated casually, as an afterthought, and then expertly rationalized. Renuka seems to embody all the contradictions of urban India in the 21st-century global economy, with its shiny new malls and underdeveloped infrastructure, its growing wealth and collapsing middle class, its modernity and traditionalism. Her fraught, often humorous and irreverent narration is a study in cognitive dissonance, in which she is constantly trying to reconcile the complex stimuli of Delhi with the image of herself as a simple woman from a good family. Even as cultural products can feel increasingly generic in our technologically advanced global marketplace, Kapur (Overwinter, 2012) proves that a gifted writer can still powerfully capture a complex voice from a singular place and time.

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