Ground Cover
SOMEONE ELSE’S GARDEN by Dipika Rai. Harper Perennial: New York. 2011. $13.99. 400 pages. Trade Paperback Original. HarperCollins.com dipikarai.com
Now and then, along comes a novel that I truly want to enjoy. The cover is intriguing. The synopsis draws me in. But for any number of reasons, it disappoints. Dipika Rai’s debut novel, Someone Else’s Garden, is one such book.
Mamta, the oldest of seven in a rural family in turn-of-this-century India, is despised and ignored by her father because of her gender. Barely fed, overworked, and not yet married at twenty, she is considered by her father to be “someone else’s garden” that he needn’t care for. Forced into a last-ditch marriage opportunity, Mamta is sent to live with an abusive husband that her father never bothered to assess. After enduring all manner of abuse, she gathers her few belongings and most of her courage and slips away from his grasp.
Alone in the city, it is up to Mamta to find her place, secure a job, and make a life according to her own abilities.
Garden is a tale of many things, but most importantly, it is a story of the power of belief in oneself. It is also a story of pain, hardship, abuse, disrespect, and cruelty toward women. There is so much pain, sorrow, and hate in this book that it spares no class, setting, or character. The novel addresses women’s rights, social traditions, and the failings of the rural caste system. Certainly, it is an earnest attempt to show that after centuries of mistreatment, women in these circumstances find it difficult to even hope to change accepted norms.
The foundation of the novel is indeed powerful: a woman deciding to buck an accepted oppressive system to make a life of her own. Issues raised in the novel are potent, heart-breaking, and worthy of our scrutiny, but that’s where the praise ends.
The problem lies with the execution of the story. While Mamta’s success is astonishing, the torrent of suffering she endures page after page weighs down the story for too long.
Garden should have been as compelling a book as are the issues it attepts to highlight, but it is filled with author intrusions and an overload of rambling imagery. As with theatre and cinema, fiction requires the reader to suspend their disbelief. When Rai imposes her own thoughts and questions, she forces the reader to step out of the narrative.
Rai also has a tendency to state and restate the obvious, making it seem as if the author is either unsure of her writing or just writing down to the reader.
There was much in the effort of this novel that needed to be weeded out and cultivated. Rather than allowing the story to blossom and grow under the watchful eye of the gardener, it was planted without the care it deserved, which is disappointing.
A portion of the author’s royalties are donated to Pratham, the largest NGO in India working to provide quality education to underprivileged children.www.pratham.org
Jeanne E. Fredriksen reads and writes from the Raleigh-Durham area, where as a recent transplant she is exploring the many hidden treasures of her new state.
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Good review Jeanne. I am just worried with all this focus on extreme violence against women we might overlook the more subtle patronizing behaviors that I see often in so many places, including in my family and in so many places -even across America.
It makes me very angry as a woman to here unfair critical comments, condescending attitudes, insensitivity, dismissiveness and arrogance (in men). I find it unbearable. I want these men with PhDs or MBAs to undergo intense gender sensitivity classes...on basic listening, supporting and understanding of the complex difficulties and realities of their own working sisters and daughters - who are trying to pursue their dreams or identities outside their homes, or trying to defy tradtional gender roles.
I find too many men in my own family, though nice, clueless and not sensitive enough to what a working professional might go through, or what women of color in certain environments might go through. We need to really confront these men. This cluelessness, and a mediocre attitude to modern day professional women has to stop.
I despise it when people assume that somehow we can all feel good about our lives if we just focus on extreme abuse out there, but not the subtle sexism that we endure everyday in every conversations with our men.
Some of our men are regresssing to - especially as they age. They are becoming conservative, in stead of more liberal. Very strange!
I am reading an intriguing well written book on two pharmaceutical companies, Amgen and Ortho, that were locked in a conflict, more like blood feud, for years. It is by Kathleen Sharp, 2011, and provides fascinating insights into how people are coopted, coerced and even gaslighted inside some of these organizations.
One of the real life characters in the book, Mark Duxbury, a medical representative, was gaslighted in ways that are shocking, disturbing and disgusting.
His counselor says to him, "Gaslighting comes for the classic 1944 movie Gaslight, in which a scheming husband (played by Charles Boyer) tries to drive his new bride (Ingrid Bergman) crazy. The husband will do anything to protect his murderous activities and, to him, that means psychologically torturing his trusting young wife".
(In the case of a company or a disturbed patriarchal work place think of the wife as the "employee", and the murderous activities as fraud, corruption and unethical behaviors).
"Strange things begin to happen to the wife: Gaslamps dim and brighten for no apparent reason; pictures disappear from the walls; footsteps sound in the sealed attic".
(In the case of Duxbury he finds his computer tampered with, his files missing, his emails and letters are selectively used. People are cunningly set up against him to make him fall, or to ruin his reputation).
"When the wife complains or raises concerns the husband insinuates that his wife is either responsible for these actions, or is imagining them."
(In the case of the company they either don't believe Duxbury, avoid him or make him out to be some crazy or paranoid guy).
"While the young wife insists that her husband's accusations are not true, she gradually grows unsure of herself and her own impressions. The husband, of course, is trying to break her emotionally so that he can lock her up in an asylum, inherit her house, and continue his sinister designs without hindrance."
(In the case of a dysfunctional work place or company patriarchy some made up, or set-up, reason is used to fire the employee, get him or her in the sideline so they would not cause trouble. In some cases to avoid lawsuits or the truth about the company or the work place coming out)".
Of course in the movie a homicide detective visits the hysterical woman to investigate an unsolved murder. He is astute enough, sensitive enough, intelligent enough, self aware enough, socially aware enough and intuitive enough to know that the woman is not insane or crazy or hallucinating.
He says to her, "You are not going out of your mind! You are being slowly driven out of your mind!"
Lke this woman, so many in our highly controlling, directing, constraining and dominating environments are systematically being driven out of their minds - sometimes in dramatic ways and sometimes in subtle ways.
Overtime our definition of normalcy itself changes.
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