In an episode of the TV series The Good Doctor, a patient named Dawn has a miscarriage. Her husband, Todd, is shocked by this revelation. Since he had a vasectomy a decade ago, it doesn’t make sense that Dawn was pregnant. Unless she had sex with someone else, that is. As the episode unfolds, it becomes clear that Dawn cheated on Todd. Except there’s a catch. She cheated because of a neurological condition that restricted her ability to refuse or say “No” to sexual advances or inclinations, which led her to have multiple sexual encounters with different individuals.
When Todd is upset with Dawn, one of her doctors asks him if he has felt attracted to others during their relationship. He admits to this feeling, adding that he never felt compelled to act on those impulses. The doctor responds by saying that while Todd resisted acting on his temptations, Dawn succumbed to hers. However, Dawn never left Todd because she loves him.
By the end of the episode, Todd and Dawn reconcile after the doctors successfully remove the tumour responsible for her infidelity. But the narrative leaves a significant question unanswered: Is it morally permissible to engage in extramarital relationships if conditions like a neurological issue are involved? Is fidelity a fundamental moral duty in a sexual relationship? Does staying after cheating signify love for your partner or simply fear of the consequences of leaving?
Aisha
Sharmistha Gooptu’s novel Unspoken attempts to answer these questions without hopping towards a moral maxim. When Aisha’s sixty-four-year-old mother Mrs G begins to reminisce about her love affair with a man she calls A, her daughter dismisses it as a figment of her mother’s dementia-afflicted mind. “Miu, there was no A. You were happily married to Boy,” is a sentiment that Aisha spools over and over again. And she doesn’t take Mrs G seriously until she talks about her colleague Shree’s death.
Aisha, the protagonist whose point of view features heavily in the novel, is a chef and dessert shop owner, engaged to Bugi and living with her mother and their help, Mandiradi. Aisha’s relationship with her mother relies on her relationship with her dead father, who sounds like a man written by a woman. Boy, as Aisha adoringly calls him, loved Mrs G no end, to a point of despair, where you wonder if it’s a man’s world that she lived in.
“Then she suddenly started on this A thing after Boy went. It was like how our codes used to be. Like she was telling me a secret, something she couldn’t spell out in so many words even if she wanted. Something only I could decipher or understand. Only this time around I simply couldn’t figure it out.” Her eyes were glistening with tears, her voice shook as she swallowed and gulped air. “I wish Boy was here, he would know, he always knew how to deal with Miu. He was so wonderful.”
Abhimanyu
A, Abhimanyu Mishra, reminds us that a woman’s world is only a pipe dream. If not for the quasi-redemption arc that Gooptu offers him towards the end, A reads like a refined and better-executed version of a Colleen Hoover character, the kind that might get a good shaking from the PC crowd. Unfortunately for them, the cruel side of A is only acknowledged, not explored. He worked at the same college as Shree and garnered the same kind of attention she does from the students and faculty: unquestioning adoration. Do I need to tell you how dangerous that is?
A loved Mrs G, but he also loved Shree, a woman whose bitterness – splayed on a platter with a tiny chapter from her perspective – is undercut by her evident disdain for the Other Woman without being the Primary Woman herself. What’s interesting about the novel, however, is that it subliminally dismantles the distinction I’ve made in the last sentence.
Would he be cruel, like she had been with him, if he had known? Did she tell him once, just in jest, that there was another man? When they were making love. Was that when he had held her neck so hard that she had had to gasp for breath? “Who?” he had asked her, but perhaps it had been only a part of the game – the games that they had played in bed, when sometimes he would turn into something that he wasn’t really.
As Aisha pieces together Mrs G’s affair with A, she finds solace in an unlikely ally: Rohan Gautam, a wellness influencer, author, and ex-banker in his mid-forties. He has written a book about his life with his father, Living with Dementia, and met Aisha at an event for which they were both speakers. The more important detail about him is that he never “[indulges] in dessert.”
This, however, changes when he takes a flight to Varanasi after Aisha goes there with her mother and Mandiradi to figure out if she wants to talk to A. Did I mention that Aisha is engaged to someone else? His name is Bugi, and he’s a mama’s boy with food orders juxtaposed with Aisha’s. In fact, he fell for her because of a dessert she’d made.
Rohan
Back to Rohan – and I’m not the only one who shifts her focus between these two men, Aisha too! – he takes Aisha around Varanasi when he arrives there. And in Varanasi, he has a lot of desserts. He “[spoons] off the last of rabri” and mockingly calls her “madam”, negging her, “cooing” in her ear. Rohan is the only person to whom Aisha is honest. This is hotter than if they had sex, but only if you pay close attention. The way Gooptu has written these interludes, it’s easy to dismiss their relationship as a complicated friendship rather than an emotional affair. You have to read into the narrative if you want to untangle the intricacy of their intimacy.
Although the book raises the question of infidelity – and whether what Rohan and Aisha have qualifies as “cheating” – it doesn’t make a moral claim about it. Even Mrs G cheating on Boy doesn’t particularly enrage Aisha, and any contention she might have quickly dissolved on meeting A and recognising what he might’ve meant for Mrs G. The only moralistic voices in the book are Bugi, Mandiradi, and Shree, relegated to the position of virtue-signalling figurines.
Gooptu doesn’t make Aisha having a mother with dementia the only aspect of her life. Neither is Mrs G’s dementia the only thing the reader knows about her. Unspoken, instead of compressing the illness to a narrative arc, treats it as a part of the characters’ lives, something that the reader watches them deal with every day.
The novel ends with laces you won’t trip on. When Aisha is getting married to Bugi, the romantic in you will want to hit her on the head. But the pragmatic will understand her. For the 21st-century woman, marriage is more than just an economic proposition, especially if you’re marrying a man who won’t understand you or your mother’s affairs. Best if you don’t marry someone who will ask the uncomfortable questions.
Unspoken, Sharmistha Gooptu, Simon and Schuster India.