Running through Raghav Rao’s debut novel Missy is a sense of foreboding: something bad is about to happen to our characters; you know that the book packs some promise because it is likely you will stick through the three hundred-odd pages to find out if they can weather the storm, as I did.
The story of the protagonist Missy is set up in two parts: first, a brief moment in a past life, and then on to the present, where events unfold to reveal that what was left behind has come to haunt.
A long, unforgiving voyage
As a young girl, a sister’s recommendation takes Savi from living in a convent to being taken on as a maid in a wealthy household; this turn of events bears promise, her employers are kind. Young love, independence, a life of dignity – as soon as all begins to seem within reach, tragedy strikes one night. An accident so unforgiving that it demands total abandonment of this fertile land of possibility, to go far enough that distance eclipses familiarity.
But this voyage is long and unforgiving: it leaves no choice but to be born anew. Decades later, in Chicago, we meet Missy at the Dancing Shiva Driving School, where she is its top brass and its vital life force. The matriarch of the Royce family, she is an established entrepreneur, a commanding figure in the Indian diaspora, and a proud mother to two girls.
Older among them, Shilpa is the ideal child archetype: ambitious, driven, and in the glittering world of corporate Chicago, now settling into her dreams of becoming a successful lawyer. When she meets Varun, intelligent and sweet, training to be a doctor, the affection is fast and fierce. Very soon, dinners are being arranged and families introduced, the first flush of feeling making way for a future with tangible shapes. But before the happily ever after arrives, old demons surface, and the truths of what goes into making a life as full as theirs demand confrontation.
The pushes and pulls
Rao’s writing has a lyricality to it, and it infuses scenes with the gravity to hold together this story of the pushes and pulls of our closest relationships. This is complemented by his choice of events that construct the plot – which ones to show readers as they happen and which to just tell about. For example, when Missy, the indomitable, no-nonsense matriarch confides in Varun in a moment of sudden quiet about believing in the words of an astrologer she visited at the time of her separation from Andy, tormented by terrorising dreams from her past – something pivotal in their dynamic shifts every so subtly, setting into motion what is to come.
His deft hand can also be seen at work in how he goes about arranging the faultlines in their familial ties, so that when things break open, you recognise the well-set patterns that have brought this to pass. But what Rao constructs most masterfully is the almost suffocating fear of a parent: when a child leaves the cushiony embrace of their unit and steps into the menacing, messy realities of the world. At the knock of the past on her door, Missy shrinks to less than herself, suddenly finding herself all too small in a big, dangerous world; and this after years of having fought for her place in this life inch-by-inch.
Throughout the novel, the protagonist Missy remains his best-etched character, equal parts grit and love. When you see her animated across your page, you can sometimes almost see her hear the roaring Cauvery call her from far away, before she buries it and turns to yell instructions at her efficiently trained employees. Perhaps this refusal to look anywhere except ahead is also a form of penance: in avoiding the guilt, she also refuses herself any reminiscence of the soft place her young heart had once been.
There are some weaknesses, to be sure. Missy starts off somewhat slow, and halfway through it, I had an inkling of the direction the story would unfold. There is also the question of how a sense of place is created: When Shilpa comes to India for the first time, for example, how the foreignness of this country settles upon her appears almost formulaic; it is a lazy effort that can see India only through its overwhelmingness: the crowds and the smells and the grandeur.
Even so, by the time the novel wraps up, we have a portrait of familial warmth that emerges from more than an acute sense of loss – the contrast between what Missy’s children see when they look out and what she does creates a contrast to calibrate their sensibilities by. This difference shines through in their tastes and preferences as they move about their lives, and in their responses and approaches to the world, and what they want out of it. Though the novel’s exploration of its characters’ interiority is limited, Rao creates a sense of distance well: we can feel Missy far removed from her previous life, not just in place but also in time.
Keen on tying together every loose end, Missy is not a romance – but it is a love story all the same. In the course of the story, we see Missy kick and fight, against circumstances and against her own worst fears, for love and for what that love has achieved; sometimes the clear outlines of a dream can only be traced in hindsight.
Missy, Raghav Rao, Penguin India.
