“Why is it such a chore to be happy?’’ Maya asks herself in The Other Sister.
This is very much the question that sums up Amrita Tripathi’s ambitious new novel. Set in the post-pandemic world disconnected and in disarray, it is unconventional and brave.
The Other Sister opens with Maya, Tripathi’s central character, going offline after posting a cryptic “Life is short, before you know it, time’s up”. The post gets twenty-two likes. Four days later she disappears. Maya moves to her Auntie Chini’s house for refuge. It is a “performance” of her self-isolation, that social media insists on. She ghosts her friends, who see her as “too intense”. “None of them know that she is already on a timeout, not until she announced it, but just goes to show how much attention they were paying in real life,” writes Tripathi. And none of her self-professed BFFs get it. This beginning sets the tone for the book.
Stories that define us
There are many threads being tugged – Maya and her protector Akira, which forms the fulcrum of the book. Her “friends” and friendship; Gautam her bhaiyya; Karthik, a potential partner she meets at the ashram; god men; Usha, her mother who abandoned her and her “father” Lakshman who dies. There is also the complex relationship of her family – her aunt Chini and Uncle Pi, superstition and trauma passed through generations. Wrapped under all these layers, is a girl struggling with dissociative identity disorder living in a world where reality is reflected and processed through social media.
Through the novel, Tripathi explores the complexity of trauma and coping. It is also about stories that we tell ourselves and that are told about us. Stories that we repeatedly hear and then become the ones that define us. And others.
Maya’s story unfolds in the break from the virtual world in the cocoon of her childhood home. Not in a linear fashion – the reader flits across the year from October 2023 to February March 2024. There are flashes of the past and her childhood. The impact of her dropping off on her friends, their reaction, family secrets and finally, life after.
Urgent, keenly observed and deeply felt, Tripathi captures the unbearable emptiness of loneliness. And taps into it. The book speaks for, and certainly to the generation that is lost desperate to be found. As Maya observes, happiness is worth chasing – all the Instagram love gurus say so. It is this chase that Tripathi captures evocatively. The desperation of trying to find connection, living virtually and needing people in real life, grabbing it and trying to hold on to it.
This is not an easy story to tell. But it is an important one. Tripathi conjures up Maya’s vulnerability – and her fragility – and handles it with sensitivity and without judgement.
Hyper-connected, vulnerable, vocal, yet deeply alone, the Global State of Connections survey 2023 revealed that at least a quarter of 4.5 billion people felt “lonely” or “very lonely”. The World Health Organisation has listed loneliness as a pressing health condition, equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. There are connections, but a lack of feeling connected is no longer a first-world problem. Nor is it only limited to fiction.
A book of the moment
The Other Sister is very much a book of this moment. A global survey in 2021, found that 43 per cent of Indians felt alone making India the third loneliest country in the world. A 2021 MTV Youth Study revealed that 70 per cent of Gen Z felt praying allowed them to be in control of their lives, 62 per cent claimed spirituality offered them clarity and 45 per cent stated that friends are only for fun. (In 2019, this figure was only 25 per cent pointing to the growing disconnection). This is the world that Tripathi’s characters inhabit. Alone in a crowded connected world of instant connections. As Reena Gupta Maya’s therapist notes: “The ubiquity of social media and the pressure it puts on people to perform their lives….paradoxically makes people more exposed but less seen, more social superficial but actually more asocial, unable to connect beyond the surface and unwilling to forge bonds with those they disagree with.”
The search for answers takes Maya to the spiritual realm of satsangs. (Her friends would disapprove.) There are spiritual cleansing, “halo-chic” gurus, awakenings and finding healing through YouTube where messages are tested for an audience and like everything on social media, boils down to the algorithm and quick fixes. Tripathi offers a view into this world of spiritual coping – seductive, addictive and available in an instant. Spirituality compressed for Instagram, or a reel and consumed like content. And sometimes dangerous.
What Tripathi handles exceptionally, is grief. It runs through the book like a background score – so soft sometimes that it is barely a whisper and at times deafening. The big D that “came out of the blue – just like that, no goodbye, no last words (except the vestiges of an argument, the harshness leaving an afterburn),” writes Tripathi. It is this loss that lingers – and one that changes Maya profoundly. She is no longer Mia, the name her father had for her, and that version of her dies with him. It is also one that transforms in many ways.
Ultimately, The Other Sister is about families, with all the attended messiness. Of motherhood – not in the polished perfect version that exists – but one that is often riddled with shame hidden from plain sight. Usha, Maya’s mother abandons her. The Witch, as Maya refers to her, leaves Maya with her “father” Lakshman and disappears. This absence is very much a presence in her life. A wound that refuses to heal. Easily the villain in her story, Tripathi sticks to her commitment to empathy as she redeems Usha.
Breezily written and bingeworthy to read, Tripathi juggles every theme with lightness. Maya’s quest takes her on a journey – of therapy, spirituality and finally, release.
It is life-affirming, of coming full circle. And as Tripathi reminds her readers in the epilogue, you are not alone.
The Other Sister, Amrita Tripathi, Tranquebar/Westland.
