‘Still Lives’: Reshma Ruia’s novel shows how the loss of home sometimes leads to a loss of self

If you too had mandatory art classes in middle school, the term “still life” is likely to evoke images of tables laden with bowls of fruit, pitchers of milk, vases overflowing with flowers, all seemingly benign and suffused with a sense of changelessness. Scratch the surface and what becomes obvious is an artificial abundance, an illusion of permanence, sealed off from decay.

Enduring life abroad

Reshma Ruia’s Still Lives attempts to tell the story of an immigrant family in Manchester in much the same way. PK Malik, an only child of middle-class parents in Bombay, leaves the stability of home for a textile printing scholarship at Delaware. A layover at Manchester turns into a business opportunity, anchoring him to a life of routine and sameness. Soon to turn 55, PK is the obverse of the fairytale immigrant story.

When he started out, he was touted as the “new face of immigration in England – an employer bringing jobs to deprived areas, not a scrounger on social benefits.” Three decades later, the business is past its prime, his aspirations of success remain unfulfilled, and domestic life is a bore. His wife, Geeta, like scores of other women (in fiction and real life), uprooted from home and pushed into an unfamiliar, unfriendly space where they must play out the roles of mother and wife, ensuring the inter-generational transfer of cultural codes, stoically endures life in England, looking forward to a time when they can retire to India. Their son, Amar, struggling at school, carries the weight of his father’s expectations and his mother’s overbearing love. PK, Geeta, and Amar are, typically, Vijay Mishra’s “uniquely unhappy” diasporic family, never quite fitting in, never quite at home.

By the writer’s own admission, this is a “character-driven novel”. It is a pity, however, that Ruia’s primary protagonist, PK, is immediately, eminently, unlikeable. Two paragraphs into the narrative, sitting at a bar with his equally unlikeable friend, Gupta, he notices a woman cleaning glasses, fixating on her “bright pink lipstick”, labelling it “too young for her face”. His wife is dismissed as having given up on herself, “letting the carless pounds weigh down her five-foot frame year after year.” Misogynistic, somewhat narcissistic, PK is that clichéd middle-aged man who buys himself vanity number plates and bespoke suits that he cannot afford.

A chance encounter with Esther Solomon, wife of a man in the same line of business as him, only, exponentially more successful, leads to a love affair, unfolding in the tawdriness of a cheap hotel. A white woman, particularly, a wealthy white woman, wearing her class in her expensive, tasteful clothes, is perhaps also an attempt at claiming power in a hostile cultural-political space. Despite all his pretensions to culture, aesthetics, and accent, PK knows he does not belong, that he will never have the acceptance he craves from his compatriots. At the same time, he holds himself superior to the Indian community in Manchester, resenting all social occasions that expect him to fraternise with other immigrant families. More complexed than complex, PK Malik is an excellent study of the overlaps between toxic masculinity and an insecure, hybrid identity.

Home and displacement are twin motifs that run through the text. The novel seems to ask if one can survive a dislocation, the loss of home, without a consequent, at least partial, loss of self. PK has, ostensibly, shrugged off all connection with India, minimising interaction with the British Asian community in Manchester, moving into an upscale, all-white neighbourhood, as if it would erase the brownness of his skin.

Ironically enough, the only thing he seems to care about, outside of himself, is a mango sapling he has attempted to grow in his garden. He nurtures it, worries about it, checks out a book at the library about the cultivation of mango trees, and dreams of it growing into a real tree, “with a huge, king-size trunk and branches that flare out in all directions, glossy golden mangoes hanging from every tip.” The plant refuses to thrive, in defiance of his over-abundant emotional investment. When derided for expecting a tropical tree to grow in Manchester’s climate, his response is only half-joking: “Look at us Indians. We are tropical, but we are flourishing here, aren’t we?”

His precious mango tree carries memories of his mother and her love for the summer fruit. It is also empirical evidence of his inability to distance himself from his past, or from the country of his origin. PK, like his tree, fails to thrive, fails at being a responsive husband or father. Like it, he and his family remain unmoored in a space that remains unknowable. Geeta continues to think of Manchester as a mistake. Amar, even as a second-generation immigrant, is unable to assimilate, contrary to the usual trajectory of diasporic communities and narratives. Home, in Still Lives, is unstable, threatened by the outside world, and ultimately, a site of tragedy, instead of a place of refuge.

Disability and ‘cure’

One of the most troubling parts of the narrative is its rather obfuscated portrayal of Amar’s undiagnosed learning disability. At school, Amar is ordinary. He attracts no attention, except of the wrong kind. At home, there are episodes of bed-wetting that his mother refuses to acknowledge as a problem. The headmaster of his school tells his parents that Amar has “special needs”, and PK’s predictable response is that of blaming Geeta’s mollycoddling for Amar’s “laziness”. His teenage sexual curiosity is similarly dismissed as “dirty” and wrong by his parents. Hurt by an errant cricket ball lobbed by PK when Amar was ten years old, his “problems” and their perceived causes veer erratically from the physiological to the psychological.

His anxiety, his obvious inability to cope, all go unrecognised because “disability” is that pejorative term aspirational parents cannot wrap their heads around. When autism finally enters PK’s headspace, it does so with the intent to “cure”. “Amar’s not autistic, he’s special”, PK says, with incredibly annoying ableism. Perhaps that is the intent of the writer- to create discomfort with PK and Geeta’s discomfiture over Amar’s “flaws” that need never translate into a medical diagnosis. It, however, remains a problem in the narrative because the discourse on disability and the activism around autism awareness have both created a space where parental denial of disability cannot possibly elicit a sympathetic response from the reader.

This, the problem of sympathy, is where Still Lives flounders for me. Novels need not be populated by entirely sympathetic characters, of course. Those who live in their pages do not have to be likeable, but they do usually inspire some frisson of feeling – even if that of anger or revulsion or, sometimes, morbid fascination. The Malik family and those who orbit around them do none of the above, They do not ask for either immersion or critical engagement of the reader. Where the novel shines, is in its engagement with race, gender, and the sliding scale of class, and in the compelling picture it paints of the socio-political-cultural matrix the Maliks, and other South Asian families like them, live their stilted lives in.

Ruia intersperses the narrative of the Maliks with events unfolding in India. Geeta writes to her sister, Lopa, married to a successful businessman, mother to neurotypical children who check the boxes of conventional milestones of success and acts as a foil to Geeta’s own insecurities and her incurable homesickness. There are references to current events in India, the spectre of development, the rise of divisive ideologies, that function as neat asides to the rest of the narrative. Exacerbating the discomfort that PK Malik inspires in the reader, the text offers no closure, holds out no absolution. The “still life” in Ruia’s narrative is one of darkness – of human thought and behaviour, of hope that is crushed, and dreams that remain unfulfilled.

Still Lives, Reshma Ruia, Speaking Tiger Books.