For many Delhiites, Vasant Kunj may mean an upmarket residential neighbourhood. However, inside these homes a hilarious life unfolds as we read Anuradha Marwah’s new novel Aunties of Vasant Kunj (Rupa), recently launched in Delhi.
The book spotlights a cross-section of women in their late 30s—meddlesome, conventional, and married like Nilima Gandhi, who constantly parks herself in the homes of Delhi University professor Shailaja or firebrand activist and single mother Dinitia.
Marwah’s comical and sensitive writing offers an empathetic gaze that reclaims being an “aunty”, a word indicative of ageism and stereotype, to one denoting interesting and significant women. “I feel 40 is a significant age where youth is bidding a farewell and you can’t mess around like you could in your twenties or thirties.
It’s an age when important decisions have to be made,” says Marwah, a professor of English at Zakir Husain Delhi College, at the launch. The launch was held at the India Habitat Centre. Varsha Das, a Buddhist practitioner and author, professor Partho Datta from Arts and Aesthetics, JNU, and Dr Priya Mirza, academic and podcaster, discussed the book with the author.
A feminist work
While Marwah has penned novels such as The Higher Education of Geetika Mehendiratta (1992), Idol Love (1999), and Dirty Picture (2007), it is Aunties of Vasant Kunj that she considers autobiographical. In ‘Chapter 2024, Now’, she surprises the reader with a sneak-peek of her life.
“Husband? Single? Children?” were a few intrusive questions she was asked when she first moved to Vasant Kunj decades ago, walking out of a marriage, with her two sons, in pursuit of a new life. “I wanted to change the way my world behaved with women who transgressed,” she writes in the chapter.
And, indeed, her 295-page novel makes women heard as they speak about sexuality, desire, daily struggles, and the idea of selfhood. For instance, Dinitia has to find a safe space like India Habitat Centre to voice her beliefs that “controlling women and their sexuality has been the bedrock of patriarchal systems like arranged marriages”. Because if the aunties of the neighborhood heard it, she’d be pronounced “cracked”.
Mrs Gandhi is another interesting character. She believes that girls from “good families” know their “limits” and takes a jibe at Shailaja for having an affair, and is often comforted in her company when complaining of a thankless job in managing the home, meeting the never-ending expectations of her mother-in-law and dealing with a husband who keeps ignoring her.
“We cannot talk about women’s experiences or their place in society without reference to feminism. I’d take it as a compliment if my book is called feminist literature and worry if people think otherwise,” Marwah says with a chuckle.
Conflicted characters
The book’s ‘grey’ characters catch one’s attention. For instance, the lovelorn Shailaja, abandoned by her boyfriend, finds solace in teaching romance classics such as Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind. While she holds discussions on love in the class, as an act of longing, she also positions romance as a post-feminist force, where women get to choose the lives they want, not believing love to be the end-goal.
“There are husbands, ex-boyfriends, and lovers in the book but they are not the centre of women’s lives. Marwah has created autonomous yet conflicted women,” Mirza says.
To read this book without being invested in the lives of its three “aunties”, would be tough as the author universalises their yearning for love and acceptance, and their journey to self-discovery. “This book is about fulfilling my desire for the many lives I did not lead,” says Marwah.