With a quirky central premise, Intemperance by Sonora Jha draws you in straight away. A middle-aged Indian academic based in Seattle decides to hold a swayamvar to find a groom. The author follows up her previous critically acclaimed award-winning book The Laughter, with this witty, perceptive, sparkling story.
The book is narrated in the first person, and we never get to know the name of the narrator. She is a Sociology professor who lives on a houseboat with her dog. Twice divorced, she is a single mother to a young man. Her libido awakened by a chance encounter in France, she decides to act on her dormant longing for love and companionship, despite her past not-too-happy experiences in matters of matrimony.
Her eccentric way of finding a husband is through a swayamvar, referenced in Hindu mythology and epics, but with a difference; traditionally, it was a man, usually a king, who arranged this ritual for his daughter, but here a woman has the agency to pull this off on her own.
The subversiveness of this idea gradually reveals itself. She is undeterred by her age, her failed marriages or her disability. Afflicted by polio as a baby and an accident at a later date, she limps and walks with a cane. In her work, she has poked and prodded at masculinity and called men out on “their mediocrity, their cruelty, their emotional unavailability.” And yet here she is, seeking a man to love. She is helped by various women in this endeavour: a former student turned wedding planner, a documentary filmmaker, an old friend, and others. And of course, there is blowback from both the feminists and the trolls.
The voice of the narrator speaks for the universal quest for love, and how age does not matter when it comes to seeking love. The writing is light, clever and frequently satirical, and specific issues are neatly intertwined in the story.
The author includes surreal elements as when the narrator’s dark family history in India is revealed. Though there is a tonal shift in these parts, it serves to shine a light on problems of caste and class, to lay bare the ferocious brutality that is unleashed on those who make unconventional choices in love, how women are expected to behave and the threat that an intemperate woman, so defined because she seeks her own path, poses. If this holds true for the narrator’s distant past, it does for the India of today, too.
There is an astute exploration of how women are very often circumscribed by the gaze of others, how a woman is ‘pinned down’ by the relationship to that gaze, so much so that they begin defining themselves by it. When the narrator states, “women who are so alert to the way they are seen can feel such ineffable abandon when no eyes and no mirror are turned on them,” it will resonate with women everywhere. The swayamvar, when it takes place, comes across as rushed. But even here, deciding the feats that the competing grooms will undertake gives room for the author to examine different ideas of masculinity and what a better version of that would look like. There is much to chew on and enjoy in this book.