Happiness is forgetting,” says Mansi, one of the three lead characters in Amrita Mahale’s novel, Real Life, yet her own story reveals how impossible that is. In fact, some of the running themes of the book are memory, regret, and longing, and how these feelings ensure that forgetting is but an illusion.
The author, who burst onto the literary scene with the refreshing Milk Teeth in 2018, returns with a story of two friends, Tara and Mansi, and what happens when the former disappears while researching for a project in a small town at the foothills of the Himalayas. While Mahale’s debut was an ode to Mumbai and captured the city’s transformation and the tensions between tradition and modernity, Real Life takes us far away, setting its mystery amid the placid Himalayan foothills.
The story is straightforward and sets off at a brisk pace: Mansi arrives in a small village searching for her friend, who goes missing. The layers in the narrative are peeled off slowly, delving into their girlhood, their bond over the years, and their journey. The introduction of the third character and chief suspect, Bhaskar, keeps the readers engaged. Narrating in turns by the three characters, each of them brings their individual essence: Mansi with her quiet persistence and buried regrets, Tara with her idealism and curiosity, and Bhaskar with his conflicted brilliance, making for an interesting conflict in personalities.
The growing-up years have a lovely lilt of nostalgia: while Tara is the daughter of a cook and a driver, the girls are never untroubled by their difference in backgrounds. Mansi’s marriage to Sid and their challenges, Bhaskar’s journey from a small town to working on AI in the US, and Tara’s research on dhole packs in the mountains are well etched out, as is the description of a small village famous with backpackers (and a café called Aunty’s): all of it rendered with a sensitivity and precision that makes the world instantly believable.
Mahale reels in the audience early on, be it through the vivid description of the village or the backstory of the female characters, as well as the slow unraveling of Mansi’s marriage. It is also perhaps one of the first mainstream novels to describe the use of AI (through Bhaskar’s work) and his creation of an online bot incidentally—or not—named after Tara.
The novel is strongest in its portrayal of the intricacies of female friendship: the undercurrents of guilt, loyalty, and shared memory that bind women together. The pace is measured without ever becoming sluggish, allowing the suspense of Tara’s disappearance to simmer while giving space for emotional depth. Her research shines through the details of dhole packs in the mountains or the building of a chatbot, grounding the story in realism without losing sight of its emotional core.
The alternating strands of mystery, personal history, and philosophical musing on memory and the ethical use of technology are woven seamlessly, keeping the reader invested in both the fate of the characters and the ideas the novel grapples with. Because the three characters loom large, there is no need for secondary characters or strands of narrative to take the story forward.
The only weak link is Tara’s story, which feels like a long monologue. While the ending ties it all up, some questions linger. A quick edit of the third part of the book would have tightened the narrative and heightened its impact.
Nevertheless, the book hits all the right notes in its exploration of friendship, memory, and loss and establishes Mahale once again as a writer with a keen eye for human relationships and the quiet complexities that define real life.