Image: Supplied.
In Natasha Rai’s debut novel, An Onslaught of Light, a ghostliness hangs over her characters. The past haunts—legacies and traumas linger, pervading the present. As Rai explores the inner workings of a family in turmoil, her prose, intimate and peppered with visceral descriptions, evokes complex emotional landscapes. A sense of heaviness infuses the story; ‘worry is the fifth member of [the] family.’
The book captures the inner worlds of Indu, Vijay and Archana (Arch)—mother, father and daughter, respectively—as we flit between their close third-person perspectives. It begins with Arch in her forties, post-lockdown in 2022, living a solitary life in her self-guarded ‘rural hidey hole’ at the foot of the Blue Mountains. A secondary timeline from 1971 is woven in which takes us through the parents’ marriage in India and the family’s migration to Australia. This gives readers clues to Indu’s mental decline, Vijay’s estrangement from his daughter and Arch’s jaded nature (in contrast with her brother Sunny, who retains strong family ties).
A story of migration is rarely a singular tale, and An Onslaught of Light offers a nuanced collective story of a family and the fracturing effects of starting a new life in a different country. But at the book’s heart is Arch and her uneasy path to adulthood. At ten years old, Arch observes how ‘silence grows steadily thicker around them till she wades through it most days, unable to reach anyone else’. Later in life, the pain of her upbringing is shown to be viscerally alive inside her body:
At the mention of their father, Vijay, Arch’s heart begins its habitual clammy thud in her chest, the bitter taste of shame on her tongue at the phantom feel of his hand raised in a slap against her cheek. The walls of her house blur, an oily nausea spreads across her stomach.
Rai carefully maps Arch’s burgeoning queerness and her struggles to feel accepted by her family and by society. With ‘the sheen of rage covering everything’, Arch is at times avoidant and selfish. But her imperfections lend themselves to the unfolding of a beautiful and satisfying growth arc. As we come to grasp her unprocessed trauma, we can sympathise with why she pushes others away and feel moved by the challenges she faces reconnecting with her father.
The past haunts—legacies and traumas linger, pervading the present.
Likewise, her parents are fleshed out with a lot of humanity. Vijay is the ‘the tyrant of [Arch’s] life’, and his abuse is not pardoned, but there is space to sit with the hardships he faces—cultural dislocation, thwarted dreams and illness later in life. Indu struggles with these same challenges in her own way, the strain of isolation and despair unravelling her sense of self. In sinking into the grief of Rai’s characters, we witness so much love and loss, including disillusionment in the immigrant dream:
Indu doesn’t even know what this life is. They are constantly begging for scraps, a day of work here, the dole payment there. This isn’t what they had in mind when she agreed to come here.
The novel is commendable in its tender and fresh approach to mental health. Rai does brilliant work in allowing the reader to witness the slow, painful developments of depression and other mental health concerns in older migrants—a common experience that doesn’t often get a spotlight.
However, in tracking Arch’s development, there is sometimes a conflation of culture with trauma—so much so that in a fight with her father, Arch exclaims, ‘What’s this family ever given me? What’s this fucking culture ever given me?’ This is a familiar trope that echoes throughout diaspora literature. We see it in Indian diaspora classics such as Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake where pressures to assimilate lead to cultural rejection, and in more recent Indian Australian releases like Ruhi Lee’s memoir Good Indian Daughter and Zoya Patel’s novel Once a Stranger where conservative and patriarchal cultural norms lead characters to disconnect from their heritage.
The schoolyard of the 90s is a volatile place for Arch, with far more pressure to assimilate than there is today. She cops degrading racist slurs, including being told, ‘fucking go back to where you came from, curry muncher’. Later, an attempt to connect with a fellow South Asian student backfires. With a coming-of-age marked by rampant race-driven bullying, an unstable home life and seemingly no space for her queerness, Arch struggles to find any comfort in her culture growing up.
The novel is commendable in its tender and fresh approach to mental health.
It is hard to carry love for your culture when it’s not dominant and is viewed as worthless, a joke or pitiable. This is compounded when you struggle to fit expectations—from family, from society—as Arch does as a queer Indian Australian. But it’s very possible to have deep love for your cultural heritage while also holding a critical lens to the negative aspects and bearing trauma. We have seen local diaspora fiction explore cultural negotiations with queer experiences in books such as Omar Sakr’s Son of Sin and Winnie Dunn’s Dirt Poor Islanders. However, not everyone can—or wants to—reconnect to culture, and sometimes the undoing of shame is enough. In this way, Rai illuminates just how transformative acceptance, in all its complexities, can be.
Despite its sometimes sombre tone, An Onslaught of Light is a compelling character study—and one that resonates beyond just diaspora experiences. It presents a very tender story about how unresolved tensions and traumas inform the way we walk through the world. Hardships are broken up with moments of respite—deep human connection, fierce resilience and the radical potential for change. Rai sensitively paints a family portrait in all its grittiness, but also with hope, even when the past is constantly shaping and reshaping lives.
An Onslaught of Light is our Debut Spotlight book for March.
Debut Spotlight is a paid partnership with Australian publishers designed to promote the critical discussion of new authors’ work to a wide audience. Titles are selected by KYD, and all reviews have editorial independence.
