Patel uses the familiar arc of a reconciliation narrative to dig into this tension, progressing the plot along familiar generic conventions—the initial, difficult meeting; a begrudging decision to try; the family taking a trip together and returning to a long-left home (in this case, Gujarat, India). But she refuses to follow its script entirely. Instead Patel offers an interesting and thought-provoking alternative, one that neither of her protagonists can engage with but which remains, like a burr, knotted into the story: Khadija seems to not want to reconcile, and reconciliation may in fact be harmful to her. In one telling scene, Khadija imagines how she wants to spend her remaining years, deciding she isn’t interested in reconciling with Ayat and would prefer to spend as much time as possible with Laila’s daughter Aysha. Later, Khadija’s health severely deteriorates after a stressful first encounter with Ayat. Although the text does not linger on the ethics of reconciliation in these circumstances, Patel is clearly aware of the complexities of estrangement and resists an easy answer. She peppers the text with moments in which it feels genuinely unclear whether the sisters are acting in Khadija’s (or the family’s) best interests, a tension which reaches an acute, yet unremarked, pitch at the denouement. Patel’s choices here are a bold move against the conservative impetus toward familial unification no matter the cost and a frank acknowledgement that often, there is no easy reconciliation of cultural perspectives.
While Patel is careful not to claim that any position is the correct one here, it’s difficult not to feel sympathy for Ayat’s perspective—not because her views are more cogent but because she is the clear authorial voice throughout, her perspective alive and troubled, and seeping into the other points of view. For Ayat, feeling estranged from her Muslim and Gujarati heritage, ‘culture’ becomes a neat label to designate that which does not feel hers, to separate herself from it and avoid engaging with it. If everything is because of ‘culture’, Ayat never has to think more deeply about it, and in doing so, risk sympathy for its logics. Thus, a recurring feature of the book is the appeal to culture as an explanatory refrain: ‘This was just how things happened in their culture,’ ‘This is our culture,’ ‘the path laid out for them by their culture,’ or ‘In their culture…’. Ayat deploys ‘culture’ as an explanation and a foreclosure rather than understanding it more generously as something akin to, as Jamaican cultural theorist Stuart Hall describes, ‘conceptual maps’ through which people interpret the world and make it sensible: not so much a reason as a way of looking at (and for) reasons.
For Ayat, feeling estranged from her Muslim and Gujarati heritage, ‘culture’ becomes a neat label to designate that which does not feel hers, to separate herself from it and avoid engaging with it.
Ayat’s distance to culture is not shared by Laila and Khadija and so, when their behaviour is explained as and by ‘culture’ in this broad way, they lose something of their dimensionality. This is where Ayat’s voice and worldview leak across the pages most clearly: Laila and Khadija are seen through Ayat’s eyes, even when we are seeing through theirs. Khadija is often written in terms that, although paying homage to her strength and resilience, are perhaps dismissive of her multiplicity: a strict, unbending woman whose key defining features are her strength of will and commitment to her culture. Similarly, Laila reads as though she is written by Ayat and is flatter for it. For example, when Laila decides to have an arranged marriage, her motivations are obscure and obscured by an Ayat-like call to ‘culture’. She explains her decisions simply with ‘This is what we do,’ her words mirroring Ayat’s when Ayat explains taking one’s shoes off before entering a house as ‘just a thing we do. It’s part of Islam…’. Parsed through Ayat’s perspective, Laila’s desires are overt—a good job, a marriage, a child—but they issue from nothing more than convention. It’s a shame because Laila is, I think, the book’s most decisive and contradictory character, the only person able to integrate her two worlds intentionally and proactively.
Yet at the narrative’s best, Patel mobilises the ambiguities of immigrant life to great effect, avoiding both the self-consciousness of over-explanation and the dismissiveness of appeals to ‘culture’, as when she writes about Khadija’s husband convincing her to allow the dog inside the house so long as it doesn’t enter the room in which they pray, or when Ayat, meeting Laila for the first time in six years, thinks ‘So, she still doesn’t wear the hijab’. In scenes like these, Patel shows readers the expectations and negotiations that constitute migrant life and, in very few words, reveals plenty about her subjects and all the contradictions and ambivalences between them. They are clever scenes, full of casual intimacy and loaded with meaning, as rich and complicated and sharp as the women whose lives they describe.
The KYD New Critics Program 2023 is supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria.
