In the interests of full disclosure, I know the author of this book, Neena Nehru, and her husband – with whom I have gone on a mountaineering expedition – and count them both as friends.
So I obviously know that Neena is a talented artist. But I had no idea that she is also a novelist, and I couldn’t be more proud of this accomplished lady.
Her novel tells the story of a young Indian couple, Aruna and Sandeep, who live in England in the swinging sixties, move back to India in the 70s and are confronted with the harsh on-the-ground realities of poverty, caste, untouchability – a world away from their privileged childhood experience of India.
What I found especially fascinating in Neena’s book is her recounting of the political views and struggles of working class immigrants Indians in London in the 60s. To my shame, as a Brit, this is an aspect of my country’s recent past about which I knew virtually nothing. Until reading this book.
Aruna and Sandeep mix with these revolutionaries – mainly Sikhs – and Aruna’s experience of the mysogyny and downright cruelty through the stories of the women is eye-opening. And very depressing.
After getting accepted, albeit warily, by the Indian working class community, they start to spend a lot of time with them, trying to understand their lives and their political viewpoint. However, in true patriarchal style, whenever they are together, Aruna is always despatched to the kitchen, while Sandeep goes down the pub with the men. But it is through her admittedly inexperienced ways in the kitchen that she earns the confidence of some of the women, whose life-stories are, by and large, tales of woe and suffering and fortitude.
When they eventually move back to India, to live in Chandigarh, there are culture shocks galore awaiting them. Some learnings are funny, in a wry kind of way.
One day Sandeep, driving, slows down to avoid an old man cycling with “a tower of cardboard trays of eggs balanced precariously on the carrier of his bicycle” but the cyclist wobbles, topples over and there are broken eggs everywhere. To Sandeep’s confusion, the old man furiously berates him:
“Don’t you know how to drive, you moron?”
“But it was his right-of-way! What did I do wrong?” Sandeep asked when he recounted the experience to their friends.
“Right-of-way!” they laughed. “The rules of the road are quite different here, my friend. Here it is the bigger vehicle that has right-of-way! You have a lot to learn about your own country…”
In other words, Aruna and Sandeep have become too westernised for India. Sandeep has to be told by his British boss how to behave around senior bureaucrats. Sandeep’s directness, not wanting to waste an important man’s time, is perceived as being rude, since he doesn’t follow the usual niceties, and allow the bureaucrat to ask the reason for the meeting and then proceed to show his largesse.
I found these anecdotes telling and – for what it’s worth – as a foreigner living in India, this concept of being neither fish nor fowl resonated:
“Yes, we feel at home in both countries, but paradoxically, not completely at home in either.” nodded Aruna. “We’re neither fish nor fowl,”
Their lightbulb moment about caste and untouchability is deeply moving, when a man in a slum they are visiting starts crying with happiness and disbelief when they accept a cup of tea from him:
“You are big people who have a car and good jobs, and live in big houses, yet you have entered our hut, accepted tea from our hands, and now you have even touched me!…We are lowly untouchable chamars; none of the others who live here would ever come into our hut, eat or drink anything from our hands, or even touch us.”
Tragic as this incident is, what is even more tragic is that today – decades after the time this book is set in – there is not a week goes by without some horrific story in the papers about caste atrocities. The disdain and bullying, the exclusion and violence persist, even in 2025.
Aruna’s terrifying experience with a group of drunk, obnoxious Playboy-reading men on a train in Bihar – where she is very afraid that the men might attack and rape the 2 women in their group – is another stark reminder that, yet again, so many of the evils the couple encounters in 1970s India are still prevalent today.
I only got to know India after the Emergency, so it was revealing to read about the very real fears of people who were politically out of step with the government, especially those trying to overhaul the system and to better the lives of their compatriots.
Inevitably, Aruna and Sandeep have to come to terms with their conflicting feelings about their revolutionary ideology, when they confront the prospect that they could, hypothetically, be required to attack their own rich, privileged families. They are both good, thoughtful, caring people, passionate about social change, a passion which they need to balance against their love for their young children. They are also getting increasingly disillusioned with the so-called political leaders of the revolutionary movement, where betrayal and sexual exploitation are at odds with their fiery rhetoric and their public persona.
The end of the novel sees the couple summiting Stok Kangri (a mountain in the Indian Himalayas) together and looking back over their life’s journey from a vantage point they had dreamed of achieving.
The novel gives us a fascinating glimpse into recent history, and even though our protagonists’ lives take a different turn as they grow older :
“It’s not that we were foolish or inadequate, we were just carried along with the ebb and flow of the tide of history.”