By Selma Carvalho
Icarus is dead, Icarus is alive. He resurrects himself in all of us as surely he must, in that tiny seedling hope which reaches for the dream lying beyond our grasp. This then is the premise of Reshma Ruia’s haunting novel, Still Lives (Renard Press, 2022), drawing the reader, immediately and imperceptibly, into a brooding sense of loss, the disappearing self searching through the gloaming.
PK is a first-generation Indian immigrant, he’s fifty-five years old, a curious age, not young, but not too old either to want one last hurrah before fading into the oblivion of care homes and mobility scooters. PK lives in Manchester, where it rains every day and mango trees don’t flourish, his wife, Geeta, has piled on the pounds, her body feels unfamiliar to his touch, his son, Amar, is a disappointment, his business ‘Malick Textiles,’ is failing, ruthless, new immigrants are producing cheap knockoffs in sweatshops on Cheetham Hill while he struggles to hold onto his integrity, because that sort of thing matters to him. Who could possibly save a man like PK drowning in a pool of self-pity? That saviour turns out to be Esther Solomon, the impeccably elegant, easily bored, spoilt rotten, Jewish wife of Cedric Solomon, with PK all too eager to be her ‘mensch.’
So begins the affair bearing the full weight of PK’s middle-age disappointments and Esther’s search for romance at the last-chance saloon, in a tawdry, little hotel, the ‘Didsbury Queen’ languishing in its own state of disrepair, with Marvin, a Jamaican man at reception, who watches PK all too knowingly, and assures him ‘the bed is clean,’ which is about the only thing that is. ‘It could be someone else’s life, not mine,’ PK concedes, as things begin to unravel, as PK plunges into the unfolding chaos of a failing marriage and a floundering son, curiously alienated from the world, in a way that PK doesn’t quite understand, an estrangement that looms heavy, unbearable because PK had had such grand dreams for the boy.
Still, there is Esther and in Esther, PK can escape. The Jew and the Indian, inextricably bound together. We’re so similar, Esther assures PK, bound by ‘the same neurosis about being on the margins,’ the margins that displacement subjects people to. But neither Esther nor PK are victims. They are not diasporic wraiths fleeing persecution, no, they are entirely resilient, they’ve pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps. In fact, their success is envied by working class white British, who cast a suspicious eye over their huge houses and spanking new cars. ‘You lot have done all right in this country, haven’t you?’ observes the mother of Amar’s only friend, Alice. PK’s dissonance is not cultural, it’s the one he carries within himself, diminished as he is from the potential of his youth. In his saner moments, PK acknowledges that his self-indulgent affair will have a ripple effect, there are other lives involved, sentient, sapient lives which will inevitably crumble in the wake of discovery, mainly Geeta’s.
Despite not strictly being an immigrant’s tale, Ruia’s extraordinary skill lies in capturing the landscape of diasporic lives, the first-generation Indian immigrant, wedged uncomfortably between tradition and modernity, between desire and restraint, between the personal and the collective, these ‘dull and small’ lives illumined only by fantastical dreams. There are intimate, yet instantly recognisable details: PK reading the Daily Mail, the very paper that dehumanises immigrants, becomes somehow relatable to immigrants; Geeta’s plaintive, ‘Can’t we get an English doctor?’ as Dr Adebayo tends to her, exposing Asian racism toward Black populations; the weekly meet-ups with Gupta, and Gupta’s tight-lipped disapproval of PK, an echo of collective South Asian censure. ‘I have a house, a brand-new car, a permanent job in an accountancy firm. My children speak with an English accent. Yes, God has been truly kind,’ Gupta preens. That sort of good fortune comes through hard work but also if you are South Asian, it comes because you are willing to conform and concede to the greater good, you are willing to subsume the self into the whole, and PK, the handsome PK, well PK has upset the status quo, turned his nose up at the very things he should be grateful for, a dutiful wife, a son, a business. PK is a traitor to the values of the community and he must be made to pay. And then there is Manchester, glooming in the backdrop, ‘The warehouses near Ancoats and Salford that once thrummed to the sound of machinery are empty husks now. Property developers have moved in, tearing down the old mills.’
All the while, PK senses the shadowy but palpable presence of destruction slouching towards him. Not the failure and dissolution of his business, not the end of his affair with Esther, not even the end of his marriage with Geeta, this is something altogether different, lying-in-wait, growing larger each day, and PK knows, like every Icarus reborn knows in his heart, that he is but doomed to have his wings singed.
Still Lives is a heart-rending evocation of a life in crisis. Not only is the minutia of this life beautifully observed but Ruia nuances its varied aspects with tremendous agility: the yearning for fulfilment, the realisation of a certain finality, a quiet fury leading us to its brutal ending. This is your must-read book for the summer.
Reshma Ruia is an award-winning author and poet. Her works include Something Black in the Lentil Soup, Mrs Pinto Drives to Happiness and A Dinner Party. Still Lives is available for purchase here.
Banner image is by Annie Spratt and downloaded from Unsplash.com