Fiction

CHINA ROOM

By Sunjeev Sahota

Harvill Secker/ Paperback/ 242 pages/ $30.94/ Available here

4 out of 5

Fifteen-year-old Mehar is part of a trio of brides who have married three brothers on the same day. The problem is that she does not know which one.

It is 1929 in rural Punjab and she spends most of her life veiled, except in the china room, an outhouse which she shares with her sisters-in-law and a set of willow-pattern plates, away from the eyes of men.

The girls are sent to their husbands at night on a roster decided by their terrifying mother-in-law, Mai, the chief arbiter of their marriages.

These visitations take place in the dark - thus Mehar's conundrum. She tries to guess her man and guesses wrong, a mistake that will doom her.

British novelist Sahota made the Booker Prize shortlist for his blazing, harrowing 2015 novel The Year Of The Runaways, about the precarious lives of Indian migrants in Britain.

China Room - his third novel, this time drawn from his own family history - is a quiet exercise in interiority.

The space afforded to Mehar is tightly trammelled by tradition, full of endless farm chores and Mai's tyranny.

"Are you certain I send the same son to you each time?" she quips to a horrified Mehar.

If it recalls dystopias like Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985), it serves as a reminder that such stories drew inspiration from real historical practices.

Yet China Room is full of life, albeit writ small. Mehar rarely rails against her fate, but nor does she cleave fully to it. She has wryly funny exchanges with her fellow wives. She learns the unfurling of her own desires.

Sahota delivers all this with a microscopic subtlety.

There is a second strand to the novel, narrated by Mehar's great-grandson, who at age 18 is sent from England to the same farm to recover from his heroin habit.

Reading his first-person chapters is like coming up for air from the claustrophobia of Mehar's world, but his is the considerably weaker narrative.

One is evidently meant to draw parallels between the two strands, but any resonances are overshadowed by their disparities.

It may be a strange time to read about life in small spaces, but his words do ring true, as he peers through the bars of her one-time prison and regrets worrying earlier about something as minor as food deliveries.

"I thought about how I'd fixated on the thing that was least important and not heard the thing that mattered."

If you like this, read: Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi (Hamish Hamilton, 2020, $32.10, available here), a sharp, unsettling novel about an artist and her dementia-stricken mother, who years ago fled her unhappy marriage for an ashram.