by Diane Josefowicz
September 19, 2023
Diane Josefowicz is associate fiction editor at West Trade Review and the author of a novel, Ready, Set, Oh (Flexible Press, 2022).
House of Caravans by Shipi Suneja; Milkweed Editions; 328 pages; $26.00.
House of Caravans, Shilpi Suneja’s debut novel, begins in 1947 in the British Raj on the train line connecting Lahore to Amritsar. It is the eve of Partition, and the imposition of a border between India and Pakistan is creating millions of refugees. As the novel opens, the station is attacked, and scores of refugees are killed. Among them is Chhote Nanu, who has just served a prison term for planting a bomb in a colonial administrator’s home. Fleeing the chaos, Chhote encounters his long-lost brother, a Hindu factory owner who has quietly exploited his Muslim workers while settling into a complacently hypocritical life in their hometown of Kanpur, on the newly created border. Although their meeting offers a chance to make amends, the rift between them only widens. Attending to emotional, social, and political realities, Suneja shows how their rupture persists down the generations, and how much time, imagination and sacrifice are required to repair it.
The brothers’ tragedy is echoed by the story of their descendants, who struggle with similar issues, of religious and ethnic identity, at the turn of the millennium. Traveling from post-9/11 New York, where he’s recently been ejected from a Flushing mosque, Barre’s grandson, Karan, joins his sister, Ila, in the family home in Kanpur, now firmly the Indian side of the border with Pakistan. Here the reunited siblings revisit their family’s complicated history, by turns Muslim, Hindu, Indian, and Pakistani. As she brings the different threads of these generational stories together, Suneja throws open a window on Partition as well, showing how one family’s personal traumas mirror larger historical moments in their chaotic violence.
It would be easy to get lost in the sweep of history, but Suneja orients the reader using a series of powerful thematic images. The most important of these arrives early, in the novel’s first pages, as Karan observes how a road reflects the larger unity in Kanpur that has been achieved symbolically, which is to say, partially, provisionally, effortfully, and without eliminating divisions between insiders and outsiders: “The saffron propaganda signs of the ruling party advertised their candidates outside the park, and, across the street, the green-and-white signs in indecipherable Urdu, the opposition party advertised their candidates in turn. Saffron on one side, green on the other, and in the middle, the hot white street with our rickshaw wallah’s labored wheel—a veritable flag of India.” (16) With this nuanced image, Suneja conveys not only the theme of the book but also her justified confidence as a storyteller. She knows exactly what she’s doing, and her readers are in capable hands.
Although her major theme is unity—of selves, peoples, nations—Suneja avoids a one-note effort by exploring her motif through many lenses, notably history, memory, and an intriguing middle form that critic Marianne Hirsch, in Family Frames (1997), influentially identified as “postmemory”—memories passed down in stories from one generation to the next. As Karan and Ila uncover the stories of their different fathers—one Hindu, one Muslim—and how each man came to be involved with their mother, they discover how much all of their forebears lost in the massive shifts of Partition. By setting the siblings’ stories against the stories of their parents and grandparents, Suneja shows how the family’s secrets work like hairline cracks in a porcelain cup, weakening relationships so they shatter under the least pressure; it is a short step from here to the fractures of pre-Partition India.
For a novel that is so oriented toward social and political history, it contains a surprising number of moments of tender beauty in private life. I was most struck by the rendezvous of Karan and Ila with their mother at the train station where so much trouble started years before. “I saw her,” Karan reports. “She was stepping off the train, a suitcase in hand. She’d lost weight, enough that her faded cream blouse fitted loosely over her tan belly. She looked up from over her reading glasses, regarded the platform with mistrust.” In this fleeting moment of doubt, Suneja magnificently dramatizes their mother’s larger ambivalences, the inner divisions that she cannot help but express in her choices, including her choices of fathers for her children. “She held onto the door handle,” Karan says, “one leg still on the train.” But then, just as history doesn’t wait for anyone to think about whether they want to participate or not, the train begins to move. Just as their mother considers where next to place her foot, Karan tells us: “The damn stupid rude train jerked. I ran to her as she lost her balance.” He implores her to let go. As she does, he and his sister finally come together in a perfect effort: “We caught our mother as she fell into our arms.” (127) What Suneja offers here is reassurance that, given enough time and patient listening, even the members of a very divided family might still come together to save one other.
Like any nineteenth-century doorstopper—Ha Jin hailed the novel as “Tolstoyan,” though its broad social canvas reminded me more of Balzac—House of Caravans is indeed a sweeping epic that sets a multi-generational family saga against a socio-political backdrop that that’s equally complex. But unlike nineteenth-century writers like Balzac, Suneja does not orient the reader using passages of essayistic explanation of the larger social history. Instead Suneja sticks close to the consciousness of one character at a time. Like any choice, this one entails risks. On the one hand, she avoids the problem of too much omniscience, the God’s-eye perspective that suggests a narrator who stands above the fray and fully controls the flow of information. But the use of a limited but deep third-person point of view, which keeps the reader in one “head” or behind the “eyes” of one character at a time, risks a different but equally troublesome simplification. That is, this “head hopping” risks turning characters into emblems of larger social forces who just happen to be duking out the larger conflict inside the smaller arena of a family. It is easy to see Chhote and Barre in this light; easier still to view the contemporary siblings, who are even more divided than their forebears, in the same light. But in fact, using characters to simplify complex conflicts is precisely what Suneja does not do. Rather, every one of her characters is an emblem of the same tragedy: the individual who is caught up in history and made a plaything of it.
Just because these characters are all emblems of the same tragedy does not make them any less emblematic. Worse, it is hard for such characters to change, as their development threatens to muddy the clear moral waters of their conflict. This problem, of stasis, shows up in small repetitions, as when Suneja describes two different characters as both having, when angered, eyes like “two daggers” (126; 139). Suneja is more convincing when her repetitions allow a measure of difference, as when another character is first described as “all bones” and then, a few lines later, as “all bones and meanness” (75), an elaboration that puts a finer point on the psychological effects of deep and unjust want.
Suneja’s novel is full of quiet, imperfect characters making hard choices in dire straits, who are aware of themselves as bigger than, and yet completely mired in, their circumstances. The power of this novel as a social novel—as a work of realism that shows the fate of the individual caught up in history—is that it shows how cruelly history treats individuals in the first place. Suneja’s representation of history and its effects effectively captures this miserable process. As a portrait of a family whose members have been caught up and then ground down by history, House of Caravans is a triumph of realism—if you can bear it.
©2023 Iron Oak Editions LLC
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Down the Generations: History, Memory, and Postmemory in Shilpi Suneja's House of Caravans
FICTION REVIEW
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