Renu, an Indian-American woman, is grappling with her husband’s death a year ago. She is packing up her life, selling her house, bidding adieu to her two sons and moving back to London where she and her family hails from. For over three decades she has called the American soil her home, bringing up two wildly different sons –– Bijal and Akash. While Bijal is married to Jessica and is leading a successful life as an anesthesiologist, Akash is making music, living in with his boyfriend and struggling to make ends meet in Los Angeles. As the three meet at their home one last time, secrets are being unearthed and past incidents are being encountered in a setting that is as familiar as it is distant.
These three characters form the crux of Illinois-based writer Neel Patel’s debut novel Tell Me How To Be (Penguin India;Rs 599). A startling novel that unpacks a family drama with poise and sensitivity, it has all the characteristics signature to a lived immigrant experience. Difficult topics like racism, homophobia, alcoholism are addressed in a manner that lends to the story instead of taking away from it.
Akash is an alcoholic who has burnt bridges in the past with his public acts of embarrassment post inebriation. He hasn’t come out to his family, and is leading a dual life, unable to find peace within himself. He is haunted by the memory of his first love and a secret that he shared with his father. Renu, on the other hand, is fraught with ideas of a life that she could have lived had she made different choices in the past. Had she not married her husband Ashok, and continued to live her life in London.
The novel is narrated by these two characters as a mother struggles to rediscover her fierce maternal love for her child Akash who only disappoints her and as her son struggles to open up to his mother and face his own truth. There is a uniformity of voice despite the frequent change in narration in the crisp and short chapters that fill up the book, divided into four separate parts. The brevity of chapters and sentences lends an impatient urgency to the novel that makes the humdrum of routine life feel like a constant buzz of busyness.
The Asian experience and its evolution with each new ‘Indian aisle’ added to every grocery store in America over the years is beautifully portrayed by Patel. His Renu is judgemental and she fights to call herself a feminist. Her inability to understand the ferocity of a white woman to claim equal rights stems from her disdain for her blonde and white daughter-in-law Jessica. Like the portrayal of a typical, Indian mother overtly possessive of her son and his stomach, Renu too scoffs at Bijal’s refusal to eat carbs and postpone having children. She judges Taylor, the white woman whose book club Renu grudgingly attends and their over-appreciative comments about her samosas. Renu and her closest confidant Chaya ironically dismisses another Indian lady’s inability to properly pronounce ‘Arizona’ after spending 31 years in the country, while they themselves are racked with burdensome patriarchal ideas.
Akash’s struggles to come out to his family is deeply rooted into his childhood experiences that have been casually strewn with stray comments of shame associated with queer sexuality. However, Patel refrains from letting this inability become the centrepiece of his novel, allowing it just enough space to blossom without intruding upon the distraught state of the mother-son relationship. As Renu seeks out her past on social networking websites, opening up a Pandora’s box of emotions, Akash retracts further into his shell till the duo is compelled to confront their past so that they are able to move on. Sensitive and complicated, Tell Me How To Be is an accomplished novel that truly picks up as part two of the book unfolds and manages to keep you hooked till the very end.
