Book: The Startup Wife
Author: By Tahmima Anam,
Publisher: Hamish Hamilton
Price: Rs 499
The Startup Wife unfurls as a gripping tale of passionate love, deep introspection, a lasting dream and unresolved regrets. Couched in a world of artificial intelligence, it explores the unexpected terrains of human emotions. Tahmima Anam efficiently weds an edgy, technological language with an appealing literary style laced with succinct metaphors and sharp prosaic descriptions. The story, on the surface, is premised upon the triumphs and tribulations of Asha, her husband, Cyrus, and their friend, Jules, who exchange vows, move to a new city and into a new life to launch an artificial intelligence platform. The platform that is built upon Asha’s algorithm finds scaffolding in an exclusive tech incubator called Utopia and promises to make a breakthrough. In pursuit of this all-consuming dream, their ideological and intimate paths intertwine and collide to present readers with a complex mesh of human emotions, conflicts and ambiguities.
I admit that I began to read this novel shrouded with the notion that I am about to enter an unfamiliar world shaped by the ethics of technology that often confront my artistic and-or academic engagement with human connections and intimacies. On the contrary, I was fascinated by the way in which it situated realms of affect and empathy in a futuristic ‘post–human’ world. Asha’s algorithmic code is tethered to a human need for empathy to potentially rescue a world that is facing a loss of communion and, thereby, of compassion. As a reader, I was co-opted into the web of a contagious dream that ignites a founding moment which can forge deeper connections between human beings living in isolated islands in a virtual space. The Startup Wife is deftly wired to deep philosophical ambivalences — rituals and non-religiosity, human emotions and technology, tradition and post-modernity — undercut by an arresting turn of events and an enticing storm of wit.
The Startup Wife by Tahmima Anam, Hamish Hamilton, Rs 499 Amazon
It rolls out a canvas coloured by distinct splashes of characters, cities and relationships. Asha’s and Cyrus’s marriage throws open humourous and captivating intercultural situations peopled by an immigrant family from Bangladesh in the United States of America, their neighbours, and multi-racial colleagues and friends at the workplace. It brings to surface the silent struggles of a girl from an immigrant family, growing up in the US and her gradual immersion in and negotiation with a white-majority world where she commands acknowledgement. On one hand, the narrative assumes a gritty stance against male privilege that marks the world of entrepreneurship while, on the other, it empathetically treads into intimate spaces to put a finger on inherent patriarchy. The story offers a sensitive understanding of how inadvertent desire for adulation, self-validation, expectations of finding agency and the sacrifice of it are often subsumed by a compelling and passionate romantic relationship. The inner core of emptiness deepens as Asha and Cyrus begin to struggle in their intimate space where they have always imagined themselves as consenting co-workers, companions and lovers. Cyrus’s mindful search for meaning in rituals and communities had inspired Asha to create her algorithm on empathy that can offer people a ritual they need for their inner being and to ultimately come together as groups that share a deeper affective bonding. This striking innovation hits a wall, hardened by ideological and personal differences as Anam poignantly writes, “I think I let it be yours and you let me be sidelined. You diminished me and I allowed it to happen.” The story, steeped in cutting-edge humour, claims a nuanced feminist reading that might leave readers to argue about the title of the book.
