When Covid-19 struck in early 2020, disease, contagion and death had overtaken every aspect of our lives. Then came the mad rush to record these cataclysmic circumstances. Ali Smith wrote Summer, the final instalment of her seasonal quartet, which chronicled the pandemic in real time. Sarah Hall (Burntcoat), Sequoia Nagamatsu (How High We Go in the Dark), Weike Wang (Joan is Okay) and many others followed suit. Soft Animal adds to this genre by delving into what the author calls a “seldom portrayed” phenomenon — a millennial marriage — in the early days of the lockdown.
Mallika Rao, a 36-year-old woman in between jobs, finds herself increasingly estranged from her workaholic husband who she married only because “there was no point in waiting around to see who came along next.” When the country goes into lockdown, she is forced to share space with a man who would rather spend his day on Zoom calls or flipping through TV channels. Mallika, tucked away in a posh Delhi neighbourhood, becomes increasingly desolate as she ruminates on the unfortunate realities of her marriage and relationships. She tries to soothe her suffocating loneliness by caring for a rescued dog and befriending an old widower. But her interactions with them only reinforce her conviction that her marriage is unsalvageable.
Soft Animal is pitched as the story of a crumbling millennial marriage in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic and the book lives up to the claim in two tangential ways. Both Mallika and her husband, Mukund, are young enough to consider themselves millennials and the relationship breathes its last during the lockdown. The marital problems, however, are not unique to an urban middle-class woman’s dissatisfaction with a workaholic, narcissistic and entitled husband. Soft Animal replicates the claustrophobia of the lockdown well and punctuates the monotony with delightful little footnotes. But it is neither memorable as a marital drama nor can it be called a pandemic fiction.
