MY BELOVED LIFE
by Amitava Kumar
A quiet, appealing, deceptively ambitious Indian (and Indian American) family saga covering 1935-2020.
The novel looks at the outset like old-fashioned realism: a sympathetic, slowly cumulative account of an “ordinary” life. Jadunath Kunwar is born in a superstitious backwater without electricity. A good student, he’s first in his family to attend college (a highlight is meeting Tenzing Norgay, fresh from summiting Everest). Jadu becomes a modestly successful historian, a husband, father to a daughter. His life’s most dramatic events occur around its edges: his mother’s near-fatal cobra bite during her pregnancy, the theft of his daughter’s dowry by a cutpurse, a brief stretch in jail after a protest. The author’s daring here takes the unusual form of modesty, quiet, calm; few big plot elements arise, and Kumar leaves lots of space for digression, anecdote, observation, and Jadu’s well-meaning mildness. Kumar’s patience—and the reader’s—pays off handsomely, though, when we jump forward to the end of Jadu’s life as seen through his daughter Jugnu’s eyes and grasp the book’s full sweep. The crowning (minor) glory of Jadu’s career is a Fulbright year at Berkeley in 1988. That trip abroad becomes the spur or permission Jugnu needs, after her husband commits a crime and her marriage founders, to settle in the U.S. as a journalist for CNN. The novel follows the father and daughter all the way to the Covid-19 pandemic, and along the way it provides an immersive, poignant portrait both of India over 85 years and of the whipsawing experience of being an Indian citizen of the larger world. But mostly, in the end, it pays tribute to two people who make noticing, attentiveness, and storytelling the central pillars of their lives. Late in the book, Jugnu encapsulates the novel’s premise and ambition when she says, “I believe strongly that we are in touch with a great astonishing mystery when we put honest words down on paper to register a life and to offer witness.”
An immersive, moving portrait that steadily gathers intensity, vividness, and surprise.