EVERY HAPPINESS

In Shah’s perceptive debut, a lifetime friendship between two Indian women is traced over the years and across oceans.

Twelve-year-old Deepa Jain and Ruchi Mehta meet at a Catholic girls’ school in India in 1962 when Ruchi transfers in after classes have started. Deepa takes the poorer and less worldly Ruchi under her wing to help her acclimate. The push-and-pull nature of their lifelong friendship develops early as Ruchi enjoys academic success, evoking feelings of jealousy in Deepa. By their older teens, a subtle but undeniable sexual attraction grows between the girls but is never discussed. Deepa marries and emigrates to the United States with her doctor husband. At her suggestion, Ruchi follows her to Connecticut, accompanied by her own husband, an engineer. The women’s friendship follows a tortuous course in their new home, complicated by differences in class and material success with Ruchi settling for a modest house and Deepa enjoying a more upscale home and, eventually, a beach house, too. Shah clearly and sensitively draws the awkwardness created by the disparities between the pair’s aspirations, ways of life, and economic privilege. The women’s disparate paths—Ruchi works in Deepa’s husband’s medical practice in order to make ends meet while Deepa dabbles at creating a cultural center for their expatriate community—are reflected in the lives of the growing group of Indian émigrés surrounding them. Shah highlights their differing choices in mothering, as well, through Deena’s hands-off approach to her daughter and Ruchi’s solicitude toward her son. When a moral quandary presents itself to one of the women—the resolution of which will have a huge impact upon the other—the complications presented by a lifetime of love, longing, and rivalry continue to haunt the friends. Shah deftly delivers a story full of parallelisms and contrasts in which the prickly humanity of her main characters is never softened.

Women’s lives presented without apology or sugar-coating.