Chronicle of a failing marriage | Review of ‘A Light Through the Cracks’ by Kusum Lata Sawhney

There is a wealth of scholarly literature that shows COVID-19 took a toll not just on people’s health but on their relationships too. The uncertainties caused by rolling lockdowns, the forlorn demands of social distancing, and the iron necessity of remote working were a serious strain on Love in the Time of Coronavirus.

Kusum Lata Sawhney’s latest novel, A Light Through the Cracks, examines a sclerotic marriage that almost inevitably comes asunder during the pandemic. The novel opens in an art-plastered lawyer’s office where protagonist Alyra Dhanrajgir, weighed down by the tedious monotony of her marriage, is attempting to divorce her husband of 23 years.

While their relationship began with no more than an easy and shared interest in casual sex, the question of marriage forced itself after Alyra found herself pregnant.

“What we had, what we have is an in-between. An insubstantial complacency that has seen us through twenty-three years of a life that was deadening and lacks any passion,” she tells Rahul, her husband. Even so, she knows the exact moment when her marriage weariness set in — a chance meeting with a handsome younger man, Rajiv, in a bar.

Various themes

From there, the reader is taken on a rollercoaster journey through the minds of the various characters. Divided into short, pithy chapters, some only a page, the novel lingers on the cause and course of this flagging marriage, meditations around sex and desire, that tired trope of rivalry with the mother-in-law, ruminations on identity and belonging, the value of female friendships, and a somewhat prosaic account of a changing India.

None of these themes is particularly original, and while the novel is structurally interesting, it could do with more show and less tell. A little more character building would have helped the novel go further — for instance, Alrya’s mother-in-law Promilla is decidedly a caricature.

Given the novel’s genre, however, credit to Sawhney for attempting to capture the life of a woman closer to middle age than girlhood, in a society that links youth to female desirability and tends to invisibilise older women.

Delhi’s swish set is legitimate fodder for Austenian accounts of love and relationships but lacks a certain verisimilitude. Also, while explorations of the changing dynamics of female sexuality, a recurring theme in many of Sawhney’s novels, may have been ahead of their times in the Sex and the City era of the 1990s, they come across as somewhat gratuitous in today’s more sex-positive world.

A Light Through the Cracks

Kusum Lata Sawhney

Har-Anand Publications

₹795

preeti.zachariah@thehindu.co.in