Suspense — that most elemental storytelling device — takes a backseat in Manju Kapur’s latest novel, Brothers . The first line reveals the central premise: Tapti Gaina is the wife of the newest prisoner in Jaipur Central Jail. By page three, we are told that her husband had shot his brother. By the chapter’s end, we strongly suspect that Tapti had had an affair with said brother-in-law, possibly the motive behind his killing. The facts are as bare-boned as that.
The frills include a livid widow, who, after Tapti’s visit, is seen by her son “rocking back and forth, crying with rage”. She offers her point of view about the events, the only time she is given any agency in the book: “Everyone loved him because he was Papa’s younger brother. Couldn’t walk one step without consulting your father, not one step. And so much he did for him, cement dealership, arranged his marriage, factory petrol pump. ‘I kept saying, don’t do so much, you are only teaching him to expect more and more’. But with such a loving heart, with his great sense of duty, your father would not listen. Always they were full of poison, jealousy, hatred.”
It seems like an ordinary tale about two sparring Jat brothers, but it isn’t. The victim, Himmat Shah Gaina, was, at the time of his death, the very first Jat Chief Minister sahib of Rajasthan, a “man of the people”, and it became front page news. “Never before had a chief minister been killed while in office. Comparisons to the Mahatma were made, comparisons that some said were excessive. But faced with murder, excess was deemed only polite,” Kapur’s narrator tells us.
Tapti is aggrieved. More so because she was not permitted to bid farewell to her ex-lover. Tapti calls her brother, Ram Pratap Ahlawat, to defend her husband, Mangal, who is transferred to Tihar Jail in Delhi and has no hesitation in pleading guilty.
Having positioned the dynamics between the various characters, Kapur proceeds to delve into their backstories. Given that the “event” that most novels would have led up to or would have used as a point of departure has already come to pass, the only way forward is to trace Mangal’s motive. Which is precisely what Kapur sets off to do, beginning with Tapti’s own history, when she was 17 and was chosen to garland Himmat Shah Gaina, the chief guest at annual day. The narrative then goes further back into the life of Mangal’s uncle, Virpal, spanning from the 1930s, thus encompassing their humble history as Jat farmers, sons of the soil.
Himmat Shah Gaina is the only figure of some rebellion within the patriarchal setup that constitutes the Jat culture that Kapur so vividly constructs. He rejects his child bride wife and the son he produces, citing that he was given no choice in the matter, officially divorcing her so he can marry the daughter of the influential Bishnoi Sahib, whom he recognises early on as his ticket to eventual chief ministerial success. Mangal, born nine years after Himmat, grows up in his shadow and all he seeks is Himmat’s approval.
When Himmat meets Tapti as chief guest at her annual day, he ostensibly chooses her for his brother, even asking his wife to vet her as a potential bride. She is smart, sophisticated, and career-minded, with no thoughts of marriage on her mind. It is obvious from the beginning that he is attracted to her, but the indulgence only takes place years later, when things have already soured between Himmat and her husband Mangal.
The lead-up to the eventual fratricide makes for a compelling read, embedded as it is in the hopes and aspirations of small town men with larger-than-life dreams, and the women they confine to the margins. But the novel disappoints, despite the vivacity of the prose and the detailed reimagining of subaltern histories. None of the characters transcends the karma that Kapur has orchestrated for them. They cling to their limitations, are jointly suppressed by the patriarchal system that fostered their upbringing and never really claim agency for themselves. As an armed Mangal prepares to kill his brother, there is an iota of suspense, but since Himmat’s end has already been foretold, the reader is never unsure of the outcome.
Had Kapur returned us to the aftermath of the ordeal so we could glimpse Tapti’s attempts to come to terms with her new reality, there could have been some hint of triumph, but she is left the way she was when we first encountered her: conscious of her role in the predictable tragedy, a broken woman who tried to be independent but got trapped in the false virtues of wifely duties, someone who could have been the protagonist in her own story but ended up a casualty in a narrative of sibling rivalry.
Brothers; Manju Kapur, Penguin Viking, ₹599.Rosalyn D’Mello is the author of A Handbook for my Lover.
