Biswas, Damyanti, You Beneath Your Skin, Fiction, (Indie: 2019)
Link :Amazon, Goodreads. Price £2.99 at time of review
Anjali strives to be the perfect professional psychiatrist and the perfect single-mother to her autistic teenaged son. Her lover, married Police Commissioner Jatin, is in danger of losing his promotion due to political scandal. When a woman is raped and horribly disfigured, he concocts a plan to use those closest to him – including Anjali – to personally solve the murder and rebrand himself a champion of women’s rights. The consequences of this choice will tear their worlds apart.
I am chary of English language books set in India, presenting a Disney India for white people to virtue signal about colonialism. But India is incredibly diverse: at least 22 languages, 6 recognised major religions, 4 distinct biodomes. Biswas avoids the problem of Disney-India by focusing on character: they encounter their parts of India and problems individual to who they are.
Big family stories have a common problem: the first three chapters are from three different PoV, and there are so many characters I found myself flicking back and forth trying to figure out who was who. Your patience, however, will be rewarded: the advantage of having so many characters is that it allows Biswas to build a real family, broken bits and all.
I loved that no character who is a perfect saint or irredeemable sinner (even those who do some unforgivable things). The book is permeated with love – even when poorly expressed, even when mixed with rage and shame – and each character a fully realised journey. When part way through something utterly shocking happens, I was entirely invested in how this community would survive.
Straight fiction often lacks imagination. Yet the emotional depth here is replete with invention, the author skilfully handles miscommunication both in language and deed, and from about page 100 I could not put it down. An excellent read.
Rating: *****
