BOMAN DESAI

A WOMAN MADLY IN LOVE (a summary)
Turning fifty, Farida Cooper is a woman with a glamorous past and an impoverished future. She lives alone in a tiny apartment and is about to lose her job. She is also in danger of losing accreditation for her Master’s degree in Creative Writing because she keeps dropping out to write novels. Born and raised in Bombay, she is vivacious, voluptuous, intelligent, talented, rich, and beautiful, not to mention spoiled and selfish, but her life had never been as rosy as it appeared. Having everything she desired she hardly knew what she needed, and after leaving the Bombay of her childhood for a Bachelor’s degree in Chicago she made her first big mistake marrying Horace Finksch, a professor of Literary Theory, flattering herself that she’s mature enough for an older man, thoughtlessly dumping her dull and sensible boyfriend, Benjie, rationalizing it will be a long time before he can provide the kind of life to which she is accustomed.

The first years of marriage seem to prove her right, comfortably settled in her role as a wife of the fifties though she also works as a market analyst, imagining her career makes her a modern woman. Less deserving men get promoted ahead of her – but she doesn’t mind, accepting the rationalization that they have families to feed and she a husband to feed her if necessary. She also has a successful second career writing short stories modeled on stories she reads in women’s magazines about adoring wives and paternalistic husbands – but with a twist. The titles tell the story: ‘Bombay Bombshell,’ ‘Sitar Symphony,’ ‘The Dream from the East.’ She also accepts that her primary responsibility is to bear children, but unfortunately suffers miscarriage after miscarriage, and for her fifth pregnancy quits everything, including work, to focus on carrying the pregnancy to term.

Horace appears to have been a caring and thoughtful husband, but he is a Deconstructionist, in the habit of deconstructing everything – or, as he would say, extracting as much meaning as possible from every word and phrase, the better to understand the subject in question. Unfortunately, he applies the same penetrating analysis to his marriage, and when Farida understands the full meaning of his interpretation she is humiliated and horrified enough to run from their house.

She escapes to Bombay, news of her father’s death serendipitously providing cover for her own horror, but though she appears on the surface as glamorous as before she is distraught enough to initiate her second big mistake: an affair with Darius Katrak, seventeen years old, leading to an even greater tragedy than the denouement with Horace – a death, for which she holds herself responsible – and again she runs, escaping from Bombay back to Chicago.

She is now thirty-five, ashamed of her past, and chooses finally a genuine independence, refusing help from both Horace and her family. The going is difficult in light of the luxury to which she has been accustomed, moving from mansions to the cramped quarters of a studio apartment, but she doesn’t complain, working again as a market analyst, but also enrolling in a Master’s program with a view to becoming a professor, and writing the novels she has long promised herself, so very different from the short stories for which she was paid so very well. A reading of Betty Friedan’s THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE reveals that her stories to date had been programmed by men on the editorial boards of magazines glorifying the fifties model of marriage which she has come to despise. After months of sporadic affairs and years of living alone she finally meets another man, but hardly sure of herself anymore succeeds only in making a fool of herself in his presence. These solitary years provide a much-needed and well-deserved comeuppance, teaching Farida that age has little to do with maturity, and the truth of Gloria Steinem’s dictum, that she has become herself the man she wished to marry!

The story is set in Chicago and Bombay, with brief trips to Srinagar and Tokyo, spanning the years from WWII to the Reagan decade, incorporating among other things a provocative striptease at a trendy Bombay nightclub, a grand party during the time of the Raj, and an unintentionally comic dinner during which a husband and wife embarrass each other beyond measure.

Along the way we meet, among others: Rohini Gupta, Farida’s best friend and mainstay in times of trouble; Ratan Cooper, Farida’s cousin, a spoiled young man who wishes to marry her; Ginger Cassidy, a Chicago socialite, Horace Finksch’s first wife, and still his best friend; the Dhun Katraks, Darius Katrak’s parents, who arrange for their son to take drawing lessons with Farida, imagining the association will raise their own social status; Nariman and Persis, Farida’s parents, one a womaniser, the other bitter in consequence but refusing to give her husband a divorce; Kaki, Farida’s aunt, her mother more than her mother; Percy Faber, an older man who helps Farida gain, finally, a measure of stability back in Chicago; Sashi, Farida’s faithful servant; and Greta Frumpkin, an academic who believes in doing things by the book, thereby initiating a nightmarish correspondence with Farida regarding her Master’s degree.

The chapters dealing with the final difficult years are structured to run like a thread through the other chapters allowing the novel to conclude with two dramatic climaxes, the conclusion of her marriage followed by the conclusion of the mad affair, providing as well a coda (not without a kick of its own) to the story. Love is the foremost theme, but marriage, academia, art, race, class, bureacracy, feminism, and friendship, all come under the author’s scrutiny.