Published by Bee Fiction, 2024, 416 pages.

“Beneath the thin fabric that packaged families, there were so many tangled threads, little knots of resentment and bundles of unexpressed anger that reveal themselves in unexpected ways. How much energy they spent on hiding them from view, maintaining the fiction of smoothness, of harmony, of normalcy—whatever that was.”

This is a novel about things that remains unspoken—the spaces in the conversations we have with the ones we love, the things we cannot or dare not say. It is the story of three generations of women: Kaveri, her daughter Aparna, and her mother Parvati.

Before I go any further, I’d like to say in the interest of full disclosure, that Usha Raman is a close friend.

Kaveri, a woman in her fifties, is recently widowed. Her husband Ananth died suddenly after a game of tennis. The couple have been living on their own—both the children have left.

Kaveri’s daughter, Aparna, a physics student in Mumbai, is living with her boyfriend Adi.  Although she is close to her parents, she has not told them about him. Adi is a Parsi, which means he is not only from a different community but also from a different religious background. Aparna is not sure how her parents, liberal though they are, would react to that and also to the fact that they have been living together, something that is still uncommon in Indian society. Aparna is much closer to her father and was hoping he would help her through this.

Parvati, Kaveri’s mother, has finally given up living on her own—something she had insisted on doing for as long as she could—and has now moved in with her older daughter, Meera, in Mumbai. She is adjusting to being old, figuring out her place in Meera’s family, learning to step back. “The hardest lesson to learn in aging was letting go, moving aside to let the next generation to take control, to accept the possibility of irrelevance.”

Ananth’s death is the catalyst for many things. Kaveri is grieving, but being on her own also eventually brings with it a sense of independence. She had refused to play the role of a traditional wife that was expected of her: she kept her maiden name, and had a job. Now that she is on her own, her brother-in-law Vasu, Ananth’s older brother, who is much more conservative than Ananth had been, tries to interfere and “advise” her. But Kaveri is perfectly able to stand up to him.

Aparna is dealing with a childhood trauma. It is something she has tried to bury, something she has never spoken to anyone about. But trauma cannot be wished away, and there are certain people who trigger memories of what she went through: her uncle Vasu, for example.

“Things outside the scope of family discussion—she knew those all too well. You go through things that no one warns you about because they don’t even imagine that it could exist ‘in our kind of families’. As if dysfunction and violence was the preserve of a certain kind of family.”

When she has to deal with something similar at work, she begins to realize that she has to face her demons.

Parvati looks back at a time when, as a young couple, she and her husband Venkatesh had gone to Calgary, Canada, with their young children. One night, standing by the window, she sees a car veer off the road and become stranded in the snow. She calls the police and the family—Venezuelans Manuel and Bianca Acosta and their two young children—are rescued. The two couples become good friends, a friendship that lasts long after Parvati and Venkatesh return to India, but which eventually fades away. But many years later, when Kaveri visits her son in the US after Ananth’s death, a meeting with Bianca and Manuel’s son Gustavo opens up new possibilities.

Raman captures the relationships between the women beautifully: the unspoken expectations, the assumption that you know someone well but realize that there is so much that they keep hidden from you. The relationship between a mother and daughter is never easy, and Raman picks up on all the nuances: the trust, the love, but also sometimes, the anger, often for the things left unsaid. Kaveri sees herself as a hands-off mother, encouraging Aparna to be independent, but Aparna finds it hard to forgive her for not being attentive enough to realize what she went through as a child.

The characters are completely believable: I have known people like them. Because Raman tells the story from the points of view of all three women, the portraits feel rounded. Although Ananth dies at the beginning of the book, he is very present through the memories of Kaveri and Aparna: a steady presence, supportive and sensitive. Kaveri’s grief at losing him is movingly portrayed: the hollow spaces that have suddenly opened up in her life, and the constant reminders of his absence.

Raman brings the story to life with a sure hand. Her book resonated with me—it was moving and felt very real.

Polite Conversations is well worth reading.

Read the Talking About Books interview with Usha Raman.