In Uttama Kirit Patel’s debut novel, Shape of an Apostrophe, parenthood goes under the microscope.

Plunged into the deep end of grief at the loss of her beloved father, Lina experiences the world in a state of disorientation. She occupies her life like a visitor, uneasy around those who seem to be in a version of reality she does not share. In her resentment of their perfectly not-upturned lives, sometimes a cruel thought or two catches her unaware: she wishes they had died instead. This is also what makes Patel’s portrayal of grief arresting. Even when wrestling with complicated feelings in every other important relationship in her life, the totality of what she has lost in her father’s death leaves the protagonist with no choice but to be completely honest about the abyss she seems to be staring down into.

And now she is pregnant, with a child she does not want. But her lack of want – apparently straightforward at the beginning – morphs shapes, colours the waters of her reasons inky. Her mother had died in childbirth: this is a truth from which ways of thinking emerge.

Mother, an identity

All of this is complicated further by the fact that life at the centre of a flourishing family business dealing in diamonds in Dubai is a prison of its own: Lina, by her marriage to Ishaan, is now also tied to his parents and their ideas about their futures. Superstitions galore, and double standards are practised with such frequency that the only way for Lina to look at this arrangement is to consider it with deep dread.

At the heart of the novel is deep indignation about womanhood, and how all its extant meanings twist when the question of being a mother comes into the picture. Splitting her personhood down the centre, the identity of a mother demands acquiescing to a state of unending contradiction – the want to protect rivalled by a need to let go, and the desire to bring the child the whole world competing with the disappointment of a small life yourself, drowning in unrealised potential.

In both Lina and her mother-in-law’s attitude towards class difference, a familiar dichotomy emerges: one sees no fault in utilising the truth of the difference between her social position and her househelps’; the other feels better about herself because she is capable of feeling bad for their trouble. What I found interesting, though, was that the author occupies Lina’s voice in a way that she does not the other characters’, granting her attitude towards the class differential a kind of license.

Experimental writing

What is certain is that Patel likes an interesting sentence, and I am partial to any work where the author tries to set themselves up for something experimental. As the writing moves in and out of the characters’ motivations, sparse descriptions of settings provide a soft landing space for the sharpness with which their interiorities are etched.

What Patel is also able to do well is trace out the interconnected way each close relationship bears on another. On a simpler level, this means that the impulse to compare an action or a reaction rears its head in unexpected moments. But more tenderly, what place a person occupies in one’s life is mediated so immensely by the texture of other interpersonal relationships. When Lina looks at Ishaan, she sees the young man she fell in love with almost as if she did not have a choice, but also: the son who has perennially poisoned her relationship with Aunty M. But also: the man whom her father had fallen into an easy, quiet camaraderie with. But also: someone whose desire to have a child seems to find no resistance in his innate impulse to please his parents. Between Lina and Ishaan is a few inches and an impossible gulf, and Patel holds it in her scenes with grace.

I was let down by the final quarter of the book – the tension Patel had built up by letting her characters be people without placing on them the expectation to have clean edges was abandoned for a neat ending. Shaping the narrative to make space for what was effectively a redemption arc felt both rushed and forced; to me, it seemed that they took away from the value that Patel’s delicate portrait of the irrational core of many wants, instead trading it in for the hollow promise of reasonability and tied-together ends.

Shape of an Apostrophe, Uttama Kirit Patel, Serpent’s Tail.

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