The politics of want

Between men and women exists a sexual hierarchy based on how attractive one finds the other, and that’s how biological it gets. In Shinie Antony’s new novel, When Mira Went Forth and Multiplied, there’s a single woman in her mid-30s waiting to be swept off her feet. Throw in a married man out to have fun, and you have your average adulterous affair. Well, not so average as it turns out.

Women used to enter the matrimonial maze once upon a time, never to find their way out again. That is the premise of Antony’s novel: how things have changed for women—married and unmarried. The moral compass no longer points in any particular direction, there is room for all kinds of loving.

Mira finds romance in most things: “He laced his fingers with hers. She pretended to check his pulse, compared palm sizes and felt for the first time the deliciousness of his hand in hers. From shoulder to fingers five, a hand all hers to hold.” All Sam sees is ‘the bed-head, the subservient smile, the glimmer of hero-worship and the hula-hoop walk of an oversized derriere’. He loves her one night, leaves her the next, end of story. For him. For her, this is where it begins.

The multiplication of Mira is three-fold. There’s her revenge by faking pregnancy. But she convinces herself too, and suffers from a phantom pregnancy, a psychological condition. And, going by the Yankee slang—where ‘go forth and multiply’ means ‘get lost’—she has to get out of Sam’s life ASAP after a one-night stand.

Mira’s heartbreak is the novel’s high point. The chapter where she is trying out various clothes in a boutique, especially, is touching for its portrayal of her intense loneliness. The writing sparkles with the suppressed. “She had longed for someone vaguely like him for so long and she had longed for a speech chosen only for her with words so tender their backs broke as they surrendered their meaning…”

Sam’s lechery, however, seems hastily etched. He is more convincing as a cowardly husband and patient—philosophising over marriages—than a lover. “People just ran into each other because they simply couldn’t sit at home all day. They paid fake compliments, smoked and coughed and laughed delightedly at bad jokes. Then, at some point, all of society needed to be pared down to one. Someone to take home and screw the hell out of,” he tells himself in hospital.

Delta, the non-wife, is pitched to the other end of the moral spectrum, as if Mira’s congenital fidelity needs an alter-ego. But innovative language and playfulness override other factors. Antony is able to take infidelity to a rare place—the collective aftermath. The breakdown of one individual disrupts other lives in a chain reaction that takes down many sanities. One never knows where it takes us, the heart.