HONOR and UNTAMED

 

I’d read several glowing reviews of this author, before picking up this book. HONOR by Thrity Umrigar tackles the heavy topics of honor killings, and how religions divide us, creating deep rifts, stripping away our humanity.

 I really enjoyed this book, not just because of the story, but also because it was set in India seen through the eyes of its protagonist, Smita, returning decades later to the country she left for America.

Smita sees India now with her Western eyes, sees a country steeped in customs and traditions that keep women subservient. Kindness is mixed with a bewildering backwardness. She struggles with the enigma that is India. Westerners see what they want to see, so do Indians living there.

But what about those who return to India after having spent years in the West? How do they perceive the country they once called home? It’s difficult not to look at it with a Western mindset. She’s on a seesaw, swaying back and forth from one feeling and opinion to the next, heart and head both demanding to be heard and felt.

It’s a dilemma that many find themselves in when they return to the country of their birth. Apart from the honor killing (no spoiler here, it’s in the first few pages), this book addresses these questions:

How does one return to the homeland as a foreigner? How can one not help but judge the injustices that abound? And yet, how can she not appreciate the small acts of kindness and generosity shown by people who have very little themselves? There is so much less of the ‘me first’ that is prevalent in Western society.

Having never been to India, it’s a place I can only imagine and learn about through reading, but the expressions of words and language peppered throughout the book (maybe a tad overdone with the yaars and aachas) were familiar.  Reading this book, I felt I could understand the dichotomy of emotions running through Smita, surrounded by a culture that feels like it has its roots in you and yet, you are different now. You are westernized and grateful for it.

**

While reading HONOR, I’ve also been reading UNTAMED by Glennon Doyle. Doyle is widely acclaimed and loved, and I felt I might be missing out by never having read her. I’m not yet through this book, and who am I to say that although there are parts of the book that are enjoyable, other parts are a struggle. But that’s what I’ve felt reading this book.

There was something I couldn’t quite put my finger on as to why it couldn’t engage me fully. While reading both books at the same time, it struck me that although both were so different (not just the fact of one being fiction the other not), both were about women and their place in the world. One set in India, one in the West. And UNTAMED is such a stark contrast. To me, it feels like it is speaking from a place of assumption that all women in the west have been subjected to subservience and need to rise up; that all women are being kept small; that all women don’t know who they are and are being smothered by the patriarchy. It doesn’t allow for the vast differences that exist.

One book is focused on the horror of the subservience of women, on the story of one, Meena, who is horribly burned and disfigured, punished for marrying outside her religion and bringing dishonor to her family. The other book is about a woman in the west, living a completely different life, one of ease and comfort, who sets out to untame and free herself. Two very different lives in which the ways each woman sees herself and her place in the world are poles apart.

It is said that when you’re feeling ungrateful or sorry for yourself, you should remember that there is always someone out there, many someones in fact, who envy the life you live and all that you have. They would love to have your life. I can imagine thousands of impoverished women yearning to have the life of Doyle, or of countless women in the west. I cannot imagine a single person wanting the life of Meena in HONOR.

Perhaps I should not have read both books together. The first changed the lens of how I saw the second.