“I can handle him, she thinks. When in doubt, a stew. But when lightness lifts your soul, time to whip up a batch of meringues.”

Anita Nair can handle it–a grim tale of a luminous, mercurial young girl shattered into a whimpering, cowering animal both by a stray log that comes crashing from the sea and the viciousness of men dealing in the illegal business of snuffing out female foetuses; a sorry story of a frothy corporate marriage that disintegrates like a delicate wine-glass knocked over by a careless bejewelled hand at a cocktail party; a touching chronicle of four generations of women in a family negotiating disparate yet entwined lives; a fragile vision of two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, until they shore up against the promise of possible redemption in each other–all of it, with the expert flair of a chef extraordinaire whipping up featherweight meringues to match the lightness and delicate sweetness of souls. Nair’s latest, Lessons in Forgetting, is like an experience in fine dining–it tantalises your palate and makes you want to chew slowly upon its offerings, and it makes you want to linger at the table just a little while longer.

What is it that we are meant to learn to forget then, like obedient students in a classroom called life? Nair, in a profound exploration of human love and suffering, offers us a philosophy of forgetting as a survival trick: in Pink Floydian terms, she suggests that we must learn to distinguish blue skies from pain, to retrieve what might sustain us from the plethora of that which continually threatens to crush our spirits and break us, leaving us scattered like dried and twisted twigs amongst the sand-dunes after the sea has retreated. This is an image that is impaled upon our consciousness as a central motif in the novel, the searing, seething form of a vivacious and intrepid young NRI woman Smriti– who returns to India with her parents to connect with her roots and is destroyed when she begins to look too closely at the ills of her homeland– lying curled and writhing upon her bed in a monstrous battle with living and forgetting. Smriti, exemplifying the irony of her name, is endlessly locked in a combat with memory, making grotesque faces and emitting grunts and growls like a wild animal in pain as her father, the renowned Professor J.A. Krishnamurthy (a.k.a. “Cyclone Jak” for his eminent scientific research on stormy weather patterns) watches over her in despair and devotion and dedicates his days to searching for the elusive truth behind the “freak accident” at a seaside town which found his radiant, ebullient daughter ensnared and sucked into a vortex of torment for the rest of her living years.

And how does one forget life’s repeated lacerations, whether they are physically experienced and manifest as Smriti’s are, resulting in a body and mind equally mutilated and contorted, or simply endured, as Meera’s are? Meera’s story is the counterpoint to Jak’s in Nair’s simple interweaving of lives and longings in contemporary Bangalore, the poster-city of progress and promise in post-liberalisation India. Nair’s skills as a lucid spinner of everyday stories are vividly demonstrated in the way we are lured to an increasing immersion in her triumphs and tribulations, as she juggles those who crowd her glass menagerie in her own ancestral Lilac House: her grandmother Lily, her mother Saro, and her own family comprising of her business magnate husband Giri and almost-grown-up children Nayantara and Nikhil. Nayantara, a delightful if difficult daughter now away studying at an IIT, is both Meera’s bte noire and beloved, a daddy’s girl who has as much trouble coping with his sudden departure as her mother does. Lessons in Forgetting opens with Meera, an immaculately-middle-aged corporate spouse who is a bestselling cookbook writer in her own right but is prouder still of being her man’s appendage at endless cocktail parties, until abandoned at the end of one by her husband whose mid-life crisis spasms into a predictable pattern of deserting the familiar in search of greener (read younger) pastures.

Meera must take lessons in forgetting her distress at the humiliation of being discarded like a frayed and overused garment by the man she had unthinkingly invested her entire adult existence in. Jak must train himself to cope with the agony of a daughter lost to the vagaries of violence and fate, and to end his churning restless pursuit of the hidden truth behind what had actually happened to Smriti the day her body was found broken and crushed by the sea in a small southern coastal town. But what he unearths is a lesson that we must not forget.

The still point of this quietly seething and simmering novel is a national shame, the business of medical clinics tucked in secluded alleyways that conduct illegal sex-determination tests and aid and abet the horror of female foeticide. So it is that Smriti, who courageously, if unwisely, rushes to uncover the terrifying truths that are hiding behind the grimy curtains of the “hospitals” in which such social sores fester and rot and spread, is sentenced to a screaming agonised death-in-life that becomes the axis upon which all Nair’s lessons in remembering and forgetting turn. But amidst such convulsive grief does a frangible tenderness blossom between Jak and Meera, a frisson so fragile that we are loathe to disturb it even with hope. Here, indeed, is a novel well worth remembering.

There is a place, somewhere between the complexity of highbrow literature and mindless prattle of chick-lit, where judicious stories of ordinary people can be told. Anita Nair slid into that place nine years ago when she published her breakout novel Ladies Coupe. Now, with Lessons in Forgetting, her fourth work of fiction, she is comfortably ensconced in her niche.
Meera, Nair’s protagonist in Lessons in Forgetting, is someone we all know—a neighbour perhaps, or an aunt. She is urban, educated and erudite. She is the mother of two teenagers and one of those women whose career is to be a corporate wife. Meera has no big ambitions for herself; she thinks all is well with her life. So when her husband leaves her, Meera is more surprised than sad. As things tend to happen in books, on the day her husband walks out of a party and before Meera realizes he has walked out of her life, she meets Jak.

Jak is someone we know too. An uncle or a friend’s cool father. He is an Indian-American, one of those who boarded the flight from Chennai as Krishanmoorthi and landed in Connecticut as Jak. He is an expert on cyclones, a divorcee and a father of two girls. His confusion is about cultures: He is cool enough to take on his daughter’s challenge and pierce his ear, but wears his mother’s diamond nose ring in his ear. His elder daughter came to India to study and became the victim of a mysterious attack that rendered her comatose. Just as Meera is forced to redraw the contours of her life, Jak is on a quest to find the real story behind his daughter’s attack.

As events spin around us, Nair gives us a look into the lives that we now lead in cities. She makes a statement about the fragility of the modern Indian marriage and the overwhelming challenges of raising our children in a milieu we no longer have a handle on. When Meera ponders about where exactly she went wrong as a wife, it reflects our incomprehension of the role we are expected to play as a partner. As Jak retraces his daughter’s path, we think along with him about how much freedom we should allow our children.

The realistic portrayal of Nair’s character is inducement enough for the reader to keep turning the pages. Nair flits about some peripheral issues and you are left guessing whether to read too much into them or too little. For example, Jak’s quest to learn about his daughter takes him to a small Tamil Nadu village where a large female infanticide racket thrives. It’s integral to the plot, yet Nair does not offer any sort of closure to it. And there are too many characters—Meera’s mother, grandmother, Jak’s aunt—each with their own backstory, whose sole purpose seems to be to distract you from the narrative.

But it is worth a read—and is a perfect fit for those in-between times when Salman Rushdie seems too much and Sophie Kinsella too little.