Ancient Promises by Jaishree Misra – an analysis

“My marriage ended today.” (3) With this stark statement begins Jaishree Misra’s debut

novel, Ancient Promises. “Ma had said, as we left the court, her voice and her eyes brimming

with sadness, that it had been my fate.” (3) This sets the tone and theme of the novel. Fate is

the true protagonist of the story, who makes Janaki or Janu, the central character, go through

a rigorous rite of passage, and sets her free only after she pays a heavy toll for ancient

promises, she comes to believe she must have made many lifetimes ago.

However, though the philosophy of determinism and fatalism are the undercurrents that run

through Janu’s life and the novel, she dares to challenge fate and wins. In many ways, it is a

Pyrrhic victory, but a victory, nonetheless.

“I couldn’t help wondering if some God had finally given up His endless task. Had finally

downed all his tools in sheer despair at the weight of errors and mistakes. He simply wasn’t

able to control anymore. And had at last sat down to cry,” (5) Janu says. She believes that her

divorce, and, in a sense, freedom from the clutches of fate, appears to come, not from an act

of will on her part, but only because even God is tired of it all – tired of his little games. 

“I’m sorry, I whispered into the wet night. I’m sorry for all the mistakes,” Janu says. “But

I’m still not sure ... was the mistake mine or was it Yours ... was it a mistake at all or part of

some grand plan? That’s what I want to think it was. A grand plan, ancient and meaningful

and free of blame.” (5)

Janu, by believing that she is part of some ‘grand plan’ God has up his sleeve, inscrutable to

mere humans, does not attempt to absolve herself of blame, but tries to make sense of her

chaotic universe. “Nothing happens without a reason”, she concludes. And with wisdom she

has dearly paid for, she accepts that finally, there is no room for bitterness in her story, but

there is no cause for celebration, either. 

Narrated in the first person in flashback, Janu’s story, by Misra’s own admission, is a thinly

veiled autobiography. The author traces the events leading up to Janu’s divorce, as she travels

back home from the court on a rainy night in Kerala. Technically, therefore, the story begins

with Janu and Arjun accidentally meeting outside their school gate in Delhi. Janu is the decoy

for her flirtatious friend, Leena, who wants to meet Jai from the boys’ school next door. On

hindsight, Janu wonders if the chance meeting with Arjun was fate’s sleight of hand planning

“Something so big I was certainly not to know of its existence then.... Something old and

timeless and unstoppable had been slowly set into motion again. Something packed full of

dangerous promises.” (21-22)

Even if she had known the havoc their love would wreak, she realises that it would not have

stopped their surreptitious meetings, until one day, her parents discover it. She is in the final

year of school then, and after finishing school, she is married off into the wealthy and

snobbish Maraar family on her 18th birthday.

Suresh, who is much older than her and has nothing in common with her, agrees to the

‘alliance’ because she fits into the specifications he has laid down: “1. She has to be pretty. 2.

She has to be young so that she would ‘adjust’. 3 She has to be able to speak English so he

could take her to Bombay in the hoped-for expansion of his motel business. 4. Nothing else

was too important.” (96)

The mighty Maraar clan approving of her so easily puts Janu in a bind. The pressure from her

extended family is subtle and incremental: “What are they going to think? They could even

retract their offer by tomorrow!” “Be grateful for what you’re getting.” “They don’t even

want a dowry ... It’s nothing less than arrogance to say no to people like that.”(61) 

Janu’s feeble protests of “I don’t feel ready for marriage” and “I’m looking forward to going

to college here (Delhi),” are brushed aside.

An only child, Janu sacrifices her love for Arjun because she says she is “tired of fighting off

my family”. Even she believes that adolescent love, however strong and deep, will not be

able to survive the onslaught of family and society – “he was the wrong age (too young),

wrong community (not Malayali), and came at the wrong time (I was too young)” (26). She

resigns herself to her fate and writes in her last letter to Arjun: “Your world and mine have

grown so far apart, I reckon I’ve lost you anyway....” (64). Arjun’s world now is a college he

has joined in England.

Ridden with guilt for the pain she has caused her parents by transgressing the boundary they

had set, and daring to fall in love, she looks upon her marriage to Suresh as compensation –

“to ensure that I began to pay off some of the debts that had accrued against my name

somewhere.” (68). She knows she can make people she loves happy “in one fell swoop”, by

this one act.

In a way, she also sees a sense of inevitability in the sudden sequence of events. “I had been

meant to come here all along,” she says. She later analysis it: “Weddings were decreed in

some otherworldly place where accounts were being totted up and evaluated who should

marry whom ... and already our destiny’s and our many pasts were combining in a grand

dance so meticulously choreographed, we could easily delude ourselves into believing we

were making it all happen.” (39-40). 

Transplanted from Delhi to Valapadu, a conservative small town in Kerala, she tries to “put

down roots” and “attempts to survive”. But she is never allowed to. She soon realises that the

soil she has been replanted into is “hard and unyielding.” For her domineering mother-in-law,

the overbearing sisters-in-law and the taciturn father-in-law, she is always going to be the

“fashion” ‘city-type” outsider, not schooled in Kerala’s ways.

Her indifferent husband is too busy to notice the adolescent’s lonely battle against the

family’s veiled jibes that tear her self-esteem to shreds. Her marriage is “not unbearable”, but

it is not “good enough, either”. Her creature comforts are taken care of, but her life is sterile

and stagnant.

Her narrow, provincial, Jane Austenian existence – visiting family friends and extended

family and attending weddings – drives her to despair. With no sense of self-worth, she feels

powerless to fight back.

In a desperate attempt to gain respect from her in-laws, she removes the Copper T, which she

has been fitted with under her mother-in-law’s supervision, and gives birth to Riya. Her hope

that motherhood will improve her status in the household remains unfulfilled. If anything, her

child is unfairly compared to her elder sister in-law’s children.

She tries to find emotional sustenance in her child, but her world comes crashing down when

the baby is diagnosed to be “definitely mentally handicapped”. “Why me?” Janu asks, unable

to comprehend the magnitude and harshness of the undeserved punishment. 

She thinks that this would be a shared sorrow – “being able to cry together must create the

strongest of human bonds”. But she soon realises that “Maraars were not the crying sort of

family” (131). So, her tears over her child’s fate are shed in solitude.

The Kerala of happy childhood memories of her summer vacations turns into “a house of

forty-watt sadness” when both her grandfathers and her father die in the next few years. 

As she blunders through her marriage and brings up a child with a debilitating learning

problem, she reaches two apparently contradictory conclusions, ironically, one stemming

from the other.

To begin with, she comes to terms with giving birth to a child with disabilities, by attributing

it to her Karma: “Somewhere in my distant past, perhaps even a thousand years ago, I’d done

something that had committed me to dedicating this life to Riya’s care. Had I been a thirsty

traveller at her door and she had taken me in, washed my feet and watered me? I would never

know what ancient promise I had made to her, just as she would never know what deed had

robbed her of words in this life. Or how it would be compensated in the next. But somewhere

along the way, we had both lived many lives that linked us together now.” (160) 

And then, with nothing to mitigate the wretchedness of her existence, she seeks to escape it.

“If I did leave Kerala with a baby and no education to speak of, how far could I go?” (122)

she asks herself. And she finds the answer to the seemingly rhetoric question when she

decides to get a BA degree in English Literature through distance education.

Thus, unbeknownst to her, begins the slow process of her evolving as a person. She also

gradually frees herself from the oppressive burden of having to constantly live up to the

impossibly high standards of the Maraars and the stigma Riya’s condition carries.

When her mother-in-law says, “I’m not having people pointing at us and pitying us, our

family is always admired in this town,” (133). Janu finally stands up to her and refuses to

leave Riya under the care of servants to attend a wedding. She finds the courage to challenge

the age-old, but potent cliché – ‘what will people think?’

“I grabbed at the realisation with a weary but dizzy, almost overwhelming sense of liberation.

I was free. I neither had to struggle for their approval anymore, nor put Riya through the

same hopeless loop,” Janu says, surprised at her own minor triumph. “I wasn’t sure why I had

so easily given up my own right to be loved” (132). As a mother, she instinctively knows that

“a child like Riya, left unloved, would wither and perish”. This probably gives her the

strength to fight back for the first time.

After this reprieve, the mother and child find joy in each other’s company, all through

Suresh’s increasingly long absences on ‘business trips’. And paradoxically, her attempts to

find a school that will admit her child, opens a path forward for her.

In all this, Janu is only vaguely aware that she is at last taking her destiny into her own hands,

“Attempting to fight all that was the equivalent of trying to fight the Gods, defeating their

very purpose.” This is starkly different from the Janu – and her mother and grandmother –

who has been forced to believe that “these were things we simply inherited.” “What was the

point in going on about something that could not be changed?”

Riya’s schooling ends in disaster, when she is expelled within a few weeks from school. Janu

bitterly realises there is no place for Riya in “that horribly normal world back there, where

children could paint purple mountains and sing the National Anthem.” 

With no support or sympathy from Suresh, and no system of education to speak of for

children with special needs in the town, Janu admits Riya to a school of sorts where an

assortment of children of different ages and different stages of disability are sent.

Janu soon offers to help the early intervention group at the short-staffed school, partly to keep

an eye on Riya and to escape from the Maraars’ caustic jibes, but also to equip herself better

to deal with Riya’s problem. This proves to be Janu’s first tiny window to the world outside.

As she starts researching for centres of treatment and training for Riya, Sheela Kuriakose

who runs the school, sows the seed in Janu of the possibility of going abroad to do a course in

special education, and taking Riya with her.

The idea soon develops a life of its own: “She could go to a wonderful Special School, the

kind whose pictures I’d seen in American magazines, bursting with toys and special

equipment. I’d do well in the course and then I’d be offered a job at the end of it. I’d work in

Riya’s Special School. We’d get ourselves an apartment....” (146). 

As the conviction that education – for herself and for her child – is the only escape route from

their sordid existence grows stronger in Janu, so does her belief that it is an achievable goal.

She is now prepared to fight her own battles.

When she gets her first letter of acceptance from the Arizona University in Phoenix, Arizona,

with the condition that she would have to produce her MA certificate before joining, Janu

begins to believe “I had inched closer to my great escape!” Riya thus becomes an agent of

Janu’s empowerment and escape.

The transition from a sense of victimhood to agency is slow and gradual. Janu, who once

passively endured her lot, believing it to be a Karmic inevitability, is willing to pay the price,

instead it being extracted from her by fate. But now, she expects to get something in return.

Finally, on her way to Delhi for a scholarship interview which will fund her education in the

USA, she muses: “I wasn’t really clever, but I had achieved quite a lot merely through a

combination of boredom and determination – a BA by the former and an MA by the latter.”

(170).

In Delhi, the city of her childhood and of her adolescent love, once again, the unseen hand of

fate brings her face to face with Arjun. In all these years, the only link she has had with him

is a vague awareness at the back of her mind about their different time zones. But now she

walks into his arms and into adultery, as if it is the most natural act. After playing by the rules

for a decade, she breaks the first cardinal rule of marriage.

The penalty she pays for an afternoon of bliss and peace is heavy. But now, she has a

scholarship, an admission to a university in London for a diploma in Special Education and a

chance at last for a modicum of happiness with Arjun, who, after all these years, still loves

her deeply. It is Arjun who urges her to apply to a university in London so that they can be

together. But even now, she believes that happiness is given, never taken, “with careful

calculations being made all the time.”

“What would you have done if someone had offered you a temporary period of happiness?”

she asks. Ninety eight days – the weekends she and Arjun can be together in England – are all

that is granted to her by fate. “With no promise of any more. And with the unspoken threat

that you might lose everything else you had. Would you grab the chance with both hands and

then use every trick available to get an extension of sorts?”(3) she wonders.

Janu decides to opt for “temporary happiness” knowing that nothing in life, especially

happiness, is ever doled out free, and that “There was bound to be a catch somewhere”. She

steels herself for the collective censure of people, both living and dead – “a thousand ghostly

ancestors” waiting to punish her for her transgression. She is aware that there is “no getting

off lightly.”

She seeks to end her marriage, for she and Suresh are “Like prisoners who hated each other

but were forced to serve endless sentences side by side”.

When she braves Suresh’s wrath to tell him about Arjun, she knows she has, with one fell

swoop, removed a terrible burden from her husband’s shoulders and transferred it squarely on

to her own. “I was no longer the injured party, he was!” she astutely observes.

Jealously and anger are reactions that Janu expects and is prepared for, even seeing them as

mitigating factors in an otherwise weak person. But instead, he unleashes a complex plot of

manipulation engineered by the Maraars. When they conspire to prove her insane and drug

her into depression, she finds strength in two weak allies – her ageing and frail grandmother

and her defeated and fatalistic mother.

Finally, she manages to go to London and get her diploma, with an ugly divorce and a

difficult custody battle looming – the Maraars appropriate Riya to use her as a pawn in their

game. Janu believes that this is the severe punishment fate has reserved for her for the “ninety

eight days of happiness”.

She and Arjun part for the third time, without ever knowing if they will ever meet again, as

she is “still struggling to repay the debt” she owes her daughter, who is now a hostage at the

negotiating table of her future.

She returns from London after experiencing a world where women take their right to be

themselves for granted, as against women of her grandmother’s generation, “who took what

they were given with tolerance and fortitude”, and for whom the concept of a better life is

alien.

“After breaking just about every rule in the Kerala Etiquette Handbook”, Janu once again

becomes grist for the gossip mill. “Soon it would have reason to sit back and rock on its heels

in cruel laughter, slapping its friends on the back and wheezing with the fun of it all.”(237)

With her new-found awareness, Janu wonders why a state that boasts of the highest literacy

rate in India, has not allowed the enlightenment and broadmindedness that education brings,

to seep through the narrow and obdurate crevices of orthodoxy. She realises that education

devoid of vision does not liberate the mind.

But emboldened by Arjun’s love, she finally fights the society’s resistance to change, and

hopes that she has at last paid for a debt incurred many lifetimes ago.

As the open-ended story ‘ends’ Janu knows that “tomorrow, the next chapter would begin.” 

Ancient Promises, which received critical and popular acclaim, works at several levels. At

one level, it delineates the inexorability and inevitability with which providence plays a

complex game using human pawns. At another, it is a triumph of individual will – of not

resigning oneself to one’s fate and not succumbing easily to the dictum that there are forces

much stronger and far more powerful than us, mere mortals. 

Misra does not unequivocally reject determinism, but merely makes Janu hesitantly hazards

to turn the Karmic wheel, despite fear of divine retribution. In the scheme of things

reminiscent of the Thomas Hardian world, Misra believes that like Janu, we can try to make

fate cede some ground. But she reminds us that Janu has not come out unscathed from the

battle between two unequal forces – fate and human will. Janu’s struggle is a long and

exhausting one. This makes her and her story more convincing. Misra deploys certain

realistic ramifications into the theme, which prevents Ancient Promises from degenerating

into a facile ‘motivational’ book about realising one’s potential against all odds. Janu’s

attempts at self-fulfilment are thwarted at every step of the way, until she almost gives up. 

It is telling commentary on her that Janu begins to question the Janus-facedness of

providence only after the fortuitous reappearance of Arjun in her life: If Suresh was whom

she was meant to marry, why were she and Arjun made to fall so deeply in love so early in

life, she wonders. And if she and Arjun were promised to each other by fate and were,

therefore, given a second chance to reclaim each other, why the charade of a marriage?

She concedes that there is a force at work that is “deeper and bigger than any of us”. Puzzled

by the destructive intrigues of fate, she asks, “What ghastly deal had Suresh and I cut in our

ancient pasts that had brought us together so inexorably, to inflict pain and confusion on each

other in this one?” (299)

Though Arjun, the pragmatist, laughingly dubs it “a good Hindu excuse for all the wrongs we

perpetrated on our fellow human beings”, Janu says, “Maybe, but I still couldn’t see why I’d

had to give away ten years of my life to Suresh, if I’d really been intended for Arjun all

along. Could these things happen at random?”(299)

Janu, with the advantage of hindsight, realises that it is only when she selflessly seeks to

create a better life for Riya does a door open for her escape, reinforcing her belief that her

child must have performed an act so utterly selfless for her in another life that she is ordained

to pay the debt back in this one. The irony is not lost on Janu when she says: “Riya’s

disability had been the blessing to free me from that circle of forced happiness.”(303)

At the end, she is still left wondering at the pointlessness of it all. If, indeed, many lifetimes

later, “when all accounts were squared, the dues all settled and no more promises had been

made”, and we had no memory of it at all”, what purpose did relentless suffering meted out

by fate serve? If at some point of time, the palimpsest that fate writes our destinies on is

wiped clean, with no traces of past deeds – good or bad – then who is to know if the suffering

is merited or unmerited?

Janu’s rhetoric question, “Would I ever know if I had taken the rules into my hands or merely

had them descend on me from some unearthly place?” (304) indicates that Ancient Promises,

though it pits the decree of fate against individual will, cannot be termed merely a novel

portraying the tussle between victimhood and agency. Janu, therefore, does not gloat over her

freedom from her marriage and her banal existence. She continues to be timorous about the

fact that she, a minor character in some vast ancient, but ongoing saga, inscrutable to her, has

“taken over” the writing of the story. Her tone, which is a proxy for the author’s, is not

celebratory. There is no room for triumphalism after her divorce, only a deep sense of regret

that it all had to come to this.

It needs to be emphasised in this context that Janu does not consciously seek out Arjun,

despite her bad marriage. She only endeavours to free herself and her child from an untenable

situation. Janu and Arjun’s meeting is providential. Again, it is meant to be. 

She is also aware that fate, by offering her a tantalising future, has, in reality, bound her to an

‘either-or’ proposition. She knows that she may be forced to choose between her mentally

challenged child and Arjun’s love. But it is Arjun who demands, “Is that how you think it has

to be? Either me or her?”

Though her question, “Would my future have room for both Arjun and Riya?”(294) is left

unanswered till the end, there is a suggestion that Janu, with Arjun’s help, might be able to

cheat destiny, despite the fact that the dice are loaded against her.

Thus, Arjun, though he appears briefly at the beginning and then at the end of the story,

becomes the agent of Janu’s transformation from someone who accepts what is ordained for

her, to a woman who is willing to risk challenging fate and social mores. She seeks physical

and emotional fulfilment from him, knowing that if she is never able to live with Arjun again,

her brief happiness would become a terrible curse, from which she will not find any respite –

“Not even in another far away life”.

It is Arjun who teaches her not to be apologetic about taking something which, in fact, is

rightfully hers. He believes that if there is something you want more than anything in the

world, you can really work hard to achieve it through courage of your convictions. In the end,

Janu, though hesitant to tempt fate by taking the entire credit for her achievements, says: “But

I wanted to believe conviction had played a part too. That the business of doing one’s

damnedest to make things work counted too.” She concedes that “That was a wisdom passed

on to me by an unlikely prophet” (304) – Arjun.

Misra, through Janu, and more significantly, through Arjun, also asserts the right of every

person to his or her own happiness and the right to create the means to achieve it. This is

central to the novel and is at variance with the constant reminder that “happiness was given,

never taken.”

Arjun nudges Janu gently into believing that happiness need not come with the burden of

guilt. When Janu says, “You couldn’t feel sorry for things you did in another life”, the

statement is almost a tragicomic admixture of her cultural conditioning imbued with Arjun’s

ideology of self-assertion.

Armed with this ideology, Janu not only creates her own happiness, but also through her

education, opens up opportunities for her daughter – a well-equipped school, speech and

occupational therapy and, quite simply, a better chance in life, away from a world where her

condition evokes pity, sarcasm and unwanted and unwarranted advice: “I had obviously done

something to be more deserving of punishment than they were.”(147)

Ancient Promises is often seen as an indictment of the system of arranged marriage. But this

is to oversimplify the theme. Janu, tellingly remarks: “It wasn’t the arranged-marriage system

for sure. I had seen enough arranged marriages metamorphose into good marriages to know

that. And I had seen enough men and women in England, with all the freedom to choose their

own life-partners, make almighty messes of their marriages.” (299)

Admittedly, the author is critical of the way girls like Janu are unwittingly pushed into

‘alliances’ either because of social pressures or because their parents truly believe, like Janu’s

parents did, that they are doing what is best for their daughters. She is told that marriage

would ensure that she would have “more people to love and be loved by”. Janu, therefore,

enters her marriage in good faith, as is evident by her statement, “At eighteen all I wanted to

do was to make my marriage work.” But ironically, the promise of love is not kept, and she is

forced to lead a lonely and loveless life.

But despite this, when her marriage fails, Janu believes that even this has been preordained

just as her marriage had been. She knows that marriages in Kerala involved “whole clans,

reaching back many ghostly generations”. And once entered into, it was almost impossible to

get out of.

This leads us to the issue of patriarchal hegemony. If Janu’s education is rudely cut short and

she is pushed into an early marriage, while Arjun goes to England to educate himself, it is a

manifestation of centuries of oppression coming into play even in the ultra-urban Delhi. But

it is not only her father who is responsible for this high-handedness, but also her mother, and

indeed, society as a whole.

“My mother had taken my happiness and converted it so easily into her pain,” (236) Janu

bitterly muses, recalling the emotional blackmail her mother uses to make her capitulate.

Ironically, her mother is a school teacher in Delhi, not a helpless semi-literate small town

housewife, and her father is a high-ranking official in the armed forces. But the tentacles of

distant native Alleppey have a vice-like grip over them, and they believe that they are

answerable to their clan entrenched in orthodoxy.

Thus, her parents are not only victims of patriarchy, but also perpetuate it in the fear of

incurring the wrath of gossipmongers back home. There is no getting past the question, ‘what

will people think?’

The inevitability of fate is used as a weapon of oppression, both by men and women, but by

women more than men, as they believe like Janu’s mother does, that “you cannot change

things”. By resigning themselves to their condition and stoically enduring the treatment

meted out to them, not only do the women perpetuate patriarchy, but inflict it on other

women, generation after generation.

Thus, not surprisingly, Janu’s mother and grandmother don’t particularly think Janu’s

predicament is unbearable because at least, she is not being physically tortured.

Again, it is the women of the Maraar household who subject Janu to psychological cruelty,

more than the men. Indifference is the weapon men use.

Thus, the Maraar womenfolk by actively being abusive, and women in her own family by

conditioning Janu into passively accepting her fate, perpetuate and perpetrate patriarchy. All

this proves the dictum – women beware women. Women are sometimes the worst enemies of

women.

Women also seem to endorse patriarchy as something desirable, as against Kerala’s

traditional matrilineal society: “The Nair act did well to abolish all that rubbish, they said; it’s

taught our men to take responsibility towards their children seriously. Best to join the rest of

the country and become patriarchal instead, it seems to work for everyone else.” (213)

This leads one to wonder if Ancient Promises is a ‘feminist’ novel. ‘Feminist Literature’ is a

value-loaded label and comes with its own baggage. But fortunately, Misra does not inflict

this burden on her story. If at all Janu can be considered a ‘feminist’ heroine, it is only a by-

product of her actions, and not central to her character. It is Arjun, with his enlightened

views, who finally liberates Janu mentally. This is not to deny that Misra, through Janu’s

character, does acknowledge and articulate the efficacy of education as a tool of women’s

empowerment. The fact that the novel reflects Misra’s own life and struggles, gives credence

to this.

It must however be borne in mind that Janu accepts her rejection by the Maraars, and by

extension the society she lives in, but the prospect of her child facing rejection even worse

than her own, causes her anguish and spurs her to assert herself.

When Janu finally gathers courage to untie the knot apparently tied many births ago, she

knows the complex process involved. “I was asking hundreds of people to go back to being

unrelated again. It was amazing to think how often that complication would have seemed

reason enough to keep a marriage intact,” (241) she says, half amused.

No one she knows has had a divorce. Ostracised by the community, the three women – Janu,

her widowed mother and her ageing grandmother – fight to survive not just the tragedy of

Janu’s failed marriage, but the claustrophobic pettiness of an orthodox society slowly closing

in on them. Janu knows she has to bear the whispered label, “a divorcee with a child”. The

women lean on each other for emotional sustenance and exhibit hidden reserves of inner

strength and courage. If viewed from this prism, the novel does give a courteous nod to

feminism.

It is instructive that Misra leaves the story open-ended, with Janu not flying back to England

and to Arjun, but on her own, venturing into the Kerala night, with her unlikely band of

supporters – Ma, Ammumma and Riya. Armed with the knowledge that she has, at last, paid

all her debts, both ancient and new ones, she frees herself from the shackles of the ‘gods’,

who, she once believed controlled her fate. She now sees them for what they are – faces in

old garish posters, “pasted in colourful profusion inside the auto-rickshaw.”

In the final analysis, above all, Ancient Promises is a sensitively written story of great and

abiding love. Other things become subservient to this. “That we had been able to fall in love

again was a real miracle,” (295) Janu says, amazed that the long separation has not tarnished

or diminished their love. The reader too, is able to marvel at this miracle. Strangely, it is not

the triumph of love over fate, for it is the unseen hand of fate which brings them together.

When Janu and Arjun meet after a decade, we hesitate to term their act of love illicit because,

like Janu we believe that “it was meant to be”, going back to many births and rebirths – an act

devoid of shame and fear. For her it is like homecoming after a long and arduous journey.

The one act transforms her life and the die is cast. Janu knows that she can never go back to

her marriage again.

Misra’s strength in Ancient Promises lies in the raw courage and urgency of a beginner, who

must tell her tale which has been deeply experienced. She knows her territory well – her inner

universe and the narrow world of Valapadu with its hypocrisies, stuck in the simulacrum of

age-old values. She describes it vividly in a few deft strokes and fleshes out her characters

with closely observed details.

Janu’s character is crafted with care. With a deep insight into her psyche, Misra makes her at

once vulnerable and strong. The writer has a keen ear for conversation, and uses this

effectively and astutely to make the acid-tongued mother-in-law and her cronies come alive.

Janu’s mother and grandmother evolve from defeatist flag bearers of middle-class morality to

unlikely champions of Janu’s freedom, almost entirely bearing the brunt of the collective

wrath of their neighbours.

It is not easy to depict a weak character like Suresh, but Misra creates a realistic portrayal of

him.

Arjun, with his brief appearance could have easily degenerated into someone wishy-washy,

but it is to Misra’s credit that he is not a uni-dimensional character.

The book leaves the reader asking for a sequel. We want to know the fate of the two lovers.

Do they finally come together? “I married my Arjun eventually and Riya, happily, lives with

us.... I hope I remember always to be grateful I had another chance to build that tower in the

sky,” (308) Misra writes in the Author’s Note, allaying our worries for Janu and the author.

* * *

All comparisons are odious, but on reading Secrets and Sins, Misra’s second novel in the

Secrets trilogy, released in September 2010 (Harper Collins), one can’t help but feel

disappointed, and sad. It is her seventh book. Seven books and the eighth on the way, in 10

years, is evidence of Misra’s success as a writer. But one wonders where and why the

innocent, raw courage of the first book has disappeared.

In Ancient Promises, the writer has poured the essence of her being to imbue it with genuine

emotions. The anguish and angst you feel for and with Janu, dry up in Secrets and Sins. The

sophisticated heroine, Riva, seems less real. The theme of a woman stumbling hopelessly and

haplessly into adultery with a man she has loved long ago, runs through both the stories, But

while Janu tugs at our heartstrings, we are unable to always empathise with Riva’s moral

dilemmas. 

While a writer needs to and does speak with different voices and creates different personas to

represent the voices, the first one rings true, but the last one sounds hollow, the labels of ‘The

Number One Bestseller’ and ‘A blockbuster’ notwithstanding.

In Ancient Promises the writer is still grappling with the art and craft of writing. This,

paradoxically, is what makes it so eminently readable.

There is a difference between a good writer and a successful writer. And Misra seems to have

evolved from a good writer to a successful one. But then, a bestseller doesn’t always a

masterpiece make.

Misra did not have the stupendous ‘Tigerwoodsian debut’ that Arundhati Roy had with The

God of Small Things. However, Misra’s Ancient Promises was a bold and touching first

novel. But both Roy and Misra, as writers, evoke a deep sense of regret and sadness – regret

and sadness that we have lost two good writers – one to ‘causocracy’ with her often ill-

advised political activism, and the other to populist fiction.

Jaishree Misra’s Ancient Promises

Crossing the Border: A Study of Jaishree Misra’s Ancient Promises

Jaishree Misra’s Ancient Promises[i], a sensitive account of a girl’s efforts to find her destination in life, is full of keen psychological observations, and culminates in a sane and balanced view of life. Transplanted from her home and the familiar world of Delhi at the age of eighteen to a highly conventional and aristocratic Nair family in Kerala, suffering from the pangs of separation from her first love, married to a man who is neither good nor bad but simply an ‘expert in the art of escape’, and surrounded by nasty and sly in-laws who will never let her belong to their world, the problems Janu has to face are numerous. All her efforts to endear herself to the family of her husband, which includes even begetting a child who is supposed to bridge the gap between herself and her new family, are in vain. It comes as a terrible shock to her when her child is declared ‘mentally handicapped’, but her intense attachment with the baby forms her best protection, and surprisingly, also her means of salvation. She starts rebelling against the snobbish conventions of the family, and slowly there emerges the first faint outline of a plan of escape. She manages a foreign scholarship to go abroad, and it is then, when she is almost ready to get out, that the panicky husband and in-laws try their best to stop her. The last step in this manoeuvre is to take away her daughter Riya. Still she goes to London and completes her course. These are her stolen days of perfect happiness with her lover Arjun. But she must return to Kerala to get her Riya back, because she believes that a life of happiness built on the pain and sufferings of other people cannot last. There is a hole in her soul which only her daughter can fill. Thus her return to Kerala is at the risk of losing even the only other happiness of her life, that is, Arjun. Back in Kerala, things suddenly turn out in her favour, she gets the divorce, Riya is returned to her, and she is ready to start a new life with Arjun.

Now the question Jaishree poses, Janu faces, and the reader wants to pursue, is this: what

we call life, this life with all its sufferings, acts of injustice, and rationally

incomprehensible puzzles, like, why should innocent people suffer, should people accept

suffering as their fate, should we break the cycle of karma and rewrite our story as we like,

etc., well, does this life have a design or is it all merely chance? If there is a God who is at

the helm of affairs, has he made a mess of things? Or to put it simply: what are we to do

with this life when we find ourselves at odds with its main current? Perhaps this is the

single, most important question that, since time immemorial, sages and philosophers and

great novelists have been trying to tackle. The attitude Jaishree takes towards this question

is perhaps more important than the answer she gives. It is the inexplicable suffering of

innocent children that makes Ivan ‘return his ticket’ to God’s kingdom in The Brothers

Karamazov, the same which generates and justifies the atheism of Tarrou in Camus’s

The Plague, the very same which turned Mulk Raj Anand into an atheist at a very early

age itself. Now let us see how Jaishree Misra deals with this issue.

Janaki, or simply Janu, the heroine of Ancient Promises, presents this question in the very

beginning of the book. She wonders, “ if some God had finally given up his endless task.

Had finally drowned all his tools in sheer despair at the weight of errors and mistakes that

He simply wasn’t able to control anymore”(p.5). She was not sure whether it was her

mistake or His; “ was it a mistake at all or part of some grand plan? That’s what I want to

think it was. A grand plan, ancient and meaningful and free of blame”(p.5). She is sure

that there has to be a reason for everything and that nothing can happen without a reason.

And the whole of the story succeeds in bringing out this conviction in a forceful and

convincing way.

Even as a young girl of eighteen, Janu was fully aware that the responsibility for her

actions rested entirely with herself. It was her decision to marry Suresh. Even though she

did not like it a bit, she acknowledges with hindsight and mature wisdom: “ I had been

meant to come here all along. It had all been written so many centuries ago even the writer

would have struggled to remember where the real meaning lay”(p.7). It is only vanity to

believe that our stories are only ours. We are only minor characters, nothing more than a

speck of dust in the grand design. Janu believes that “our destinies and our many pasts

were combining in a grand dance so meticulously choreographed, we could easily delude

ourselves into believing we were making it all happen” (40). Of course, at first she was

scornful of the blind acceptance of everything, and felt that it must be “ a petty poor God

who couldn’t even seem to get right who was deserving of punishment and who

wasn’t”(p.143). But both her mother and grandmother were typical oriental fatalists who

might ask:“ What was the point in going on about something that could not be changed?”

(160). What we suffer in this life is caused by something we did in an earlier life, though

we can never know what it is: “ I would never know what ancient promise I had made to

her, just as she [Riya] would never know what deed had robbed her of words in this life”

(160). Any effort to reject one’s lot in life is to fight the gods. But later when she walks

into the arms of Arjun, she feels equally certain that it is also meant to happen. Arjun must

also be related to one of her previous lives: “Was it because that was what was meant to be

because of some promise so ancient I could not even remember it now?” (206). It is

interesting to note that it is the same idea of ‘ancient promises’ made in some other life as

the justification of present experiences that makes her both accept her lot and fight against

it at the same time. This is the philosophical basis of the whole novel and it needs further

looking into.

Her first affair with Arjun is almost like a dream. Her marriage into the Maraar family is

the reality into which she wakes up. After ten years, when she steps back into her dream at

Delhi, she is so much distanced from her married life, both emotionally and

geographically, that the reality looks like some previous life, a kind of misty dream. It had

all to happen like that. Nothing is wasted; nothing is meaningless. She had to sacrifice ten

years of her life, ten long years to pay off some unknown debt from a previous birth to the

Maraar family, and that is the price with which she buys her future happiness with Arjun.

Her forty-eight weekends with Arjun at Milton Keynes are ‘stolen’ or ‘borrowed’, and for

her to start a new life of her own, she has to get her daughter back.

Now what are the things which distinguish this tale from the all too familiar one of a

woman leaving her home to run away with a lover? First of all, it must be remembered

that her art of characterization sees to it that no character other than Janu receives the

‘close-up’. For example, Arjun does not appear as a ‘real’ character throughout the novel,

and it is especially so in the first part. This, I think, is both deliberate and significant. He

does not somehow belong to the real world so that we do not pass any judgment on Janu

when she decides to marry Suresh. If the character of Arjun had been developed more

thoroughly and if we had witnessed his pain and disappointment at her betrayal, our

response to Janu’s action could not have been as unequivocal as it is now. The same

argument is true about Suresh too, for given a glimpse into his thoughts and feelings at her

betrayal, it would have been difficult to withhold moral judgment from Janu’s actions.

Similarly, when Janu rushes into the arms of Arjun, and as she enjoys the moment of bliss

without guilt, we are convinced that it is beyond blame. For one thing, the dream like

figure of Arjun does not seem to be real enough to bring in moral censure. What she

experiences then is a moment of pure bliss, uncontaminated by any bitterness or

selfishness or even a sense of taking revenge on her insensitive husband. The purity of her

experience is thus effected, by a two-way action, which while cutting off her husband

from the picture on one hand manages at the same time to sublimate the lover into an

ethereal image so that the question of praise or blame does not occur.

Another important device that helps Jaishree to complete the picture of Janu is her

daughter, the mentally retarded Riya. If Riya had been a normal child capable of missing

her mother, her inconsolable sorrow would have definitely cast its disquieting shadow on

Janu’s one year in London. The reader accepts the situation because he knows that the

needs of the child which are mainly confined to good food and fine clothes and some

looking after can be as well met by the father, or even a good servant. But the final

flowering of Janu’s personality occurs when she decides to risk her life of happiness with

Arjun for the sake of retrieving her child. Thus it seems that the thorough representation of

Janu as a full-fledged character achieves its poignant effect to a very great extent from the

semi-representation of other characters as vaguely perceived entities.

Janu’s experiences are typically those of a migrant. Rushdie once wrote:

Migration across national frontiers is by no means the only form of the phenomenon. In many ways, given the international and increasingly homogeneous nature of metropolitan culture, the journey from, for example, rural America to New York city is a more extreme act of migration than a move from, say, Bombay.[ii]

Born and brought up in Delhi, when Janu is married to a Nair family at Valapad and

moves over to Kerala, she encounters all the bewildering experiences of a migrant, both on

a linguistic and cultural level. Even before her marriage, she had realized her paradoxical

situation: “ That these two places [Delhi and Kerala] ran together in my blood, their

different languages and different customs never quite mixing, never really coming

together as one” (p.18). She grew up in Delhi “with Malayali parents but Delhi friends,

and Malayali thoughts but Delhi ways” (p.18). Soon after her marriage, her mother-in-law

reminds her: “ Like it or not, you now live in Kerala, so I suggest you drop all these

fashionable Pleases and Thank Yous” (p.80). Her Malayalam was woefully inadequate,

and the usual mixture of English and Malayalam simply would not do there. Speaking in

English would be deemed stylish; her brand of Malayalam always provoked sarcastic

laughter. So she was forced into monosyllabic replies. Delhi did not like the Kerala in her

and Kerala resented the Delhi about her. She exclaims: “ Half-way children, we could

have founded a world-wide club of people belonging nowhere and everywhere, confused

all the time by ourselves . . .” (pp.169). Later in England, in moments of crises, as for

instance when she is being questioned by the Immigration Department, she becomes aware

of the quality of her English deteriorating, as “ my Indian accent was squeezing its way

out, sending my tongue into overdrive” (p.290). It is obvious that language has played a

crucial role in making her predicament hopelessly awful.

Close on the heels of this linguistic disorientation follows the cultural dislocation. Though

she hated Kerala often, she would miss it too, as Kerala was in her blood. But her main

problem was in getting accepted as a member of her husband’s family. For this, she had to

transform herself into someone who was totally different from her actual self. On the

morning of her wedding, after the make-up is completed, she looks into the mirror and

sees a stranger looking back, ‘a proud product of Preethi’s Beauty Parlour’ (p.72). Her in-

laws dress her up in a Maraar sari and Maraar jewellery and turn her into someone else.

She muses: “ I stood in front of them, a counterfeit Maraar, hiding Delhi insides and a very

heavy heart” (p.92). Even little things seem to accentuate her oddity. “ Even a badly hung

blouse could announce to everyone who walked past the washing line that there was an

intruder in their midst, one that could never ever measure up to the others” (p.109). In

short, though she was never beaten up, though nothing really terrible had happened to her,

there was only “ a long and constant catalogue of very small things, . . . so small and so

subtle as to be almost invisible, could not do any grave damage, just rob me gradually of

my knowledge of myself” (pp.110-11). Suresh never bothered to find out what she thought

or how she felt. As far as she was concerned, he never existed really. Thus her earnest

efforts to be a good wife and an acceptable daughter-in-law were thwarted, partly by the

insensitivity of her husband, partly by the devious nastiness of her in-laws, but mainly by

the alien customs of a narrow-minded society, a system which was hostile to her true inner

nature. Her firm refusal to accept her share of this ‘forced’ happiness is indeed heroic.

Nowadays, terms like ‘honesty’, ‘sincerity’, ‘integrity’ etc., have become somewhat

outdated in literary criticism. But Ancient Promises makes its impact mainly through the

writer’s honest approach to life, and as a female Bildungsroman, it makes its mark with

astounding clarity and intensity. Janu has fought her fights with unrelenting determination,

and in the course of the whole novel, never for a moment does she become selfish or

inhuman: she has never betrayed her true self. And that is not something we can say of

many people.

Parenthood – The Gates of Joy and Dread: A Reading of Jaishree Misra’s

Ancient Promises

 

Ms. R.K. JAISHREE KARTHIGA

Assistant Professor of English

Thiagarajar College of Engineering

Madurai  625 015

 

Parenting remains a mystifying subject about which almost everyone has opinions. It

is the principal and continuing task of parents in each generation to prepare children of the

next generation for the physical, economic, and psychosocial situations in which those

children must survive and thrive. This paper therefore addresses questions about the positives

of parenthood, the purview of parenthood and present-day problems of parenthood. Jaishree

Misra’s Ancient Promises turns one’s attention to the nature and dimensions, the conditions

and the concerns of parenthood.

Jaishree Misra, an Indian author was born in 1961 to a Malayali family in New Delhi.

She started her writing career in 2000. Misra’s life is as dramatic as her books. As a Keralite,

growing up in an army family in Delhi, Jaishree Misra lived an apparently Western lifestyle.

She fell in love as a teenager, but was directed into an arranged marriage with a fellow

Keralite instead. Misra managed to get an MA in English Literature from Kerala University.

The marriage was a disaster, and worsened with the birth of a mentally challenged child.

Ancient Promises vividly states how changes affect the usual ‘Indian’ ways of parenting. The

present generations’ style of living is more complicated that the parents find difficulty in

conforming to the new culture.

Today’s world is heavily competitive. When a person strives hard to progress in his

business, earn a degree, or experiment his plans, he needs to maintain a good rapport with his

co-workers. Starting from a peon to a manager in a company, everyone needs to have good

interpersonal relationship. Though interpersonal relationships have their own significance, a

person encounters such relationships only when he faces the society. Till then, intimate

relationships make an individual ready to handle these interpersonal relationships. The first

and foremost intimate relationship one has is with one’s mother followed by one’s father.

The intimate relationship of parents towards their children is wholesome and natural.

Parents love their children best because they are their own flesh and blood. Children are the

fulfillment of their parents’ love. Children make their parents feel stronger than ever before.

Sometimes, children are the ones who provide the reason for their parents to hold on firmly to

their married life. A couple, even after giving birth to their third child takes pleasure in

parenthood:

                          You are the one we held on to so tightly. You are the link with our past, a

reason for tomorrow. You darken our hair, quicken our steps, square our

shoulders, restore our vision, and give us a sense of humor that security,

maturity and durability can’t provide.

                          When your hairline takes on the shape of Lake Erie and your own children

tower over you, you will still be our baby. (Chicken Soup for the Mother’s

Soul 141)

Jaishree Misra in her Ancient Promises, highlights the constant struggle that goes on

between Janu and her parents because of her love affair. It is a novel that gives equal

importance to the anxiety that parents of a teenage-girl undergo and the urgent need for girls

like Janu to be understood by their parents.

 In Ancient Promises, Janu’s first meeting with Arjun happened through Leena. After

a couple of weeks of their encounter, Janu and Arjun started having casual meetings. They

shared same interests. Janu was worried if, she, a sixteen-year-old, was ready to experience

that splendid feeling called ‘love.’

When she was a cat on the wall, not able to identify if it was love or not, she thought

about her parents. She had never before kept a secret unknown from her parents. But now, the

secret of loving Arjun and hiding it from her parents was sheer thrill.

Janu’s father was totally against the concept of love marriages. He had never liked

young people falling in love nor wanted his daughter to get influenced by all the ‘love’ ideas

that go around her.

                         I was fairly sure my parents would disapprove; I’d heard Dad harrumph

loudly at love scenes in films, worried they would fill my head with silly

notions. Love, for him, had been the stirring in his heart when his mother had

shown him the picture of a fresh-faced girl she’d chosen for him to marry

eighteen years ago. This running-around-trees business was for film stars and

fools, he often said. (Ancient Promises 23-24)

Janu was never sure of how she was going to label her relationship with Arjun to her

parents. One fine day, she asked if she could bring her friends home as they kept pestering

her for South Indian ‘dosas.’ Janu’s mother, knowing that one of the friends was a boy, gave

an alarming look: “How long have you known him? Who is he? How do you know him?”

(Ancient Promises 24). Janu stayed cool by saying that he was just a friend. Her mother

immediately retorted:

                        ‘I don’t know,’ she said doubtfully, ‘I never had friends like that when I was

growing up. You have to be careful, you know, there’s lots of boys out there

who will be only too willing to take advantage of pretty girls.’ (Ancient

Promises 24-25)

 Janu’s parents led a conventional life and wished the same for their daughter. The

idea of a child taking a decision regarding her future partner was unimaginable to them. They

believed in children settling in life with their parents’ choicest blessings. Both Janu’s mother

and father had left the most important decisions in their lives to be taken by their parents.

They firmly felt that their parents knew what would be the best for them.

As Janu’s parents had fixed beliefs and values, Janu’s world was an enigma to them.

The kind of comrades and experiences Janu had was totally unheard of by her parents:

                        My world was a confusing one for them. They were so sure that I would be

safest among my own people, marrying eventually into my own community.

But I had all kinds of friends and all kinds of experiences that were alien and

that couldn’t be stopped. Arjun, unfortunately, would fall firmly into that

category – he was the wrong age (too young), wrong community (not

Malayali), and came at the wrong time (I was too young). (Ancient Promises

26)

 

Jaishree Misra, apart from giving attention to Janu’s parents, also picturizes Leena’s

and Arjun’s parents in a different angle.

Leena’s parents were open-minded people and they gave her permission to invite boys

for her birthday bash. As the daughter of a pilot and an ex-stewardess, Leena enjoyed much

freedom. All her friends really envied her because she was the only one who was allowed to

have boyfriends and boys at her parties. Janu’s parents gave her permission to attend Leena’s

birthday bash and to stay at Leena’s place that night. This gesture by Janu’s parents revealed

their trust and love for their daughter. They too gave the necessary space and liberty that a

daughter needs.

Similarly, Arjun’s parents gave him the necessary independence. As he grew, this

helped him make right choices and stand independently. His mother was in England and

many people had believed that Arjun’s parents had been divorced. But, the fact was that

Arjun’s father did not want to disturb his son’s education in India and at the same time to

look after his farm. Arjun felt that his father was more than a friend and that he could share

anything under the sun with him. He trusted that his parents simply doted. It was this basic

element of trust that made Arjun’s parents let him do whatever he wished to do.

As days passed by, Janu and Arjun started to meet at Chor Minar. The excuse that

Janu gave at her home was ‘drama practice’ and ‘Mathematics tuition.’ Soon, Janu was

caught red-handed by her parents and it was here that she lost the trust and love of her

parents, especially her father’s. She had said that she had gone for a special Mathematics

tutorial class when her father’s friend saw her with Arjun sharing a bowl of soup noodles.

Her father was enraged when Janu lied:

                        In blind, raging confusion that his little girl had become a woman without

anyone bothering to tell him. . . . All the anger . . . at having ever left Kerala,

at having carefully attempted to bring up a daughter in a thankless place like

Delhi, at having been deceived by the thing he most loved in the world . . . all

seemed to be coming out at me, with that horribly swishing cane. (Ancient

Promises 48)

From then on, Janu lost all her freedom. She was taken to school and picked up by her

parents. She was not allowed to use the phone and was accompanied by someone wherever

she went. Her parents stopped her play practice and tuition. It looked as if her world had

suddenly shrunk and life became bitter. She started spending all her time in her room and

kept looking at her text books.

After Janu finished her schooling, she desired to continue her education. But, her

parents had given up all hopes in sending their Janu to college. Though she was offered a seat

at Miranda House College for a B.A. Degree in English, Janu’s parents strongly felt that

college was an apt place only for girls who are serious and studious and who could remain

‘loyal’ to their parents’ trust and money.

Meanwhile, Arjun had secured admission at Hull University and had decided to join

his mother in England. Janu, during her visit to Kerala, was engaged to one Mr. Suresh. It

appeared that Suresh hailed from a reputed family. Janu agreed to it as she wished to

compensate for upsetting her parents.

In Ancient Promises, the mistake is on both the parents and the child. Janu accepted

things as they came, in order to satisfy her parents. Then again, Janu’s parents kept her affair

with Arjun in mind and felt that their daughter can be safe and secure only if she enters into

wedlock. They failed to understand that it is a process of growing up and their daughter

would understand herself as she grows.

Children absorb new culture and ideas at a young age. Janu’s idea of ‘dating’ looks

strange and shocking to her parents. Jaishree Misra emphasizes the urgent need to restore

culture in its right perspective. The author, in her novel Ancient Promises, takes effort to

make her readers understand the full spectrum of emotions, from the heights of total delight

to the depths of grief, as children grow from babyhood to adulthood. In the beginning,

couples enjoy their new role as parents. But, as their children grow, they create unwanted

anxiety in parents. Jaishree Misra overtly conveys the message that parenthood is complex as

it involves a relationship between two different generations. The incident of raising children

can be an assorted bag, of both joy and sorrow.

Semi-autobiographical, this is a story about Janaki (Janu) a Keralite brought up in Delhi.

Married-off at eighteen she forsakes her first love Arjun for a loveless, tyrannical, marriage in

her native South India. Her meek acceptance of the 'Ancient Promises' made in previous

lives.

However the reality of life with her new extended family does not live up to expectations.

After the birth of her daughter, Riya, a child with special needs, Janu realises that she can no

longer live trapped in a cold marriage with a spineless husband and domineering mother-in-

law. Jaishree Misra tells the reader in the acknowledgements that this is where the

autobiography ends. She thanks "Daya Misra - my beautiful feisty mother-in-law, for

showing me how to be brave". Daya Misra is obviously quite unlike Janu's domineering

mother-in-law, Mrs Padmaja Maraar, who is more interested in maintaining "appearances"

among their South Indian society than in Janu or her grand daughter Riya.

Janu plans to leave India for America to continue her studies and find a "special needs"

school for her daughter Riya. However a chance meeting with her old love sees her deciding

on a divorce and fleeing to England with Arjun.

She is forced to leave behind her daughter with her ex-husband, Suresh. Determined to get

Janu back he uses his daughter Riya as a weapon. This part of the narrative is probably a

fairly common story of divorce among Indian and western couples alike.

What I liked about the book was the transformation of the character from an eighteen-year-

old witless young bride, to a stronger, warmer, more determined Janu. It takes courage to

continue studying and secretly planning and plotting whilst living in a larger household.

The book explains well the bonds of family and what filial duty means in the Asian culture. It

also explores the differences in cultural attitudes between the "Malayalis" of the South and

the "Delhi-ites" of the North. It really is about Janu no longer accepting the "ancient

promises" of race & culture, but more those of "love".

This book is not just another story about arranged marriage. It is a tale about how Indian

women can escape from miserable marriages. A task, no doubt difficult if you are under

educated or less determined than Janu.

Janu is racked with guilt at every stage: a feeling probably shared by most women. Guilt

about bringing shame onto her family, her guilt at having a handicapped child, guilt at not

being loved for who she is, guilt at leaving her daughter. One particular description of her

grandmother's "ancestral home of 40-watt sadness" is particularly poignant. Trauma, fear,

loneliness and guilt are all emotions brought out in the book.

All the characters are believable. Even Janu's husband, Suresh, makes a supreme effort to

look after his daughter by himself. One might question his motives but the act is both

commendable and understandable.

Suffice to say there is a happy ending, this book is meant to be a modern day love story after

all!

A book to read, re-read and savour.

It's a Cinderella deferred kind of tale. An arranged marriage and a child intervene before the heroine (Janaki) is finally whisked away by first-and-only-love Prince Charming to that happy ending that signs off most fairy tales and, yes, the usual Mills and Boon candyfloss fare.

Fortunately, it's also much more. Jaishree Misra has a sharp ear - recording the cadences and cattiness of the conversations of her deliciously delineated and often quite nasty characters who inhabit the little world she has created in Valapadu, a fictional town in the backwaters of Kerala. The women, funnily enough, call to mind Cinderella's awful sisters and stepmother, who in this novel is the cold and haughty mother-in-law. The mother-in-law of all mothers-in-law.

Misra's debut novel has all the mush and melodrama of the kind of fiction that makes women's magazines thick and is the stuff of a million daydreams: the first kiss, stolen moments, adolescent awakenings, the nightmare of the nuptial bed with a stranger for a husband, a child with disabilities. And at times, the kind of purplish prose best

reserved for Valentine's Day cards.

Her plot is shaky and has coincidences you usually find in masala movies. However, the author, a Malayalee who has obviously spent her growing-up years in the north, paints a fascinating picture of the social landscape of Kerala, with its upwardly mobile business community and its static traditional core.

The dynamics of a conservative joint family are bound to be interesting. All the more so since the point of view from which the story is told is simultaneously of an insider and an outsider: both the protagonist and the author, though Malayalee, are strangers looking in.

And the north-south equation gets a different twist: Malayalee girls from Delhi are decidedly bad marriage material. There are many "southy-northy battles" as she puts it.

The author has a nice turn of phrase and quite an eye for images. Consider her description of jackfruits: "How like sad fat babies the dumpy, jackfruits looked, clinging helplessly to matronly tree trunks." But what gives the novel its frisson is the fact that, as Misra adds in her note at the end, it's a case of art imitating life. Her life and a profile in courage.

I went to the library to look for the 3rd and last book in The Hunger Games trilogy but it

wasn’t there. They had to place an order for it and they said it would take a week. Even as my

disappointment was taking shape my eyes fell on Jaishree Misra’s “Ancient Promises.” A

summary:

Young and vulnerable, Janu gave up Arjun, her first great love, to enter into an arranged

marriage. Years later she is miserable, having been gradually shut out by the coldness of her

husband’s family and his indifference to her and their daughter’s needs. Finally she flees to

England to escape the loveless union – but at what price to herself and those she loves?

I had heard of Jaishree Misra but this was the first time I gave into reading her book.

Especially since my mom said that someone had raved about this book to her. The book

begins with Janu’s marriage and then takes us a little into her past. Janu meets Arjun in

college, they become friends and then lovers. Now in most parts of the world the natural

progression would be to marry each other and lead a great life. But in India, being lovers

comes with a sack of complications. Caste, race, religion, class and most of all parental

approval comes into play. Thus is decided an arranged marriage. One which Janu goes

through. Despite Arjun being the owner of her heart, Janu decides to agree to the “match”

that her parents made for her. She goes through years of silent suffering before she speaks up

for herself, gathers courage and even makes the decision to support herself.

A lot of the issues in this novel surface from merely being a part of Indian society and part of

a household that fiercely upholds a traditional outlook. Although Janu felt rage initially, at the

fact that she wasn’t involved with the search process, she didn’t voice it. Instead, she cried

inside, she held hands with Arjun and parted from him with a heavy heart as he left for

further studies to England. She met her future husband for 5 minutes where he asked

questions and she answered. She agreed to the marriage although she could have put her foot

down and refused.

Many readers would wonder what made her take this seemingly insane decision. I personally

would never do it. But somewhere in a remote corner of my mind I comprehend her choice.

In her letter to Arjun she explains –

Because I’m tired of fighting off my family, they’ve proven their love for me in the eighteen

years it’s taken to bring me up…maybe I will find some comfort in making my folks happy for

once! For a while they’ve seen my ways as being increasingly dissolute and uncaring, so

here’s compensation for all that in one fell swoop. And how! I’ve never seen them happier.

It’s hard not to let that infect me.

Although it has changed over the years, a lot of brides in India still get married for all the

same reasons that Janu mentions. While a few marriages genuinely turn out to be good, the

rest continue in a parallel existence made up of adjustments and compromises tied together

by the fear of social stigma. Janu’s turns out to be one such marriage. Her husband does not

abuse her or beat her. He provides for all her needs, monetarily. But he is indifferent. They do

not have conversations or laugh together or share anything with each other. He is mentally

remote, which makes it all the more difficult for Janu to pinpoint the reason for leaving him.

Her husband’s family, mainly the womenfolk, revels in throwing taunts at her, teasing her

and generally not showing her love or kindness. In a last bid to win their affection, Janu

deliberately gets pregnant. But she discovers that even her daughter fails to move them, even

more so when the child turns out to have learning disabilities.

Janu eventually musters the courage to put an end to the jibes thrown at her, study and earn a

degree and finally get a scholarship to go abroad to study and teach. Janu’s problems don’t

end there but Misra ensures a happy ending.

What I liked in this book was the acute perception and description of a lot of issues that are

faced by Indian families, particularly women, even today. This book would make particular

sense to a person coming from Kerala, a state in Southern India, which is where I too come

from. Many references and words from Malayalam, the language of the state, are used in the

novel which might make it a little difficult for others to understand but makes a whole lot of

sense to me. In fact, it’s this additional sprinkling of words from another language that gives

a more definite texture to the story, immersing it firmly in the culture and customs of the

place.

On the other hand, sometimes the characters can seem black and white. All the people in

Janu’s in-laws family are portrayed as uncaring, scheming people. Arjun seems to be a man

without flaws. Leena is the right foil to Janu, with her flirtatious and free-spirited ways.

Janu’s own family is a mix of good heartedness and spirituality, weakened by tradition and

societal obligations. Misra’s writing is uncomplicated and flows smoothly albeit a bit

melodramatic in some places. Being a semi-autobiographical book makes it a more

interesting read.

Jaishree Misra's (JM) Ancient Promises is the story of an affectionate and dutiful daughter,

a compassionate but guilty lover, a restless and miserable wife, a helpless and despairing

mother - a woman constantly in search of an identity, a woman pursuing her rightful share of

happiness.

Its the fascinating story of the protagonist Janaki's long journey traced through a happy

childhood, an unexpected arranged match, a traumatic marriage ending in strife finally

culminating with the finding of everlasting love in true fairytale fashion.

Janaki aka Janu is a Malayali Nair born in Kerala but raised and educated in far-away

Delhi. She's totally at home in these ''alien'' surroundings but constantly reminded of her roots

and values. When she is 16, Janu meets Arjun , the local school cricketing hero and they

become friends. Slowly but surely love blossoms but things take a nasty turn when Janu's

parents get wind of her romantic escapades. They whisk her away to native Kerala and

arrange for her to marry a groom ''handpicked by them'' from the socially respected Maraar

family. Janu is confused and unsure of her future with Arjun. Unwilling to hurt her parents,

she agrees to the proposal and gets married to Suresh on her 18th birthday. Arjun leaves to

the UK where he decides to pursue his college education living with his mother.

Janu enters the typical, traditional matriarchal Maraar household where everyone is fighting

for affections and acceptance. Her husband's family resents her Delhi background and treats

her as an outcast excluding her from household activities and discussions. To compound her

agonies, her husband Suresh is very aloof and uncaring, more concerned about his business.

A few years roll by and the family is still indifferent to Janu who now feels unaccepted and

miserable. She hopes that the arrival of a child would change the family's attitude towards her

but when she delivers a mentally challenged baby girl Riya , the misery only piles on. She

raises Riya without any help and at the same time pursues her education. Her growing

frustration in life worsens with her father’s death. Deciding to take matters into her hands,

she applies to study abroad so that she can take Riya there and treat her.

She leaves for Delhi to give a scholarship interview and chances to meet Arjun. Old passions

are aroused and the couple realize they still feel deeply for each other. Janu promises to file

for divorce to end the miserable marriage, flee with Riya to England and restart a new life

with Arjun. But fate has other plans for her as Suresh refuses to part with Riya. Janu is forced

to leave for England without her daughter. She arrives in England and spends a year studying

and reliving lost moments with Arjun. But Janu is unable to come to grips with the absence of

Riya in her life. She leaves England to return to India and fight for custody of her daughter.

And as if by magic, Suresh reconciles himself to a divorce, hands over Riya and alls well that

ends well.