“The Complex” by Karan Mahajan

Karan Mahajan’s ambitious third novel, The Complex spans roughly fifteen years of Indian family life, from 1980 to the mid-1990s. It charts the Chopra clan of Modern Colony, North Delhi, through the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the anti-Sikh pogroms of 1984, the rise of the BJP and the Mandal Commission agitation against caste-based affirmative action. It is a serious, carefully constructed novel, yet also, at times, a genuinely exhausting one.

The exhaustion is partly the point. Mahajan’s Delhi is rendered with an accuracy that feels almost archaeological: smog-blue Fiats with their reluctant choking sound, marble temple floors “the colour of a thunderstorm”, “clotheslines savagely crossing rooftops, everything sloping toward death”. That last phrase is worth pausing on. Those clotheslines are the visual grammar of people living too close together with too little space and too much family, staking out the thin air above a rooftop the way they stake out every other inch of available existence. Anyone who has driven past an Indian colony of that era will recognize it immediately, and anyone who visits today will recognize it still.

Mahajan’s Delhi is rendered with an accuracy that feels almost archaeological.

Gita and Sachin Chopra are Indians of a particular formation: educated, aspirational, emotionally earnest, and constitutionally unsuited to the transactional cheerfulness that successful immigrant life requires. Sachin is a Chopra by birth, Gita by marriage, and both are running, in their different ways, from the suffocating gravity of the family compound at A-19 Modern Colony. In Midland, Michigan, they are what a later generation of assimilated Indians would call FOBs (fresh off the boat), carrying India with them like weather. They are good together when observing America from a safe ironic distance, laughing at the couples shrieking at each other in Queens, at the Indian students stranded at JFK who look up Indian names in the phone book and call asking for a place to stay. Alone, facing each other, things fall apart. .Gita was almost-an-editor in India and is reduced in America to occasional pieces for a lifestyle magazine called Bay City Monthly, too afraid, as Mahajan puts it, to ride the New York subway with its “aura of piss and murder”. Sachin has a ketchup bottle patent he developed at Trident, his American plastics company, and no real recognition beyond a token dollar. They survive America but do not flourish in it, because India is where they belong, and some part of them always knows it.

The engine of the novel’s first movement is Laxman Chopra, one of the sons of SP Chopra, the dead patriarch whose photograph hangs garlanded on every wall of A-19. The assault on Gita at a family wedding is an act he commits with the casual entitlement of a man who has never once been held accountable for anything. He follows her upstairs, does what he wants, wipes his neck with a towel afterward and tells her “men need a release.” On a subsequent visit he tries again in his Fiat, and when she fights him off and gets out of the car, he leans through the window and says, with perfect composure, “Try to tell people, see who’s believed.” The horror deepens when Gita seeks counsel from Vibha, the family’s senior woman and self-appointed moral authority, only to discover that Vibha had effectively arranged it: if Gita could not conceive with Sachin, Laxman was the designated solution. Gita is not just assaulted but instrumentalised, her body a problem to be solved by the family’s internal machinery. She tells no one, carries it back from Delhi to Michigan, and the weight of it shadows everything that follows.The dread reaches its pitch when Laxman and his wife Archana arrive in Midland for a visit, ostensibly to pursue a business partnership with Detroit-based Malhotra, who is considering moving back to India. Gita is trapped in her own house, performing hospitality for the man who assaulted her while Sachin, oblivious, plays the generous host. The tension finds its sharpest social expression at dinner with Malhotra and his wife Simranpreet, who goes by Cindy.Gita’s brief affair with Hector, a Mexican-American from her marketing class, follows naturally from that damage. He is warm, present, “clear peeled-almond skin, iridescent teeth, a wide boyish smile.” Mahajan has her driving to his apartment knowing she is no longer “immune to the forces of adultery that smashed through these lonely American lives.” For a woman of her background and generation, lovemaking is a marital obligation, not a thrilling diversion, and when she tells him she loves him afterward, the body and the heart are simply going where they have always gone together. Hector, taking her at her word, sends a letter. Sachin intercepts it, reads the “torrent of black inky cursive on nearly translucent paper, bubbles visible where his nib must have burst through the surface with passion,” and is devastated. The affair ends, the marriage survives, and eventually they return to India.

Simranpreet (who goes by Cindy) is, in the vocabulary of the Indian drawing room, dangerously pseudo.

The sharpest contrast to Gita’s unresolved immigrant life is Simranpreet, who goes by Cindy, the Detroit wife of the Indian-American businessman Malhotra. Where Gita frets and performs and carries her Indianness like an obligation, Cindy has simply become someone else, fluently and without apology. She opens her door in a white dress with white strapped sandals, leads guests into what she calls her “Oriental living room”, decorated with Asian chests, eggshell walls, and a Buddha painting bargained for in Hong Kong. She serves Chinese food because it suits the room. Her accent is American, her aesthetic is cosmopolitan, her manner is warm but bounded. She is, in the vocabulary of the Indian drawing room, dangerously pseudo, and she does not care.

Her husband Malhotra, handsome and smooth in the way of men who have spent years navigating boardrooms, is nostalgic for India in the way that men who have successfully left somewhere often are: sentimentally, at a safe distance, with someone else expected to do the actual work of returning. Cindy is having none of it. “Darling, you and I are bloody American,” she tells him at dinner, and the room goes briefly quiet. She understands something Malhotra does not: that the India he is nostalgic for never really existed for women like her, that assimilation was not a betrayal of identity but a reasonable assessment of available options. When Archana, visiting from Delhi in her best clothes, says the Emergency under Indira Gandhi “wasn’t all bad,” Cindy responds without pause: “Destroying slums? Throwing opposition members in jail? Maybe one closes one’s eyes when one is there.” It is the voice of a woman who learned to think for herself in a country that rewarded it.

Mahajan does not flinch and does not relent.

Where the novel is most illuminating is in its portrait of characters that a younger, more globalized generation of Indians would dismiss with a mildly condescending “uncle” or “aunty”, those figures of matrimonial obsession and suburban intrusion who populate wedding shamianas and family drawing rooms. Mahajan takes them seriously as moral and psychological beings. Laxman Chopra, the novel’s great villain, has “eyes small and folded shut with merriness” that conceal a predatory entitlement. His bonhomie is social genius in a society where everything runs on networks: college seats arranged through sports quotas, government doctors called for favors, municipal bureaucracy navigated with the fluency of a man who has never needed to queue. This is the operating system of pre-liberalization India. When he eventually joins the Rath Yatra, a Hindu nationalist procession demanding the demolition of a mosque in Ayodhya, riding a chariot built by the Ramayan TV show’s set designers through the lanes of Hyderabad, he is not performing ideology. He has found the container for his energy, and the fit is so natural it is chilling.

His assault on Karishma, his sister-in-law and long-term lover, is rendered without melodrama. He forces his way into her flat, holds her wrists down, does what he wants. The horror is in what follows: Mahajan gives us Laxman’s interior immediately afterward, the self-exculpatory drift of a man telling himself she had been “subdued” at the end, that she had “loved him back,” that he had “perhaps gone too far,” as if rape were a minor lapse in an otherwise defensible record. That “perhaps” is the most damning word in the novel. Karishma walks out of A-19 shortly after and steps in front of a train. The novel does not editorialise.The unremitting bleakness is the novel’s one real liability. Mahajan does not flinch and does not relent, and there are stretches where the cumulative grimness becomes its own kind of monotony. The prose is always controlled, always precise, but precision without occasional release can start to feel airless. Cindy, sipping her drink in her Oriental living room while Malhotra talks about returning to the motherland, knows exactly what she has and exactly what she chose not to have. She is the novel’s one figure of genuine freedom, and Mahajan is wise enough to let her remain at the edges, a glimpse of the road not taken, vivid and unavailable and entirely herself.