Small Days and Nights starts off with a simple premise that becomes a shattering study of disaffection and belonging. The half-Italian, half-Indian narrator Grazia sets up home in rural Pondicherry in India, where “paddy fields glimmer like swimming pools at the base of brown hills”. At the edges of her physical territory are hustling politicians, greedy property developers, local thugs and corrupt businessmen. Her emotional territory is just as fraught: pulled to India by the death of her mother, Grazia uncovers a dark secret and struggles to find her place.
Grazia is an extraordinary narrator: disaffected, atomised, sometimes repulsed, frequently furious. Her sour delights and lacerating observations don’t protect her from the painful reckoning she must make with her family’s past and India’s present. Of her mother, her “grief is filled with anger because she has overwritten every memory with a kind of deception”. Of her father, she says: “There was violence in the silence he created, a terrible asphyxiation.” A memory of her parents dancing together, apparently happily, makes her think of “two serpents in their battle dance”.
Grazia’s experiences sit at the perilous point where family duty shades into murderous rage. Visiting her old family home, she thinks: “you can never imagine the scale of ruin when it comes to the house of your childhood”. This is also symbolically true as she tries to come to terms with what she learns about her past. “You never think your parents lead more deceitful lives than you, but of course they do.”
Small Days and Nights is about disjunction, dislocation and the failure to meet impossible ideals of nationhood, womanhood and parenthood. The title is surely ironic, because this is a concise novel of staggering depth. Grazia is challenged by the expectations heaped upon her as a family member, the head of a household, and a person of wealth in the locality. Her hatred and self-hatred compete for the reader’s bitter edification. Alongside ravishing observations of the natural world, such as the “measured hush” of the sea, there is incredible physical and emotional violence.
In its vivid setting, the novel is not exactly a paean to modern India so much as a piercing Munchian howl of grief. In Grazia’s locality, “rowdies… go around with axes and knives. They want to sell all this land and make resorts and coal factories.” Vicious arguments explode across status and class lines, while the most dejected people “could bear…indignities as though they were creatures made entirely of wounds”.
As well as being an award-winning novelist, Doshi is an award-winning poet, shortlisted this year for the Ted Hughes award for her collection Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods. Each page of this novel bears testament to her skills as inequality, secrecy and unhappiness harden into menace. Through a cycle of visits, returns and memories, Grazia must weather huge unease and bruising conflicts. Eventually, she finds strength and acceptance in this disturbing, deep and utterly extraordinary novel.
• Small Days and Nights by Tishani Doshi is published by Bloomsbury Circus (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
