Earlier this month, amidst the sound and fury surrounding Leslee Udwin’s documentary India’s Daughter, I was entangled with a different kind of story about India and her daughters. Jaishree Misra’s latest novel, A Love Story for My Sister, tells the story of two women—Margaret Wheeler and Tara Fernandez, who suffer the similar fate of being abducted in their 18th year and who fall in love with their abductors, only they are separated by a span of 140 years, and Margaret is based on a real person, whereas Tara is invented.

Misra, who began working on the book after she moved from London to Delhi, initially had the idea of writing a historical fiction about the uprising of 1857 and the siege of “Cawnpore,” with Margaret Wheeler’s Stockholm Syndrome story at the centre of it. But twinned with Misra’s own issues of safety in Delhi and the growing reports of rapes and abductions in the papers, a binary story began to emerge. It was surprisingly easy, she said, to find similarities between women “in that long agotime” and women of today. “The pragmatic decision made by Margaret to marry her captor, rather than become a social outcast, is so resonant with the idea of honour that motivated those women who were kidnapped during India’s Partition and similarly went on to marry their abductors or simply kill themselves, and also not that different from women of today who survive rape and/or domestic violence but cannot bear to tell anyone about it.”

 

Misra does a tremendous job of moving between the centuries. In one breath we are in the barracks of Cawnpore with Margaret in her yellow grenadine dress, the heat of the June sun, the dried well full of dead bodies; landaus, gigs, “dushman-log”—and the next, we are with Tara in the megalopolis of Delhi, in the immediately recognisable world of Facebook and the carnivorous Indian media. Linking the stories aren’t just the two women—the way they are snatched from their lives, the claustrophobia of their capture, and the grief that necessarily follows in their wake, but the dedication with which Misra depicts the male characters—humanising them without glamorising. As supporting cast there are fathers of the religious and paternal kind, brothers, and the captors themselves, and through these depictions Misra shades a world that is infinitely more complex and hued with grey than the usual stories of this type.

 

While Misra believes that fiction shouldn’t attempt to solve the problems of the world, she does think that stories have the ability to shift perception. Writing historical fiction, as she’s done in the past with Rani (about Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi), she says the membrane separating fiction and history was “delightfully permeable.” But with A Love Story… there was a need to enter the preserve of fiction writers—to go into that most intimate space of private thoughts and conversations that even the best-preserved histories can only hint at. Poised as she is between these worlds, Misra offers us a book that while bleakly asserting the unchanging brutality of human behaviour, also allows for an opening in the conversation surrounding the crisis in masculinity in India today. “It is this crisis,” Misra says, “that we all need to address, if we are to make things safer for women.”

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