Portrait of an urban modern Indian woman | Review of Rupleena Bose’s Summer of Then

"Summer of Then" by Rupleena Bose is a bildungsroman exploring love, relationships, and identity with spare, elegant prose.

The air feels like a metaphor for love in Rupleena Bose’s debut novel, Summer of Then, a bildungsroman that maps its unnamed protagonist’s desires, ambitions and musings over a decade. The novel begins the day she meets the man she will inevitably get into a complicated relationship with, on a day when she is breathing the cleanest air of the decade, and ends bang in the middle of COVID-19 when the air is full of poison and contagion, and the man seems to have forgotten her. “It is the air that drove us apart, I tell myself,” she says in the novel.

At its core, Summer of Then is a story of becoming and how relationships, cities and personal choices shape this process. It tells the story of a young English teacher caught between two men and how this romantic quagmire affects her life, dreams, and sense of self. In a similar vein as Rooney’s Conversations With Friends, Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, it also offers an exploration of the complexity and power of female friendship, a space that provides a safety net of sorts but is not inured from gestating disappointments or unuttered resentments. 

Bose’s prose is spare, lucid and elegant, ruminative without veering into excessive self-indulgence. Though one could argue that the book meanders in places, it is easy to forgive these superfluous sections since they are so few and far between. It also helps that the flawed, deeply insecure, self-absorbed and unreliable protagonist has a compelling, profoundly relatable voice that inveigles you into staying with the novel, even when the narrative falters.

While not an easy read — there are disturbing bits, including descriptions of communal violence and rape — it is an effortless one, offering a much-needed portrait of an urban modern Indian woman torn between middle-class aspirations and morality and a hunger for so much more. “I could feel a wall of longing rise within me. It is like a physical thing. It is something that seemed to break through the self I had built,” writes Bose. 

The novel is also remarkably sweeping in its reach. Some other themes explored in this novel set in multiple cities are the complexity of desire, the exponential rise of religious fundamentalism, the amorphous nature of identity, the indisputable impact of social class on art, the enduring legacy of colonisation on a nation’s cultural imagination and the pernicious persistence of violence against women.

It is also rife with references to literary texts and the relevance of literature in our lives, not surprising in a novel written by someone who teaches the subject for a living. “Shakespeare is best adapted when it is set in India… The feudal world of that time still exists in India. It brings out the conflict of caste and class in a way European culture cannot dare to adapt Shakespeare,” writes Bose in one part of the book, while in another, she claims that literature is the only thing that ties the past and the present. “That is what literature is, making sense of the world.” 

preeti.zachariah@thehindu.co.in