Mehta's Mila

Mila in Love by Dina Mehta. Published in 2003 by Penguin Books India (Private) Limited, 11, Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi 110017. Pp: 267. Price: Rs 295.

Mila in Love is the prize-winning dramatist, short-story writer and novelist Dina Mehta’s second novel. Her first novel, And Some Take a Lover, was a sensitively crafted tale set during the period of India’s nationalist struggle and was about a young Parsi girl in love with an idealist Gandhian. This was a book that had held much promise and one therefore looked forward to her subsequent novels with considerable anticipation.

Mehta’s second novel is set in contemporary times and though it has a half-Parsi protagonist in the form of the recalcitrant lover Rayhaan, it is not focussed on Parsis.

Like Roshni, the female hero of the first novel, Mila too is a young girl who has to find her own place in life. In that sense Mila in Love also appears to be a quest novel — a quest for identity and maturity.

The action is seen through the eyes of Mila and is told in bursts of flashbacks. The novel opens with Mila’s return to India after having lived in California for several years. Distance in time and space hasn’t decreased her passion for Rayhaan — a much older family friend and she still pines for him. We then go back in time with Mila and see her as a frightened young girl, cowering with her equally frightened brother, while their mentally disturbed mother rampages around their home. It is not clear though whether the mother’s mental breakdown is because of her husband’s affair with his secretary or the affair is a result of the mother’s loss of mental balance. Whichever way one looks at it Mila is very negatively impacted by the see-saw nature of her parents’ marriage. After her mother’s death she goes through a rather difficult stage, rebuffs the advances of friendship made towards her by her father’s mistress and is finally packed off to America to stay with her father’s family there. When she returns years later — now insisting on being called Sharmila — her affections for Rayhaan are still intact and after many misadventures Rayhaan does finally return Mila’s love.

Weaving in and out of the main narrative of Mila, her parents and Rayhaan are sub-narratives of Mila’s conventional brother Vikram, with whom she has little in common, her tyrannical paternal grandmother who terro­rises her daughter-in-law and Mila’s school friend Ritu.

After the promise of And Some Take a Lover, this book disappoints. What is Mehta trying to say here? Is it that marital unhappiness could unhinge a woman mentally? Is it that an unhappy marriage can impact the children? Is she making a statement in favor of gender equality? Is this a psychological novel? If one were to go by the title, is this a romantic novel in the mold of a Mills and Boon book? A book in which a rather headstrong heroine pines for her strong, handsome lover and finally wins him on the very last page? Or does one attribute a Jane Austen kind of sensibility to Mehta? If so, is Mila a kind of Emma? Or can one think of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane and her saturnine lover Mr Rochester?

Mehta: fails to impress

Mila in Love does not appear to provide answers to any of the above questions. It is not a book about strong women. Mila is too flustered and confused, even though she sneers at Ritu’s conventionalism and disapproves of her grand­mother’s ill treatment of her aunt. She takes no strong stand for gender issues. She seems to flirt with the idea and then retreats into self-indulgence again. Mila is not an Emma for the latter’s fine sense of self-awareness and irony are lacking in Mila. Jane is too strong a character to be seriously compared to Mila and even though there are gothic characteristics in both novels such as mad women, Mehta does not have Bronte’s sense of direction. At the end of the book the reader is left almost as confused as Mila has been throughout the narrative.

Dr Nilufer E. Bharucha