A House for Happy Mothers: A Novel
By: Amulya Malladi / Narrated By: Deepa Samuel
Length: 9 hrs and 49 mins
Nothing says Asian American Heritage like: AY, CARAMBA!!!
Jeez…
I was sooo looking forward to celebrating Mother’s Day with visiting a Slice of Life from the vantage point of a Heritage I Do Not Possess. Meaning: Can I address some stereotypes I have in m’ head stemming from limited engagement with first and second generation Indian Americans. That Amulya Malladi is an author of note? Awesome… That Indian women seek a path out of poverty by selling the only thing available to them, their wombs? Yikes, and AWEsome… That a wealthy Indian American woman might find herself with only one thought: Let’s use an impoverished woman’s womb so that I might have a child. Oh good cow, and AWESOME…
Sooo, I was thinking A House for Happy Mothers might be a semi-hard-hitting look at the exploding Indian surrogacy industry, a weighing of a privileged life against one of constant struggle, and p’raps maaaybe? The coming together of two women, as women, helping women heal other women.
Malladi says she does this, like, I’m serious: In the last five minutes of the audiobook. Since she could not show the Listener THAT with almost 10 hours of writing? Why, just sum up the purpose of the story in those few sentences… that made m’ eyes roll back up into m’ head: Awwww, you got sooo close, Malladi, sooo close. Wellll, at least with the last 1 1/2 hours of the book. The rest? The first, like, EIGHT hours?
Ach, mein Gott!!! I reeeeally wanted to throttle our Mom Wannabe.
Priya is one of our main heroines, the one who lives only for a baby. And all she does is, dare I use the word? Oh I dare! All she does is -bitch- and moan and whine and wheedle and needle and berate her husband until he acquiesces to do the unconscionable: Exploit a woman’s poverty. I s’pose we’re to feel mightily for Priya as she’s had sooo many miscarriages, that p’raps she’s just feeling hormonal after another near hit? Dunno, but she just shrieked: I’d Make an AWFUL Mother, and I Should NOT be Trusted with a Child!!!
Meanwhile, living a life of complete scarcity and making do on just a day-to-day basis, is Asha and her family. Her young son is beYONd intelligent, and she so desperately wants a future for him, which means sending him to a good school. Tuition must be paid, and this while she and her husband don’t even have a flat of their own. A family member has served as a surrogate, and so Asha truly sees this method as the only means available to her to grant her son a future. One Instant Pregnancy and a Health Scare later, and poor Asha is packed off by the doctor’s (And Priya’s!) insistence to “The House for Happy Mothers” where she’ll stay with other women, away from her beloved family.
This whole time, again: FOR HOURS, Priya is bemoaning this fear, bewailing that situation, having throw-down, knockout hissy fits with her poor ever-patient husband. Plus, she’s not living up to her dearest mother’s expectations, and Mom is written as sooo judgmental that I’m assuming we’re meant to further feel for Priya’s plight. But nope. And what with her frequently musing that oh hell yesss she’s gonna keep working, stay at home moms are unfortunate and all that? To go with other musings that indicate she has NOT considered how completely the entirety of her life will, nay: SHOULD change? Jeeeezzzz!!!
Deepa Samuel does a respectable job with the narration, keeping me from really Really REALLY wanting to claw my ears off every single danged time Priya shrilled SOMEthing (Samuel keeps screechiness to a minimum, oh thank merciful GOSH!), so there’s that. And she made Priya’s husband sooo kind and loving, especially at the end, that Priya got a healthy Huzzah for just marrying the guy. Her standout performance, however, was of Asha and her evolution from humble, quiet, PASSive woman to a woman who just might indeed start speaking out was really great and believable. I’m so glad Malladi wrote her as a woman who seethed about her situation, that she wanted to kick in Priya’s teeth (As did I), that the Hearts and Flowers of a Shared Womanhood were hard-won. So good for Samuel for making it all very believable.
It’s just that Malladi doesn’t get to that until there’s soooo little time in the book remaining; Asha’s evolution was credible, but the relationship between Asha and Priya as two women traveling the road that women must… was not. It was fairly sudden to the point of almost being abrupt. Plus it was actually Hearts and Flowers for Priya, while Asha’s lot in Life still pretty much sucked. This wasn’t thought-provoking so much as it was just sad. Dunno if Malladi was going for bittersweet, but my guess is that she was not. There was indeed the whole bit about the final five minutes of the story and all, you see.
Anyhoo—A House for Happy Mothers only reinforced the notions I have of Indian Americans via experiences in the workforce and meeting their family members. I’ve worked for two first generation Indian women who have been TOUGH Moms: They didn’t Demand of their daughters; rather, they Expected. And I came to know their daughters very well, saw their struggles to meet, to exceed, to sometimes fail… Okay, so Priya’s mom WAS like that. But nothing else was very enlightening. Pretty much only that it’s daunting and not for the fragile to be women in India.
Ay, Caramba… Ach, mein Gott…
And soooo many other interjections to describe this descent into madness…
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