In “Hidden Life,” you tell the story of Nidhi, a fourteen-year-old girl from Bangalore who is sent to stay with a great-aunt in Madras while her mother recovers from a miscarriage. At Jaya Aunty’s house, she also encounters Jaya’s daughter-in-law, Padmini, who is cognitively disabled, and a middle-aged male visitor, Sudhir, who is a Theosophist. How did you assemble this cast of characters, and did you know from the start where their interactions would lead?
“Assemble” is just the word. I began writing this story with different characters, namely, an aspiring young writer and his new bride, who pay a visit to an elderly relative resembling Jaya. For whatever reason, that combination of characters didn’t work. I replaced the young writer and his bride with a teen-age girl, but that didn’t work, either. It wasn’t until I inserted the character of Sudhir that the story suddenly leaped to life, and I saw exactly how it would end—how it had to end. Who can say what that alchemy is? Certainly not me.
Sudhir Desai keeps coming to stay in this household, to which he has only a very tenuous connection. His motivations aren’t entirely clear. Why do you think he takes such an interest in Nidhi?
I’ve met men like him, and, if I knew the answer to that question, I’d have avoided some unpleasant situations. What, indeed, does Sudhir want? He suffers from all the usual afflictions—loneliness, loss of potency, regret, terror of old age, what have you. Jaya, whose son has died, welcomes him into her home, and he, a bachelor, enjoys the attention she gives him. What Jaya cannot give him, however, is access to his own youth. That can only be provided by someone who is herself young, like Nidhi. I wouldn’t say that this explains Sudhir’s entire motivation for taking an interest in her, but it’s certainly part of it.
Nidhi’s parents are progressive and quite open with their daughter about sexual matters. Is their attitude very unusual for this time and place? When Nidhi returns home, having had a bewildering exposure to sexuality, she feels, pleasantly, more detached from her parents than she did before. Do you see this as a healthy sign of her increasing maturity and independence, or do you sense that her experience in Madras has damaged her in some way?
I don’t know for sure that Nidhi has been damaged, but, even if she has, I don’t believe that damage is an impediment to the acquisition of maturity or wisdom. One of the questions I’m asking in the story, I suppose, is exactly what it means to be mature or wise in the first place.
In Jaya and her parents, Nidhi is presented with two opposing models for maturity, at least when it comes to sexual matters. Her parents approach sexuality head on, almost with glee, which is certainly unusual for their time and place. One gets the sense that they rather enjoy being provocative. Jaya, by contrast, favors insinuation; she allows what is unspeakable to remain unspoken. By the end, Nidhi comes to find both approaches inadequate, even self-protective. I’d like to believe that she begins, on that train ride home, to grope her way toward a third, more profound approach, though she is a long way from articulating what it might be.
“Hidden Life” is your third story in the magazine, and, although their plots are quite different, all three involve a kind of contest for power or control between children and adults, be it their parents or new acquaintances. What makes this cross-generational dynamic so appealing to you as a writer?
I’m mortified to be so consistent! But the truth is that I do find the cross-generational dynamic fascinating, in particular that terrible moment when, under the gaze of a child, an adult’s carefully constructed shell of expertise and experience crumbles to reveal . . . what? A buffoon? A monster? A worm? That moment, for me, possesses an almost horror-story quality, and I always seem to find my way back to it.
Do you have any favorite stories about child-adult dynamics that were perhaps a model or inspiration for “Hidden Life”?
I remember that Katherine Mansfield’s “The Garden Party” made a real impression on me when I was a child. And I consider Ethan Canin’s “The Year of Getting to Know Us” to be a benchmark of the parent-child genre. Neither served as a direct model for “Hidden Life,” but both are surely present within it in some ineffable way. ♦
