Karan Mahajan on Immigration and the Self

In “The True Margaret,” your story in this week’s issue, Meera, a young Indian woman, moves to London to be with her new husband only to discover that he already has a wife in the city, a woman named Margaret. The story that’s then related is set in 1959. What drew you to the historical setting of London in that time?

I’m interested in scrambled, liminal spaces. London of the nineteen-fifties was one such place. The war had been over for some years, but you’d still see bomb sites, boarding houses, refugees, new immigrant enclaves. At the same time, the swinging sixties were around the corner—a period of new social arrangements memorialized in Doris Lessing’s “The Golden Notebook,” which partly inspired my story’s fifties setting. So London was a city where a man like Ravi might plausibly be torn between competing modes of life. London also occupied, and continues to occupy, an outsized place in the minds of Indians, as the colonial center. This heightens Meera’s shock about not just her marriage but the fact that she’s arrived in a cold and grimy metropolis.

Ravi, Meera’s husband, toggles between two wives, often spending half the week with Meera and the other half with Margaret and her two children. He’s also remarkably variable in his treatment of Meera. What accounts for this divided self?

Ravi is a man who refuses to let anything go. He’s married an Englishwoman but feels obligated to respond to family pressure to marry an Indian woman. As a doctor, he’s in a position of relative power, but he’s still an immigrant in a racist and colonial society. He knows he’s done something wrong but won’t admit it. He exists in a state of constant flight between two poles. The act of immigration can be the act of losing one’s center.

Meera feels herself at the mercy of so many men in this story—Ravi, her uncle (who lives in London but can’t or won’t help her), her father (who arranged the marriage). Yet none of the men come across as truly powerful. Does Meera, too, slowly come to this realization?

Meera is at the mercy of these men because she is so isolated in London. She would have been isolated anyway, as a new immigrant, but Ravi has every incentive to keep her shut up in an area with a (then) low or nonexistent Indian population, and to not induct her into his social circle. Southall, then a new Indian enclave, is far away, as is the London Hospital, where Ravi works. Like many victims, Meera is ashamed of her situation. Her world is reduced to Ravi, her neighbor, her memories of her father, her fantasies about Margaret. Her realization that the act of possessing two wives is not a measure of power but of weakness is a key turning point.

The frame of the story is Meera relating these events from some unspecified time after the marriage has ended, after she has married again, a life we know little about. Why did you decide to tell it that way, almost as if this episode is enclosed, at a distance?

For me, memory is one of the great organizing principles of storytelling, often even more than the oral tradition. Memory is private and allows for associative leaps and psychological annotations. I wanted this story to feel like a memory Meera returns to again and again. She doesn’t reply to Ravi, but she’s, alas, constantly in conversation with him in her head. ♦

In “The True Margaret,” your story in this week’s issue, Meera, a young Indian woman, moves to London to be with her new husband only to discover that he already has a wife in the city, a woman named Margaret. The story that’s then related is set in 1959. What drew you to the historical setting of London in that time?

I’m interested in scrambled, liminal spaces. London of the nineteen-fifties was one such place. The war had been over for some years, but you’d still see bomb sites, boarding houses, refugees, new immigrant enclaves. At the same time, the swinging sixties were around the corner—a period of new social arrangements memorialized in Doris Lessing’s “The Golden Notebook,” which partly inspired my story’s fifties setting. So London was a city where a man like Ravi might plausibly be torn between competing modes of life. London also occupied, and continues to occupy, an outsized place in the minds of Indians, as the colonial center. This heightens Meera’s shock about not just her marriage but the fact that she’s arrived in a cold and grimy metropolis.

Ravi, Meera’s husband, toggles between two wives, often spending half the week with Meera and the other half with Margaret and her two children. He’s also remarkably variable in his treatment of Meera. What accounts for this divided self?

Ravi is a man who refuses to let anything go. He’s married an Englishwoman but feels obligated to respond to family pressure to marry an Indian woman. As a doctor, he’s in a position of relative power, but he’s still an immigrant in a racist and colonial society. He knows he’s done something wrong but won’t admit it. He exists in a state of constant flight between two poles. The act of immigration can be the act of losing one’s center.

Meera feels herself at the mercy of so many men in this story—Ravi, her uncle (who lives in London but can’t or won’t help her), her father (who arranged the marriage). Yet none of the men come across as truly powerful. Does Meera, too, slowly come to this realization?

Meera is at the mercy of these men because she is so isolated in London. She would have been isolated anyway, as a new immigrant, but Ravi has every incentive to keep her shut up in an area with a (then) low or nonexistent Indian population, and to not induct her into his social circle. Southall, then a new Indian enclave, is far away, as is the London Hospital, where Ravi works. Like many victims, Meera is ashamed of her situation. Her world is reduced to Ravi, her neighbor, her memories of her father, her fantasies about Margaret. Her realization that the act of possessing two wives is not a measure of power but of weakness is a key turning point.

The frame of the story is Meera relating these events from some unspecified time after the marriage has ended, after she has married again, a life we know little about. Why did you decide to tell it that way, almost as if this episode is enclosed, at a distance?

For me, memory is one of the great organizing principles of storytelling, often even more than the oral tradition. Memory is private and allows for associative leaps and psychological annotations. I wanted this story to feel like a memory Meera returns to again and again. She doesn’t reply to Ravi, but she’s, alas, constantly in conversation with him in her head. ♦