My Beloved Life
Amitava Kumar’s novel actually traces three lives. Jadu is born to impoverished Indian villagers in 1934, the year of a devastating earthquake. Through hard work and dedication, he becomes a modestly successful historian. His daughter Jugnu choses life as a desis, an Indian living abroad, as an international journalist for CNN. Maati, an unrelated woman of the Adivasi tribe, is born in 1992 and suffers the devastation of Covid in one of India’s poorest states.
My Beloved Life is a richly textured tapestry of a people struggling to move forward. The challenge for readers is precisely this tapestry effect. Jadu’s story constantly cuts away to accounts of gods, legendary heroes, and friends’ and relatives’ stories. The narrative jumps. Jadu and his wife can’t find health care for their desperately sick child. Cut to the child recovered. The adult Jugnu is first determined to defend her husband from rape charges; then cut to her divorce proceedings. Despite a moving chapter on Jadu’s deathbed, readers are repeatedly denied key scenes, undercutting our emotional link with the characters. Jugnu’s narrative is interlaced with summaries of her news stories, but we see less and less of Jugnu.
In the final section, Maati feels “old” at 25, when Covid deaths exhaust the supply of wood for the funeral pyres. Here and throughout My Beloved Life, dedicated readers will experience the grip of the caste system today, the ubiquitous presence of a culture of bribery and corruption, the occasional triumph of individuals—and how that triumph takes them so far from home. Most of all, in Jadu’s story, we see how deeply the figures of myth and legend figure as a present reality in everyday life.
