Inside the Mirror: A Novel

by Parul Kapur

Overview

Winner of the AWP Prize for the Novel
Winner of the 2025 Georgia Author of the Year Award
Longlisted for the Center for Fiction's 2024 First Novel Prize 
Longlisted for the 2024 New American Voices Award 
Honorable Mention for the 2024 Foreword INDIES Book Award in Literary Fiction
Finalist for the 2024 Foreword INDIES Book Award in Multicultural Fiction
Winner of the 2024 American Fiction Award in Literary Fiction
Finalist for the 2024 American Fiction Award in Multicultural Fiction
Named a Ms. Magazine's Most Anticipated Feminist Books of 2024

In 1950s Bombay, Jaya Malhotra studies medicine at the direction of her father, a champion of women’s education who assumes the right to choose his daughters’ vocations. A talented painter drawn to the city’s dynamic new modern art movement, Jaya is driven by her desire to express both the pain and extraordinary force of life of a nation rising from the devastation of British rule. Her twin sister, Kamlesh, a passionate student of Bharata Natyam dance, complies with her father’s decision that she become a schoolteacher while secretly pursuing forbidden dreams of dancing onstage and in the movies.

When Jaya moves out of her family home to live with a woman mentor, she suffers grievous consequences as a rare woman in the men’s domain of art. Not only does her departure from home threaten her family’s standing and crush her reputation; Jaya loses a vital connection to Kamlesh.

Winner of the AWP Prize for the Novel, Parul Kapur’s Inside the Mirror is set in the aftermath of colonialism, as an impoverished India struggles to remake itself into a modern state. Jaya’s story encompasses art, history, political revolt, love, and women’s ambition to seize their own power.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781496236784
Publisher:	Nebraska
Publication date:	03/01/2024
Series:	AWP Prize for the Novel
Pages:	358
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Parul Kapur was born in Assam, India, grew up in the United States, and lives in Atlanta. She is a fiction writer, journalist, and literary critic whose writing has appeared in a number of publications, including Ploughshares, Pleiades, the New Yorker, Art in America, Guernica, Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Paris Review. Kapur holds an MFA from Columbia University and has received fellowships from the Hambidge Center and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts.
 

Read an Excerpt

Inside the gunnysacks were the makings of a man. There were two
bags, roughly dividing the bones for the upper and lower halves of the body,
and Jaya had not wanted them inside the bedroom. But her father said they
should not be stored on the balcony during the monsoons, where she’d kept
them last month, because they might start to smell in a heavy rain. The servant
boy had climbed a stool and placed the sacks on top of the wardrobe
at her father’s instruction, her mother grimacing as the thin boy raised the
bundles overhead. Jaya had been told to ask the servant to retrieve the sacks
for her whenever she was ready to work in the afternoons. Instead, she had
moved the rootless bones once again. She’d removed a pile of household
wreckage from the corner between the wardrobe and the wall—a broken
towel rack, loose shelves, boxes of childhood belongings—and pushed the
bone-sacks into the space, where she could easily reach them.

Today she had pulled out both bags, not only the one containing the
bones of the upper body, which she had to mark up. She hesitated before
removing the rib cage and placing it on an old sheet spread over the dhurrie
on the floor. She glanced behind her—the door was shut. No one liked to
see her laying the bones on the bedroom floor and taking her red chalk to
draw a line where a muscle originated, and marking in blue chalk where
the muscle inserted. Now she took out the brownish basin of the pelvis,
searched for the long shaft of the thigh, and found a fully formed foot, all
the knotty bones threaded together. These were new bones to her; she had
not dared to assemble them like this before.

The first couple of times she’d set out to do her assignment, she had
asked Kamlesh to stay in the room on the pretext of holding open Gray’s
Anatomy for her. Searching inside the sacks was frightening, all sorts of
forms coming into her hands, rough protrusions and smooth cavities. She’d
have to pull out a number of bones until she found the ones for the arm
that they were dissecting in college. Her twin had frowned and asked to
leave, looking so distraught that Jaya realized she would have to do her
work in privacy. If their grandmother happened to be in her alcove at the
back of the bedroom, which the three of them shared, Jaya would ask her
to shift to another room and Bebeji would rise from her bed, taking with
her the many newspapers she read religiously. Bebeji found it indecent for
a person to handle human remains.

From her writing table, Jaya fetched her pen and ink bottle and tore
a sheet from a tablet of drawing paper. She tacked it to a small plank she
used as an easel. She sat on the floor, leaned against Kamlesh’s curio cabinet,
and considered the skull with its clenched set of teeth and hollow eyes,
the winged whole of the rib cage, the rod of a femur, and beneath a gap
of white sheet the fanlike foot. The morgue prepared the bones from the
bodies of the unclaimed dead found in the roads and railway stations; each
first-year medical student was partnered with a fresh skeleton.

Here were the pieces of a man. Who had he been? Jaya drew the rib
cage with a slower hand. The trunk of the sternum and looping branches
of ribs needed close attention to be given form as a whole, with lines and
shading. A splotch of ink spread on the half-made foot, the toes sharp as
pincers. A thought came to her: How do you become someone? She wrote
the words like a banner in a fluttering script and capped the pen, lifting
the board from her lap.

For a moment she let herself drift, closing her eyes, as she tried to feel
some connection to the man. Moving onto the bedsheet, she slipped a
few feet away from the fragmented figure she had laid out. Aligning her
body parallel to his, she lay down, wondering if she could assess the man’s
height, discern something about him.

The bell rang, the front door banged shut. Heerabai must have answered;
Jaya could never hear the maidservant’s barefoot movements in the flat.
Clicking steps hurried down the passage. Their mother called out, “You’ve
come, Kamlesh?” Jaya was pushing herself up when her sister opened the
door and caught her sitting beside the partially assembled skeleton. Her
twin made a face, clutching a parcel to her chest. “What are you doing?
Making the whole thing up?”

“I wanted to try drawing it.” Jaya stood up and arranged the pleats of
her sari. Her nervous hand went to her hair, which was bound in a neat
plait down her back.

“They want you to draw the full skeleton?”

“No. I wanted to see how the bones fit together.”

“Just like that?” Kamlesh squinted at her.
“Yah—just like that,” said Jaya, bending over to gather her art materials,
then the bones.

Table of Contents

Part 1. The Witnesses and Their Dreams
1. Chapter One
2. Chapter Two
3. Chapter Three
4. Chapter Four
5. Chapter Five
6. Chapter Six
7. Chapter Seven
8. Chapter Eight
Part 2. On the Precipice
9. Chapter Nine
10. Chapter Ten
11. Chapter Eleven
12. Chapter Twelve
13. Chapter Thirteen
14. Chapter Fourteen
15. Chapter Fifteen
16. Chapter Sixteen
17. Chapter Seventeen
18. Chapter Eighteen
Part 3. Dancing Girl
19. Chapter Nineteen
20. Chapter Twenty
21. Chapter Twenty-One
22. Chapter Twenty-Two
23. Chapter Twenty-Three
24. Chapter Twenty-Four
25. Chapter Twenty-Five
26. Chapter Twenty-Six
27. Chapter Twenty-Seven
28. Chapter Twenty-Eight
29. Chapter Twenty-Nine
30. Chapter Thirty
Baroda
Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

"This is a beautiful exploration of the hardships endured by women artists."—Publishers Weekly, starred review


"Kapur's vivid descriptions of Jaya's paintings and Kamlesh's dancing bring them to life on the page."—Booklist, starred review


"An engaging examination of female independence and familial devotion."—Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher