The House of Hidden Mothers: A Novel

by Meera Syal

Overview

Life hasn’t always been easy for Shyama, a woman in her mid-forties whose husband abandoned her when their daughter was still young. But she has finally found happiness with Toby, a man ten years her junior. She and Toby want to have a child together, but Shyama’s doctor tells her that her womb has become "inhospitable."("An inhospitable womb! There, she had been looking for a title for her autobiography.") While Shyama and Toby begin their search for the perfect surrogate, four thousand miles away a young woman in rural India named Mala becomes convinced that carrying a child for an international couple will be her ticket out of poverty—and as her life intersects with Shyama’s, the two women soon discover that an apparently simple arrangement may be far more complicated than it once seemed.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250132178
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	06/13/2017
Pages:	432
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Meera Syal (b. 1963, Wolverhampton) is an English writer and actress. Educated at Manchester University, she was co-writer for a three-part BBC television series My Sister Wife, and wrote the screenplay for Bhaji on the Beach (Channel 4). A cast member and co-writer for Goodness Gracious Me and The Kumars at No. 42, her play Generation Next was programmed as part of the National Theatre's Connections 2012: Plays for Young People.

Editorial Reviews

"Passionate and opinionated . . . This book is bound to delight many readers."—The Sunday Times (London)

"Beneath the pacey narrative and emotional journeys thrum observations about youth and age, East and West, wealth and poverty, love and sex, pain, [and] joy. . . . A delicately written, profound study of the female condition in the rich world and the poor. The gifted Syal does it again."—Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, The Independent (London)

"Sprawling, humorous, and sensitive."—Metro (London)

"For sheer scope and ambition [Syal] makes Dickens and Tolstoy seem single-minded."—Susan Elkin, The Independent (London)

"[A] rambunctious, confrontational and ultimately heartbreaking book."—Alfred Hickling, The Guardian (London)

"Ambitious."—Publishers Weekly

"Syal so skillfully uses this bicultural cast of characters to explore the dramatic complexities of transnational surrogacy. The many themes of this novel, including generational conflicts, cultural myopia, economic privilege, and gender politics, give readers plenty to think about. . . . A well-paced, enjoyable read."—Kirkus Reviews

"With an absorbing modern family saga story line and sympathetic, compelling characters, Syal’s novel trains a personal lens on ethical issues surrounding surrogacy and women’s rights."—Sonia Reppe, Library Journal

From the Publisher

Meera Syal, much celebrated in Britain as an actor, comedian, and novelist, is little known here, though that should change with the publication of The House of Hidden Mothers, her third novel. Fast paced, character rich, and, for the most part, deftly plotted, the book throws out a constellation of problematic issues arranged around a central one, that of the Indian surrogacy industry and the relationship between people who have nothing to sell but their bodies and those who can afford to avail themselves of them. As of this writing, the Indian government is in the process of regulating the trade and prohibiting surrogacy for foreign couples, but the matter is far from resolved, not least because surrogacy is the only means by which many Indian women have been able to provide for their own children's welfare and education. The question is so ethically complex as to have no satisfactory answer. In other words, it provides ideal material for a novel.

Shyama, daughter of Indian immigrants, is a successful London beauty salon owner and a woman of "a certain age" — forty-eight, to be exact. She is divorced from an unfaithful husband and living with her nineteen-year-old daughter, Tara. Also present is Toby, Shyama's partner of some six years, a gentle man fourteen years her junior. Meanwhile, her elderly parents, Prem and Sita, once refugees from Partition who have scrimped and saved all their lives, live right next door. Shyama and Toby have been trying to have a baby for four years, and the novel opens in a Harley Street fertility specialist's office, where Shyama finally learns that she has no viable eggs and an "inhospitable womb." Pregnancy is impossible, and it's devastating news, especially to her, a self-made woman used to overcoming barriers. It's a grim truth, she reflects, that "[i]n an age where you could cougar your way around town with a wrinkle-free smile, inside you were not as old as you felt, but as old as you actually were." Not to be balked in her quest for a baby, Shyama seizes on the idea of employing a surrogate mother.

This will be Mala, a woman living in poverty in an Indian village. Unable to complete her education because of the death of her father, she is married to Ram, an ignorant boor whose family received what they considered an inadequate dowry. This shortcoming has given Ram license — if license were needed — to treat Mala like chattel; and when he learns of the riches to be obtained by renting out his wife's womb at one of India's many surrogacy clinics, he is determined to act on it. But it is Mala who takes charge, seeing surrogacy as power and an escape from her degrading existence.

The plan is for Shyama and Toby to travel to India and for Mala to be impregnated with a donor egg and Toby's sperm — the idea being that the surrogate will have no substantive attachment to the baby. Mala will be housed at the clinic with the other gestating surrogates and, upon delivery, hand the baby over. Complexities of the plot, however, result in Shyama and Toby bringing Mala home to live with them during her — or, as they think of it, their — pregnancy. It does not make for a happy domestic scene. Tara is furious with her mother — partly because she has been completely left out of her decision to have another baby and partly because of her mother's general high-handedness and, not to put too fine a point on it, self-absorption. Beyond that lies a more wounding circumstance: while Shyama is in India dealing with the clinic, Tara is sexually assaulted. Traumatized, she feels she cannot confide in anyone, most especially her mother, who is wrapped up with the pregnancy.

For their part, Shyama's parents are bewildered by the whole idea of their middle-aged daughter's determination to have baby, especially in this manner; but, in addition, they are in torment thanks to another strand of the story. They had allowed Prem's niece and her husband stay temporarily in the apartment they had bought with their hard-earned money for their longed-for retirement in New Delhi. It is one of the many examples in these pages of one person's generosity being taken as stupidity by the recipient. Fifteen years later, the couple are still there, refusing to move even though, in addition to his own apartment, Prem's brother owns two other apartments — which he rents out. Prem could have recovered his apartment years ago simply by bribing the legal authorities — as the present occupant is doing. But instead, honorable and peace-loving, he is in misery, as is his wife.

The novel is a cornucopia of vexed situations: the trials of an older woman–younger man relationship; the anguish of infertility; mother-daughter conflict; the many questions surrounding surrogacy; sexual assault in the Western world and in India; female infanticide ("to save their parents the price of a crippling dowry"); the plight of poor Indian women and the status of women in India in general; Western feelings of entitlement; cultural dissonance; legal corruption; and dispossession of émigrés. It is truly remarkable how Syal can bring so many big topics into the storyline without making the book seem less a novel than a primer in twenty-first-century global ethics. But along with these matters the novel delves deeply, often with rueful humor, into the main characters' inner lives: the petty envies, tyrannies, doubts, hopes, regrets, and bubbles of joy. Further, Syal's writing is highly visual, summoning up milieu and mind-set in scene after scene, as, for instance, in her depiction of Mala's journey to New Delhi, squashed in a crowded train carriage with Ram. Among their fellow passengers are:

A worn-out mother with three children, barely months between them: she must have popped them out like winter peas, thought Mala. Of course, the whole carriage knew why: the eldest two were girls . . . They were obviously the rehearsal for the third child, a boy, visibly plumper than his sisters, his skin gleaming with coconut oil and with kohl around his eyes to ward off the evil-thinkers, nestling in his mama's lap, prince of them all.

In the end, everyone gets his or her lot in life straightened out, for better or worse, and in one case, rather too neatly — or perhaps I should say happily. But The House of Hidden Mothers remains a most rewarding novel and, I would add, an ideal selection for a book club, as it lends itself to endless and expansive discussion.

Katherine A. Powers reviews books widely and has been a finalist for the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle. She is the editor of Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life: The Letters of J. F. Powers, 1942–1963.

Reviewer: Katherine A. Powers

The Barnes & Noble Review

2016-03-16
A woman longing for a child jumps headlong into the dramatic world of international surrogacy in Syal's third novel (Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee, 2000, etc.). Shyama, a 48-year-old British Indian divorcée, lives in London close to her aging immigrant parents, Prem and Sita, and her 19-year old daughter, Tara. After a series of unsuccessful fertility treatments with Toby, her 34-year-old partner, Shyama decides to bypass her "inhospitable womb" by hiring a surrogate mother in India, where the process is unregulated and cheap. Despite the reservations of her daughter and parents and Toby's ambivalence about having a child, Shyama and Toby make the journey to Delhi to find a surrogate through a clinic specializing in assisted reproductive technology. There they meet Mala, a young married woman eager to escape her limited circumstances. As Mala begins her pregnancy on behalf of Shyama and Toby, they become entangled in each others' lives in unexpected and inadvisable ways, turning what begins as a simple matter of supply and demand into something far more complicated. Alongside this drama, Prem and Sita's struggles with a property in India and Tara's increasing alienation and loneliness are woven together to create a multitextured story of desires, disappointments, and family bonds. The novel inhabits many points of view, including Shyama's, Toby's, Mala's, and Tara's, as well as those of more minor characters. These varying perspectives mostly add interest to the narrative, but at times, they feel redundant and unnecessary, a forgivable flaw, since Syal so skillfully uses this bicultural cast of characters to explore the dramatic complexities of transnational surrogacy. The many themes of this novel, including generational conflicts, cultural myopia, economic privilege, and gender politics, give readers plenty to think about. Somewhat overpopulated with characters and issues, but ultimately this hefty novel is a well-paced, enjoyable read.

Kirkus Reviews