Avni Doshi wears her Booker prize-shortlisted turn (for Burnt Sugar/ Girl in White Cotton in 2020) lightly. “It’s something that happened, it was wonderful…but at the end of the day, it’s also in the past. Each book is sort of a fresh experience to some degree. And…once you actually start writing and thinking, all of that falls away,” she says over our video interview. Words that could also be true of the protagonist of her latest effort, The First House, published by HarperCollins India. As the unnamed narrator grapples with the end of her marriage, her enmeshment with her authoritarian family and her shifting sense of self, she begins to discover a fresh identity—one that exists alongside her previous one.
On the surface, the book may be about one woman’s reckoning with her husband leaving her, but Doshi wrote the book as a sort of exploration of midlife, and the “rupture of identity” that often accompanies it. In the years leading up to her own 40th birthday, the Dubai-based writer observed that almost everyone around her was going through some form of rupture, whether in marriage, motherhood, watching parents age or die, or illness, and that even people without an obvious external crisis were experiencing an internal shift. She became interested in the question of “Who am I now, now that I’m not all those identities that I clung to for so long?”
Every metaphor in the book (and there are many, many metaphors) speaks to that central conceit—a loosening of the intense need to cling to a fixed set of rules and roles accumulated in the first half of life. The classic midlife trope, as she sees it, is the shift from an outward focus on achievement to an inward question: “What was it all for?” From the Roman goddess Diana to the molting of cicadas, Vedic astrology (which the title alludes to) an itinerant cat, and Greek mythology, the allegories in The First House can be hard to keep up with. But their very fragmentation evokes the narrator’s fragmented grasp on reality. Doshi also suggests an alternate reading: one where the narrator was already living a half-life, wilfully blind to certain realities. When everything falls apart, it expands her worldview. She begins to process the end of her marriage through myth, giving the experience a structure beyond her own interiority.
Even with all the insignia and imagery, the book remains grounded in real people and situations. The narrator’s sister, who Doshi calls “a soldier”, exists as “more apparition than flesh and blood”, but her entanglement with her authoritarian family is a reminder that marriages and relationships are political arenas, often operating like totalitarian regimes. “I think between the two sisters there’s a strange kind of love, but for the older sister to have greater intimacy with the younger one would require perhaps too much destabilisation, and vice versa,” Doshi says. Each sister protects herself differently: the protagonist runs away from the father’s home, while the older sister enmeshes herself so completely that it becomes her only available form of protection. “When you live under an authoritarian or fascist state, it doesn’t allow for a whole human being,” the writer explains. “There is a kind of cult mentality… a fragile identity that can’t tolerate any disturbance.”
Universal ideas that also extend to Doshi’s depiction of the marriage itself, grounding it in familiar truths. “Financial abuse is a real thing that a lot of women silently go through.” The marriage also shows how capitalism and patriarchy are “in bed with one another”, asking “which labour is remunerated versus which isn’t”.
Doshi is not interested in heroism. The protagonist of The First House makes no pretence of courage or independence when her husband leaves her. While this is also a function of the timeframe, which is the immediate aftermath of being asked for a divorce, she is, for the most part, frustrating; a woman who can neither drive, nor run the house in his absence, and who is completely at sea when the patriarchal structures that uphold her life come apart at the seams. But that is the point. “She doesn’t know who she is anymore. She may change, but we don’t really know,” she says.
Indeed, one is left with a sense that the narrator is also asking the same questions, as Doshi says: “What was the fairytale that I was sold? And what do I do now that I’ve realised it doesn’t really stand up?” But unlike fairytales, this one has no neat tropes or flat archetypes, or a storybook ending to tie up its loose ends. The book resists redemption, leaving the reader to draw their own conclusions.
That is not necessarily a bad thing, according to Doshi. It offers the protagonist a kind of invisibility, allowing her to exist outside the sanctioned roles of wife and daughter. “She doesn’t really fit into the boxes. She’s an outcast now,” she explains.
Ultimately, though, there are costs and benefits to invisibility. “When you are different; birthed anew...it becomes a question mark which relationships are going to remain, and which aren’t. The question is, is she free? There’s something painful, about not being seen…about invisibility. At the same time, is that the requirement for freedom for a woman?” These are questions the novel leaves unresolved, and ones the reader is left to grapple with long after the last page.