by Manju KapurPenguin
~ Review in Halifax Herald, February 2010
Nina is a university lecturer of literature at a college in New Delhi. She is successful and relatively content, but she is also thirty with no marriage prospects in sight, a situation which causes her widowed mother much distress. Through a family acquaintance, Nina is introduced to Ananda, a dentist with a thriving practice in Halifax, NS. A marriage is arranged and Nina leaves her mother, her home and everything familiar to travel halfway around the world to live with her new husband.
Halifax has been kind to Ananda. He has made enormous efforts to fit in and embrace his adopted country. But life here is different. “Till Nina came to Canada she hadn’t know what lonely meant.” She misses her mother, her friends and the crowded, bustling life now unimaginably far away. Her husband talks “another language. Canadian perhaps.” She timidly ventures forth to the Halifax Memorial Library, taking solace in literature. “Silently she grieved, the only men in her life long dead authors.”
Set against the oppressive regime of Indira Ghandi, when “opposition was jailed, the press censored, demonstrations banned, (and) activists tortured,” The Immigrant tells the story of two people whose marriage is less than both of them want, in a country where their traditions and roles are neither understood nor supported. They are expected to be Nova Scotians. Canadian. .
In her first book, Difficult Daughters, Manju Kapur explores the roles of women in modern India as her heroine struggles against tradition, attempting to balance unbreakable family bonds against her need to find her own way.
In The Immigrant, the family bonds are just as unbreakable, but, far from home, the structure of the family is different. Nina struggles to find her place in Canadian society alone, without her extended family, and Ananda’s self centredness dismays her. They both struggle with rising tensions within the marriage which have far reaching and surprising repercussions.
