WARNING: This reckons with a portrayal of rape, sexual violence, and assault, and murder.
When I started Susham Bedi’s Havan (The Fire Sacrifice), I found that the third person omniscient narrator made the book a slog to get through. By the end, it became clear to me that its third person omniscience was an essential part of Susham Bedi’s obfuscation of second generation experiences. Her omniscient narrator reproduced the attitudes and the anxieties of the first generation. In doing so, it demoted second generation perspectives to non-existence. As a result, the second generation’s subjectivities are made completely unintelligible. The only individuals of the younger generation that Bedi cares to give three dimensionality in their subjectivity are Tanima and Anima, who grew up in India, and Kanika, who most closely reproduces the life her parents envision for her. Raju, who is the main character's son, is treated with narrational neglect for the whole book. He is only mentioned insofar as his loneliness and taste for violent comics, video games, and TV shows worry his mother, Guddo. She associates them with foreboding and unintelligible shadows cast by demons. Raju is nothing but a nightmarish caricature of what could go wrong raising a child in the diaspora. Likewise, his cousin Radhika is made out to have a near-mechanical level of antagonism against her parents. All of her actions are understood only insofar as they are in opposition to her parents' desires. She gets pregnant and contracts an STI in high school, she doesn’t go to a good college, and god forbid, she gets into disco. Bedi has her die by aimlessly wandering the streets in shock because she supposedly “caused” her father to have a stroke. In this state, she gets brutally gang raped and murdered. Not once in her life is her character given any desires, values, or agency. The second generation diasporic experience is only understood as a degradation of values, an empty and oppositional agency that is simply unintelligible. Her cousin, Arjun, is also condemned to this space of unintelligibility. He does well in school, and though he is very social with friends from his sports team and comes home late, his parents do not mind because of his grades. Unlike Radhika’s parents, Pinki and Santinder “felt that having too many rules would only make him rebellious or impede his development” (157). He ends up overdosing in a gay bar. Again, the narrator’s indifference to the perspective of the second generation erases his subjectivity, and makes this seem like some unexpected perversion of innocence that comes out of the blue. Bedi went out of her way to make sure that his experience, in conversation with Radhika’s, demonstrated the total lack of control that parents have over their children in the diaspora. No matter their approach, their children will fall into this world of unintelligible horrors. And this is how the book ends. Mr. Bartra, a lawyer from back home, assaults Guddo. She rebukes him, and says:
India flows along at its own speed, going forward or becoming modern, but we haven’t moved beyond the point where we were when we left it to come here… I’ve built my children’s lives on the traditions and social restrictions which I knew in my time. You know that time is moving ahead in India, but our time has stopped right where it was. Our present and our future are built on the India of our past. (177)
The implication is reactionary. Bedi constructs a situation in which the character associated with India that has "flowed along" is a married man assaulting a widow. The second generation, their parents’ best efforts, sink into unintelligible nightmares. In Bedi's world, it is only the first generation of the diaspora left who have tradition; who build. Despite Guddo's efforts to assert her agency over Mr. Bartra, the book closes in a moment where the third person narrator loses its omniscience to the end of reproducing the fear and confusion of Guddo’s experience. Raju quits his job and Guddo finds hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash in his drawer. The narration follows this discovery with frantic questions, confused sentences, and desperate fragments. The book ends doing the exact same work it did the whole time: it erases second generation subjectivity, but makes its second generation subjects out to be (all of a sudden) fallen. It renders the second generation through the first generation's perspective, condemning the second generation to unintelligibility.
At the end of the day, this is just as much of an insult to the first generation as it is to the second. The unintelligibility of second generation subjectivities is only the case because the first generation is rigidly unempathetic and even more conservative than their mainland counterparts. Though it’s a pessimistic perspective that denies joy to the diaspora, it could be done with (potentially comical) tact by juxtaposing the two subjectivities. But the narration, of course, doesn’t do this: it squarely reproduces the very problem it demonstrates. It dooms both generations in the diaspora to pain and suffering. It reproduces the very sentiments that do that work.
It is an insult to my Dida, my mother, and all of the joyful, accepting, and deeply empathic members of the South Asian diaspora who raised children who are proud of their heritage.