Review The House Of Hidden Mothers Translated By Meera Syal Accessible As EPub

my full review see here: sitelink co. uk/

Having read and loved Anita and Me earlier this year, I was intrigued to see her third novel was being released and then doubly excited to receive a review copy from Netgalley.
Meera Syal is one of those allround amazing people who seem to excel at everything they set their hands to which would be irritating if she was not so generally awesome with it.
Novelist, standup, actress, playwright, social commentator she is a woman of many, many talents, The House of Hidden Mothers is a novel written with passion and intelligence and centres on some very timely subject matter commercial surrogacy and the situation of women in twentyfirst century India.
It lacks the focus that made Anita and Me such a classic but still feels like an important novel raising issues that need to be discussed,

The main character is Shyama mids, divorced, AngloIndian with an emphasis on the Anglo, She has a nineteen yearold daughter Tara, a thirty yearold partner Toby and she runs a thriving salon, From the very beginning, it was almost distractingly clear that it in the inevitable adaptation, Shyama will be played by Syal, The novel opens with her visiting an expensive clinic to be told once and for all that she will never conceive or carry the longedfor child she so craves.
After some discussion, she and Toby decide to resort to surrogacy, with their destination being India recent surrogacy capital of the world until Januarywhen new laws were put in place.
In effect, Shyama is making the return journey pilgrimage that her parents made decades previously they went to Britain to find a new life, Shyama returns to find a baby.


She shares the narrative with Mala, a newlymarried young woman whose husband has been looking at her strangely, A woman in the village had left while heavily pregnant and returned with no baby but with a host of electrical goods the rewards for commercial surrogacy.
As Mala finds herself pressganged by her husband into doing the same thing, the two storylines meet and converge, The House of Hidden Mothers is ambitious in its range and scope, attempting to offer a commentary on the state of India as a nation as well as the position of women within the world as a whole.


Surrogacy is a very emotive issue and has the power to grab headlines whenever things go wrong, Like Ian McEwans The Children Act, reallife cases are referenced incidents of babies abandoned by parents who changed their minds the fertility doctor notes that couples often think that having the child will fix everything and when the goal is reached, the blemishes in the relationship are laid bare.
Dr Passi recalls with distaste being approached by several couples who viewed surrogacy as a laboursaving device highflying executives who preferred to outsource their gestation, Toby and Shyama meet several couples who rave about how Dr Passi is the very best and that nothing goes wrong on her watch which indicates to the reader that of course, events are not about to run smoothly.


That being said, there are no villains here, Dr Passi is no unscrupulous charlatan, she has business concerns but is also determined to put her children through medical school and is running to a deadline when regulations will tighten around commercial surrogacy in India.
She is no ruthless opportunist and Syal leaves her motivations intriguingly fuzzy, The scene where she comforts a tearful surrogate mother who has gotten cold feet over giving up the baby she is carrying really stuck in my mind, as Dr Passi used no threats but simply explained gently how very difficult it would be for the woman to walk out of the clinic with the child.
Huge fees would need to be repaid, contracts broken and at the end of the day, the woman would need to explain a changeling child in a remote rural village.
I was reminded of Family Secrets, how unmarried mothers were pressured into giving up their babies even though there was no legal requirement for them to do so simply by the force of persuasion and officiallooking forms.
It sat uncomfortably with me that the clinic deliberately used women from rural villages, no doubt because those were the only ones willing to put their bodies through that but also because they were likely to be uneducated and so have no methods of redress.
The world has moved on since those days but The House of Hidden Mothers makes one wonder if perhaps we are moving a little too close to the world of The Handmaids Tale for comfort.


Syal contrasts the way in which Shyama the beauty therapist holds off the exterior signs of aging but is unable to stave off what is going on internally, In an age where you could redefine ageing and cougar your way around town with a wrinklefree smile, inside you were not as old as you felt, but as old as you actually were.
Her bleary cynicism is the source for a good deal of the humour but she still has the face the judgment of friends who wonder if she wants another child in order to make up for the mistakes she made with her daughter Tara.
Generational tensions abound with Shyamas parents raising their eyebrows gently at their daughters decision and Tara huffing heavily at the other end of the age spectrum, I was a teenager when my own mother remarried and I feel that Syal captured something of the disorientation which comes with the situation, At the same time though, observing Taras more hormonal behaviour, I felt like referring her to Anne Fines Step By Wicked Step, that wonderful manual of How To Behave In A Stepfamily, specifically the chapter Green Pyjamas a.
k. a. StepfamiliesMind Your Manners.

Tara was the character who developed the most over the course of the novel but she was problematic for me, We saw her go from sulky and sullen sitting on the sofa to courageous crusader and while there were obvious points which prompted this, she ended up feeling like too much of a proxy for Syal to be convincing.
Far more effective were the quiet sadnesses of Prem and Sita, Shyamas parents, who find themselves locked in a Jarndyce and Jarndycestyle court battle to regain control of their Delhibased flat which has been illegally occupied by their nephews family for nearly a decade and a half.
Prem is brokenhearted to be so betrayed by the son of his favourite brother, still more so since said brother refuses to intervene but Prem stubbornly believes that right will win out eventually by contrast Sita is seethes silently, disgusted by the corruption within her birth country and determined to regain their property by fair means or foul.


The final chapters weave in the horrific Delhi bus rape of December, which still makes me want to cry nearly three years on, Indian law prevents the publication of the names of rape victims, so Syal uses the name widely used by the press at the time Nirbhaya, which means fearless.
Tara and Shyama find themselves in Delhi at the time of the crime and are swept up in the protests, I found myself wondering if Meera Syal had written The House of Hidden Mothers to voice her opinion on the case since her fury is obvious although eloquently written.
The horrific details of Nirbhayas injuries, the almost incredibly ignorant and offensive opinions voiced by men on how the attack was actually her own fault Syal is appalled by her mother country.
This is the first of her novels to take place in India and we feel her affection for it behind all of the disappointment but she knows it well enough to see to the truth.
Interestingly, when one of the characters visits a womens rape crisis centre, they are warned off trying to solve rape as a westerner, a telling aside from Syal as author she can fix nothing in this book, she can only observe and grieve for Nirbhaya and all like her.


On the surface, this could have been just a standard middleagedwomanfindshappiness story but The House of Hidden Mothers has far more to say for itself.
With so many competing voices Toby the kindly farm labourer Mala the village girl with dreams Shyama

the wouldbe secondtime Mum Tara the lost girl Prem the honourable man Sita the tiger mother it is not surprising that it did not have the same impact as Anita and Me but yet it was still highly effective and spoke for women who have no way of speaking for themselves.
.