Contemporary Authors

• The Private Life of Mrs Sharma ( novel) Bloomsbury (New Delhi, India), 2015

• Overwinter - 2012 Hachette Book Publishing India Pvt Ltd, Sector 44, Gurugram, Haryana 122003, India

• The Asian Writer - http://theasianwriter.co.uk/2016/02/ratika-kapur/

  Ratika Kapur
  February 5, 2016Farhana Shaikh

  Q. The Private Life of Mrs Sharma is the second novel that you’ve written. Much has been said and written about writing that difficult ‘second novel’. What mindset were you in when you started?

  I think the difficulty with the second novel that you refer to applies to those (fortunate?) folks whose first books met with great success and who feel a tremendous amount of pressure in recreating that success with their subsequent works. My first novel, Overwinter, enjoyed critical acclaim but it was no great commercial success, and so I did not suffer that kind of pressure. That said, when I began my second book I was beset by other kinds of difficulties, difficulties that largely had to do with what I felt were great literary risks that I was about to take.

  Q. You’ve taken a huge leap of faith in creating a character who is most un-likeable. In Mrs Sharma I found someone who really rattled me, she’s manipulative and really gets under your skin. What were your fears about writing a character that isn’t someone you’d invite for tea?

  A writer doesn’t have to create characters who will necessarily win a popularity contest. In fact I believe one of the writer’s moral responsibilities is to strive to bridge distances, to help readers to connect with people they might not otherwise be able to connect with. It’s not difficult to get a reader to care for someone who is likeable or intrinsically sympathetic. The challenge comes with characters who have sharp corners but are still human.

  Q. You’ve got this seemingly ordinary middle class woman in Mrs Sharma who from a reader’s point of view, you really want to like, but you know, she’s lying to you, and she carries on lying to you (and probably herself). She’s basically in denial. What have your experiences been of people like her, who live in a peaceful ignorance of how their world really is and who they really are?

  It would be difficult to claim in all honesty that we are all not somewhat self-deluded, to a lesser or greater degree, wouldn’t it? I think we have all met people who are self-deluded. Deluding oneself is a way of coping. If we faced the world in all its reality then it would be difficult to get out of bed in the morning. Even for those who hold tremendous wealth or wield a lot of power, if they were to remind themselves every day that in a limited time they will be dead, life would be difficult. Self-delusion, I think, is a keystone of the human experience.

  Q. Having said that, there are parts of Mrs Sharma’s personality: her frankness, her simplicity, her lack of self-reflection that we can all relate to and which add lightness to the book. How did you strike the balance between this and the darker under-currents of the book?

  It is not really a question of balance; it is about the apprehension of a person in full, about the inextricable interconnected-ness of the different aspects of a person’s personality. The one aspect defines or shades the other, the other is likewise thrown into relief by the one.

  Q. Human desire for control is a fascinating thing. What research did you do on the mindset of people who have a desire to control everything about their life?

  I don’t think a novelist needs to go too far to find people who are looking to exert control over their lives. Each one of us has some sort of deep-rooted impulse for control. It is only highly evolved people who, Buddha-like, accept the world for what it is and our transitory existences for what they are.

  Q. Do you think the relationship between Modernity and Tradition can be so destructive, especially when they clash?

  I think this has been a theme of Hindi cinema for several decades. Today the encounter is more nuanced and being staged in different terms. Tradition is bleeding into something that would be better described as conservativeness. The goals that are considered conventional today were impossible to imagine two decades ago, and the possibilities of an unconventional life are also vastly expanded. I guess what I am saying is that the old binary of modernity versus tradition has now received several upgrades. And it is necessary for us to pay close attention to what has changed and what has remained the same.

  Q. You’ve returned to themes of family secrets and betrayal that were present in your first novel, Overwinter and explore further how destructive / or seemingly in control things can be in someone’s head. What is it about these themes that interests you as a writer?

  Family is certainly central to both my novels – family and love and sex, and the manner in which the modern Indian zeitgeist shapes these aspects of our lives. I guess I am essentially interested in family and the threats to the order, the stability, the protocols that are the foundation upon which the notion of family is so carefully built. And as for the destructiveness of particular ways of thinking, isn’t that on display all around us? From the tiniest things that might only affect a household to large things that affect huge populations, we see how ideas, thoughts, concepts control people and cause destruction.

  Q. I read some reviews which speak of Mrs Sharma’s teenage son as ‘difficult’ and I was like, that’s how it starts. She’s (Mrs Sharma) totally manipulated them. What’s surprised you most about people’s reaction to the book?

  In a first person narrative, the reader is (hopefully) drawn into the world of the main character, and the reader sometimes uncritically adopts the main character’s point of view. So I don’t find it surprising that one reviewer calls the son “difficult.” He is, in fact, difficult for Mrs Sharma, although another reviewer may say she is being unreasonable in labelling him as such.

  Q. Bringing it back to the craft of writing, what do you think writers can learn about working with difficult characters, or taking their work in a direction that can be surprising to readers?

  As I said before a character in a novel doesn’t have to win a popularity contest. The writer needs to attend to the impulses within her that draw her towards particular types, the impulses that fructify in the creation of a particular character. Eventually it is a form of self-knowledge that drives the process, an exercise in honesty, if you will. So, to answer your question more directly, a writer reading my work need not learn anything at all, or they can learn that a character needs to be internally consistent, and that is all a character needs to be.

  Q. Finally, what did you learn about yourself from working on this novel? What will you take-away for the next one?

  I guess one thing I learned is that you have to back yourself as a writer and take the risks you feel you need to take.

  Ratika Kapur‘s first novel, Overwinter, was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize. Elle magazine’s Indian edition included her in a Granta-inspired list of twenty writers under forty to look out for from South Asia. She lives in New Delhi with her husband and son. – See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/author/ratika-kapur/#sthash.KnKUghhR.dpuf

• Bloomsbury Publishing - http://www.bloomsbury.com/author/ratika-kapur/

  Ratika Kapur
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  Ratika Kapur's first novel, Overwinter, was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize. Elle magazine's Indian edition included her in a Granta-inspired list of twenty writers under forty to look out for from South Asia. She lives in New Delhi with her husband and son.

  ratikakapur.wordpress.com

  Writes: General Fiction

  Author of : The Private Life of Mrs Sharma

• NPR - http://www.npr.org/2016/12/25/506898925/author-interview-the-private-life-of-mrs-sharma

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  Author Interview: 'The Private Life Of Mrs. Sharma'

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  December 25, 20168:47 AM ET
  Heard on Weekend Edition Sunday
  Renuka Sharma is a dutiful wife and a devoted mother. Life is going as planned until she meets a man at the metro station, and begins an affair. NPR's Ailsa Chang talks to Ratika Kapur about her book.

  AILSA CHANG, HOST:

  Renuka Sharma is not a cheap woman. She'll be the first to tell you that. She is a dutiful wife, a devoted mother and the central character Ratika Kapur's new novel "The Private Life Of Mrs. Sharma." When Renuka meets a man at a train station, she's faced with a question. How long can someone deprive herself of pleasure today because she's always planning for tomorrow? Ratika Kapur joins us from New Delhi to talk about her latest book.

  So glad you could be with us.

  RATIKA KAPUR: Ah, thank you for having me.

  CHANG: So just first tell us about your title character Renuka Sharma, or Renu, as she calls herself. Where is she in her life on the day we meet her?

  KAPUR: Renu is about 37 years old. She's a small-town girl. She moves to the big city when she gets married. Her husband is away in Dubai trying to make some money for their future plans, and she's holding fort in Delhi with her in-laws and her 14-year-old son. And Renu was the one who sent her husband to Dubai. What does that tell us about her?

  KAPUR: Yeah, that's definitely just one of many signs of her need to fulfill this middle-class, new Indian dream that she has of, you know, a nice apartment with backup electricity and running water. And she has very, very clear ideas about where she wants her life and the life of her family. She feels that she's sort of trapped in this kind of prison of poverty which she wants to try and break out of. And she will go to any lengths in order to break out of it.

  CHANG: I mean, there's no question that Renu's constant sacrifice and planning has led her to lead a very lonely life. She seems unhappy. And one day, she meets a man named Vineet and starts an affair with him. Tell us about Vineet. What is he to her, an escape from duty?

  KAPUR: She does say that being with him is like being on holiday because I don't think she's ever had space. I mean, there's just perpetual domestic demands on her. So it's not - I don't think it's simply an affair in sort of conventional terms where, you know, she needs sex or, you know, her husband's not there and there's no one else to sleep with and she needs that kind of physical intimacy. I'm sure she needs that do, but I think as important would be this ability to just, like, switch off.

  CHANG: Yeah. I mean, what was also really interesting watching the affair develop was that Renu still refuses to let go of her self-image as a respectable woman. She rationalizes away any wrongdoing on her part. She even convinces herself that her husband is probably cheating on her, too, in Dubai?

  KAPUR: You know, I think there are certain decisions that we make which may not necessarily sit well even with how we think, let alone what the rest of the world thinks. And sometimes, the only way to justify, I think, is through this sort of self-delusion.

  CHANG: Yeah.

  KAPUR: Look, all of us, in some sense, exercise self-delusion. I mean, you wake up in the morning. I'm not going to think that - yes, in, you know, X number of years, I'm going to be dead because then I probably wouldn't want to get out of bed.

  CHANG: (Laughter).

  KAPUR: So I mean, there are degrees and degrees of it. Of course, she takes it to one extreme.

  CHANG: Perhaps the biggest self-delusion of Renu is that she has this affair under control. I was wondering, could I have you read something?

  KAPUR: Absolutely.

  (Reading) See, whatever you do - good or bad, right or wrong - it is very, very important to set limits. And I know my limits, and I have set them. I can meet Vineet from time to time, enjoy his mind, enjoy his body. But I'm a good woman. I have a child and a husband and in-laws and a job. And I have duties towards each and every one of these. And I don't like to boast, but the truth is that I've always fulfilled my duties without fail. And I will keep fulfilling my duties until the day that I die.

  CHANG: What fascinated me about that passage is that it reads like what women often accuse men of doing when it comes to sex - that men can have sex with no emotional attachment, that men can exit at any time.

  KAPUR: Yeah, this is the sort of reversal in that.

  CHANG: Exactly. And, you know, maybe this shows my double standards, but it's more jarring when I hear a woman talk like this. Do you think women are expected to talk about sex differently?

  KAPUR: Oh, absolutely. But I think she's not doing that to try and assert her, sort of, feminism. She's doing that simply to say that I'm just having fun. But remember - I mean, what's more important is that I'm still a good wife, and I still do my duties. And it's still about her husband and her son and the apartment with the Italian marble and all of that.

  CHANG: But you don't think Renu sees any contradiction between her having an affair and being a dutiful wife?

  KAPUR: She doesn't allow herself to see that contradiction. Her delusion - her self-delusion allows her to just sort of, you know, overlook this contradiction.

  CHANG: Ratika Kapur - her new book is called "The Private Life Of Mrs. Sharma."

  Thank you so much for being with us.

  KAPUR: Thank you. Thank you.

  Copyright © 2016 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

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• The Rumpus - http://therumpus.net/2017/05/reading-across-cultures-a-conversation-with-ratika-kapur/

  Reading across Cultures: A Conversation with Ratika Kapur
  BY CATHERINE CUSICK
  May 1st, 2017

  No one ever said affairs weren’t messy.

  Ratika Kapur’s second novel, The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma, is the story of a missed connection at a train station in Delhi that actually connects.

  Renuka Sharma, devoted wife and mother, has been proving her devotion for almost two years now, working part-time and caring for her in-laws and teenage son while her husband sends money back from Dubai. But when Renu’s commute provides a platform—literally—for some innocent brushes with a handsome hotelier, her devotion is tested as one thing inevitably leads to another.

  In this breezy, sensible primer on rationalizing infidelity, Renu convinces herself that no so-called thing is necessarily the thing anyone thinks it is, and that none of what she wants is inevitable unless she does everything in her power to make it happen.

  The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma is an impressive decoy of a novel, with a narrator whose look-over-here instincts inadvertently draw the reader’s attention to what’s behind every curtain. A fresh and obvious talent, Kapur plays out Renu’s desire to slip into something more comfortable wherever it leads, whether Renu seeks comfort in the bedroom, material wealth, or a relativist worldview where everything is, come to think of it, conveniently okay.

  I caught up with Kapur just before the book’s release here in the States this past December.

  ***

  The Rumpus: You quote Saul Bellow in your interview in The Hindu: “No amount of assertion will make an ounce of art.” How do you incorporate that in your approach to your own work?

  Ratika Kapur: I’ve always felt that a novelist must submerge the theories that might drive her art. Theories can inform the work, shape it, but they shouldn’t be asserted. If you want theories, ideas, assertions, why not read straight-up anthropology, say, or political science?

  I write to tell stories. Of course, there are concerns I have about the world that I wish to explore—gender and modernity and class, among other things—but the real push to begin writing and the subsequent driving force comes from something else, a picture or a person or a story I overheard, not from any theoretical concern.

  I am interested in the expression of the felt life, specifically, the big and small sufferings of ordinary life, more than I am interested in asserting ideas.

  Rumpus: Were you considering an international readership while writing The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma, after the success of Overwinter?

  Kapur: I didn’t think too much about the readership—that can be harmful to the writing process. In creating Renuka’s dialect of English, I did feel I was taking a kind of risk because native English speakers would find it a little plain, but apart from that, in terms of the setting and Renuka’s relationship to her social milieu, I didn’t make any conscious attempts to explain things to people who were not from India because I feel that such explanations undermine a book.

  Rumpus: I don’t know whether I am a typical American reader, but I definitely come to the book infused with some (stereo)typically liberal attitudes; one is a strong stomach for unconventional lifestyles. I recognize that Renu is struggling to reconcile modernity and Indian conservatism, but I wonder if some of the weight of her traditional role is lost on me because I have such different cultural expectations to contend with than Renu does. Do you think that compromises my understanding of the stakes?

  Kapur: This question is a really important one. Let me answer it in a roundabout way, if I may.

  Reading across cultures is an adventure. People in places like India have long read American/British/Western fiction and made some of the compromises you speak of. They have misunderstood many things and misunderstanding can lead to puzzlement. The reader who seeks to unpuzzle herself enters a path to discovering a larger world.

  This is where the burden splits equally between the reader and the writer. The reader’s burden is to try and project into a space that is both different and similar to her own, to not grip the similarities too tightly, to not gloss over the differences. The writer’s burden is to draw the unfamiliar reader into the world of the book, to make them feel what is at stake. Prose is our infinitely plastic material; we can create emotion out of it. It is our job to reach across the divide to the reader who doesn’t have the benefit of a life experience shared with the characters. But if we as writers fail, and to some extent we will fail, then the reader must reach across the divide too.

  Reading is a process of growth, after all. If a book doesn’t change you in some way, it’s probably not that good to begin with.

  Rumpus: I primarily found myself trying to recalibrate my cultural expectations around infidelity. I’m not married, grant you, but I consider extramarital affairs to be very common. Are affairs as big a deal in Delhi as Renu worries they are, or were they in Meerut when she was growing up? Is the double standard as intense for Indian women as she thinks it is, i.e. men can stray but women can’t? Or would her husband be as unfazed by the idea of her infidelity as she is by the idea of his, with the Anglo nurse?

  Kapur: I feel fiction creates a world whose truth need not look to the truths of the “real” world for validation. To my mind, the pathos of Renu’s situation does not lie in the relationship of the reality of the world to her perception of it. Attitudes change everywhere, from day to day, from place to place.

  My own attempt is not so much to understand how close or far Renu is from the realities that exist in her city on a day-to-day basis; it is a city of almost seventeen million, so almost every single attitude that one can think of probably has some representation somewhere within it. I am more interested in the structure of her own thinking, about the turn her life has taken, and how that structure shapes her actions and is shaped by them.

  Rumpus: There are a few shocks in the book, often portrayed as unthinkable at first, then rationalized in retrospect.

  Kapur: Aren’t there times in all our lives when we do things that were unthinkable to us before we did them? Sometimes things we do remain unthinkable despite our having done them. How do we live with the idea that we have done something so outrageous that we couldn’t even think it? Everyone figures out a mode for living on through, or after, such an event, a mode that allows them to reconcile the contradictions that this creates and face themselves in the mirror.

  Renuka’s life and the challenges it throws up keep putting her in situations that she may not have foreseen, making her do things she may have thought she would never do. To get past those things, to keep moving towards her goal, she has to rationalise whatever she does, much like, I believe, many of us do in our own lives.

  Rumpus: We only see Renu’s son Bobby through his mother’s ever-shifting opinions of him. If this almost silent character were narrating, would his thoughts shock Renu’s generation, or does he have a lot of the same struggles as they did and still do?

  Kapur: Some things change while some things stay the same. If Bobby were to talk to Renu she would likely be shocked by the things he knows and how he views the world because her own view of the world is limited. But if she listened, if she listened and tried to understand what he was saying, she would probably see that her son’s attitudes are in fact not that far from her own.

  Young people find it easy to hide their conventional thinking: break a taboo here or there, dress differently, wear your hair a new way and older people think of you as bold and unconventional. But below all that lies the same substrate of uncertainty and fear that pushes people into conventional, comfortable modes of thinking.

  Rumpus: I thought when Bobby asked Renu not to tell his dad about the cooking classes, his request was very revealing—he would never want to hurt his father’s feelings, but he seemed to be picking up on his mother’s needs, too, acting to shield both parents from disappointment. Despite evidence to the contrary, I often had the sense that Renu dismissed the idea that the men in her life ever shared her questions or concerns. What taught Renu that suspicion? Why does she generally sidestep honesty?

  Kapur: I think women all over the world carry this suspicion to a greater or lesser extent; we all feel in one way or other that the men in our lives don’t care about our concerns to the extent that we care about theirs. Who taught us this suspicion? That’s a question that the world must answer. And until strong evidence emerges to the contrary, we will probably continue to carry this suspicion.

  The question of honesty is related but different. Renuka’s dishonesty is not the dishonesty of the powerful who could lead comfortable lives even if they lived honestly. Renuka’s dishonesty comes from a deeper place within her. The question you have asked—“Why does she sidestep honesty?”—is precisely the question I want my readers to ask.

  Rumpus: Renu is living out the lesson of what she saw as the cautionary tale of her parents’ mistakes with life, death, and money, but her ambitions for her own family earning its way out of poverty broke up three people who were otherwise a model of happy attachment: “But we were still prisoners of poverty. We were happy together, but together we were jailed.”

  How reliable is Renu’s account of their poverty? Is she instead a comfortably middle class social climber? Is masoor dal really that much worse than moong dal?

  Kapur: Masoor dal is not that much worse than moong dal, but a lot of comfortably middle class Indians live one or two economic shocks away from sliding down the fine-grained class ladder of urban India. But, that apart, I think it is true for most people that things we are most closely attached to are not, if seen by a detached observer, as important as they seem to us at the time. We ourselves may wonder later in our life why we were so hung up over something that now appears trivial. Forget about other people, we are unreliable respondents even to ourselves, and sometimes we do understand this at a later stage in our lives.

  Rumpus: Renu’s affair is a solution to a problem that she created herself: her husband’s absence. Why does romance lose out to pragmatism in her marriage, which satisfies her, while fidelity loses out to the often disappointing romance of her affair, which does not?

  Kapur: Why indeed! The pathos of Renuka’s situation lies in the question. Haven’t we all been there some time or other, neither hunting with the hounds, nor running with the hares, to invert the old proverb? Perhaps it is that people who want too much end up getting little or nothing. But if that was what I was trying to say in this book, that would make it a moral tale, a fable. And that’s certainly not what I was trying to do.

  Rumpus: How do you turn off your inner professional editor in the bursts when you are writing fiction?

  Kapur: I don’t. To be honest, I tried to shut her up, but like many editors, she’s persistent, dogged, and so I gave up trying. The writing process, then, is a slow-going one for me, but I’ve learnt to live with her.

  Rumpus: You’d mentioned a yen in DNA India for “some nerdy chitchat about the perfectly constructed sentence.” Let’s go there! If you had to pick a reigning champion, on a sentence level, who would you pick? Extra credit for writers who are alive and writing now.

  Kapur: I have several favorites. For today, however, I’d like to serve up James Salter, who, sadly, died last year, so no extra credit for that. But how about bonus points for an instance of his craftsmanship? This is from his novel All That Is: “They made love simply, straightforwardly—she saw the ceiling, he the sheets.” Now how’s that for mastery?

  Rumpus: What quote from literature, song, or prayer gives you strength in dark times?

  Kapur:

  Love is not the last room: there are others
  after it, the whole length of the corridor
  that has no end.

  This is from Yehuda Amichai’s poem “Near the Wall of a House.”

  ***

  Author Photograph © Amitabha Bagchi

  Catherine Cusick is the audience development editor of @Longreads. She was a rep at the American Booksellers Association for years, as well as the social editor for IndieBound, a nationwide local first movement. She lives in Harlem and tweets as @CusickCatherine. She lives in Harlem and tweets @CusickCatherine More from this author →

• Ratika Kapur - https://ratikakapur.wordpress.com/

  About

  Ratika Kapur is the author of two novels, The Private Life of Mrs Sharma (Bloomsbury) and Overwinter (Hachette India).

6/30/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Print Marked Items
Ratika Kapur: THE PRIVATE LIFE OF MRS.
SHARMA
Kirkus Reviews.
(Oct. 1, 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Ratika Kapur THE PRIVATE LIFE OF MRS. SHARMA Bloomsbury (Adult Fiction) 16.00 ISBN: 978-1-4088-7364-9
In contradictory modern India, an urban womans private confession becomes a portrait, and perhaps an indictment, of
21st-century globalism. The novel opens with 37-year-old Renuka Sharma describing her first encounter with a stylish
man at a Delhi metro station. His name is Vineet Sehgal, he is 30 years old, and he works in a boutique hotel in
Gurgaon, a rapidly growing financial hub on the outskirts of Delhi. Renuka and Vineet soon become chaste but
frequent companions, and she seems to learn everything there is to know about him. In return, Vineet has little
curiosity about the facts of Renukas life. She is never forced to tell him that she's married, that her husband works in
Dubai, that she lives with her 15-year-old son, Bobby, in a small flat, or even that her mother died when she was 13.
Those intimate details are reserved for the reader, details of her domestic life mingling with observations about
technology, poverty, ambition, real estate, respectability, and masturbation. As candid as her observations are, there are
times even in these pages when she withholds the truth. When her relationship with Vineet does become sexual, it is
stated casually, as an afterthought, and then expertly rationalized. Renuka seems to embody all the contradictions of
urban India in the 21st-century global economy, with its shiny new malls and underdeveloped infrastructure, its
growing wealth and collapsing middle class, its modernity and traditionalism. Her fraught, often humorous and
irreverent narration is a study in cognitive dissonance, in which she is constantly trying to reconcile the complex
stimuli of Delhi with the image of herself as a simple woman from a good family. Even as cultural products can feel
increasingly generic in our technologically advanced global marketplace, Kapur (Overwinter, 2012) proves that a
gifted writer can still powerfully capture a complex voice from a singular place and time.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Ratika Kapur: THE PRIVATE LIFE OF MRS. SHARMA." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Oct. 2016. General OneFile,
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p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA465181926&it=r&asid=a9c73313f801c2366768fc2806449b77.
Accessed 30 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A465181926
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The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma
Cortney Ophoff
Booklist.
113.5 (Nov. 1, 2016): p28.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
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Full Text:
The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma. By Ratika Kapur. Dec. 2016. 192p. Bloomsbury, paper, $16 (9781408873649).
Renuka Sharma considers herself a proper and respectable Indian woman. She is a dedicated wife and mother, caking
care of her son and her in-laws at home in Delhi, while her husband lives in Dubai, where there is more money to be
made. But she is not completely traditional. Working part-time in an upscale doctor's office, she is exposed to
intoxicating modernities, and she dreams of finding a place for her family, especially her son, in whom she tries to
instill a respect for learning and self-advancement in this upward-moving India. Then she meets a handsome young
stranger at the train station, and, like an Indian Anna Karenina, embarks on a truly modern relationship that will
forever change her life. The battle between then and now comes alive in Kapur's novel of life in an evolving India.
Renuka's inner conflict mirrors that of her nation's battle to participate in an increasingly global world while
maintaining traditions and cultural heritage. A beautiful, tragic, and highly recommended work by a writer previously
long-listed for the Man Asia Literary Prize.--Cortney Ophoff
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Ophoff, Cortney. "The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma." Booklist, 1 Nov. 2016, p. 28. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA471142801&it=r&asid=fd1b18d93ad29f0d4efa68cc6db7b798.
Accessed 30 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A471142801

• Newsday
  http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/books/the-private-life-of-mrs-sharma-review-ratika-kapur-s-clever-wise-novel-of-an-indian-housewife-1.12724807
  Word count: 751

  ‘The Private Life of Mrs Sharma’ review: Ratika Kapur’s clever, wise novel of an Indian housewife
  Updated December 14, 2016 6:00 AM
  By Marion Winik Special to Newsday

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  Ratika Kapur, author of
  Ratika Kapur, author of "The Private Life of Mrs Sharma." Photo Credit: Amitabha Bagchi

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  THE PRIVATE LIFE OF MRS SHARMA, by Ratika Kapur. Bloomsbury, 192 pp., $16 paper.
  “The Private Life of Mrs Sharma” is a short, simple novel, the first-person narrative of several months in the life of a woman in Delhi. There are just a few characters and settings, a straightforward plot and a wonderfully funny narrative voice. It is an easy pleasure to read.

  Yet I am certain I will remember this book for years to come. The points it makes about motherhood, responsibility and self-deception are all so close to home. At the same time, it takes place on the other side of the world. The feel of contemporary Indian life, caught between tradition and modernity, is brilliantly captured in the details of Mrs. Sharma’s predicament.

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  Mrs. Sharma’s husband is working in Dubai. He has been gone for over a year, and though coming home for a visit soon, he will remain there for years to come. As she explains, “People are always saying to me, Oh ho, you poor woman, your husband is so far away! . . . It is true that he is far away. . . . And it is true that I miss him. But what can I say? We have duties. As parents, as children, we have duties. I could keep my husband sitting in my lap all day, but when my in-laws grow older and get sick, who will pay for the hospital bills?”

  It is exactly this sense of duty that will lead to Mrs. Sharma’s Waterloo.

  As the novel opens, Mrs. Sharma meets a younger man, a hotel manager named Vineet, who intervenes on her behalf when there is an argument about her place in line in the metro. Because she can tell that he, like her, is a nice person from a good family, she accepts his invitation for coffee.

  This friendship, which Mrs. Sharma repeatedly points out is totally on the up-and-up, becomes the bright spot in her overburdened life. She lives with her adored 16-year-old son, Bobby, and her in-laws, Papaji and Mummyji, in a tiny apartment. She has a dull job as a receptionist in a doctor’s office. Bobby, for whom she foresees an MBA and a fancy career, has begun to rebel. He comes home one day so sick from bootleg liquor that he has to be hospitalized for a week. “Nobody in our family,” she says, “not even my uncle who gambled, nobody has ever, ever touched alcohol.” Unwilling to talk to her husband, in-laws or even Vineet, she bears the burden of worry and discipline on her own.

  Well, of course she can’t tell Vineet, because she hasn’t even told him that she is married. She plans to, just as soon as he asks — but he never asks her any questions. This deception is more a way of keeping him out of her real life than anything else, but that boundary will not hold.

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  In describing her unremitting sense of responsibility, Mrs. Sharma at one point repeats a story about two lizards on a ceiling. One asks the other if they might go on a little outing. Absolutely not! Is the reply. Who will hold up the ceiling?

  Mrs. Sharma insists this story has nothing to do with her life — because in her case, the duty is real. Yet the widening gap between what she feels she must do and what she is actually doing brings this story to an absolutely unpredictable end.

  Kapur’s first novel, “Overwinter,” was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize; “The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma” seems destined for such honors as well. I will be devouring all past and future work from this clever, wise writer.

• New York Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/08/books/review-private-life-of-mrs-sharma-ratika-kapur.html
  Word count: 1299

  BOOKS

  Review: In ‘The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma,’ a Search for Release
  Books of The Times
  By JENNIFER SENIOR DEC. 8, 2016
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  The brain is capable of remarkable flimflam. We act on impulse, and only later start looking for a logical justification for it; we somehow find ways to intellectually defend what’s in our gut. As the psychologist Jonathan Haidt likes to say, we rely on an inner lawyer, not an inner scientist, to do our moral reasoning.

  This lawyer works overtime when we make a mess of our love lives. (It is, arguably, one of the best reasons to keep that bulldog on retainer.) Renu, the mesmerizing narrator in Ratika Kapur’s “The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma,” has a gift for self-deception. It is baffling, then funny, and then quite poignant to witness.

  The novel opens with a chance encounter between Renu and Vineet, a gallant, self-assured man, at a metro station in Delhi. He’s 30, single, a striver; she’s 37, married, the mother of a teenage son. The two start spending time together — no lying to her husband involved, he is hard at work in Dubai — but it’s innocent stuff. They split samosas at a sweet shop. They munch on momos outside the train station. Then Vineet invites her to ride with him on his motorbike. Hmm.

  “I was not born yesterday,” Renu says. “I know what it can mean, I know how it can feel, to ride behind a man on a two-wheeler. I know how the man could slowly lean back into the woman sitting behind him until his body is pressing against her chest, while the woman’s hands could move from the handlebar behind her to the man’s waist and then finally rest on his thighs as she leans forward against him.”

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  But would she ever allow such untoward physical contact? She would not. She is a respectable woman from a respectable family! And Vineet is far too upstanding to play any games, she is sure of it. “That is why I agreed to go out with him,” she says. “I agreed to go out with him and I don’t think that it was wrong.”

  Other things that Renu does not, as this story progresses, believe are wrong: Visiting Vineet at the upscale hotel where he works as a manager. Visiting him at his house. Concealing from him that she has a husband and son.

  You can see how slippery this slope is. The two of them eventually slide right into bed.

  This is the second novel from Ms. Kapur, who lives in New Delhi. (Her first, “Overwinter,” was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize.) The story it tells is taut, focused; its wider setting, the new India, pops with life. But the real star of this show is Renu, the Mrs. Sharma of the book’s title. She starts in one dimension, then gradually plumps into three.

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  Ratika Kapur Credit Amitabha Bagchi
  Renu does not make a sympathetic first impression. She’s judgmental and pious, yet not above demanding kickbacks at her job if the cost of groceries has gone up. One of her favorite expressions is, “I don’t like to boast, but …” and then, boasts she does — about her son’s good looks, about her inner strength, about her sexiness. “My husband could never keep his hands off me,” she says. “He actually thinks that I have the most beautiful bones in the world, and he is a physiotherapist, so he has seen many, many bones in his life.”

  She’s both full of guile and guileless. A woman-child.

  Yet as the story hums along, we learn that Renu’s boasting belies an ocean of distress. She is lonely, broken, exhausted. She misses her husband. (When the story opens, he’s already been gone for 18 months.) She is a font of stoppered dreams. (She wanted to be a schoolteacher; instead, she’s a medical receptionist.) All around her, Delhi is blooming with gleaming new shopping malls and luxury apartment complexes. She lives in a rented flat with faltering electricity.

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  “It is a jail, a jail,” she says of her financial condition. The dream of breaking free is why her husband works in Dubai. He and Renu want a piece of the new India. But they will not be able to buy their apartment unless he stays in Dubai seven more years.

  And her brain has been annexed by worry. She cares for her in-laws, one of whom is fragile and diabetic. She cares for her 15-year-old son, Bobby, who’s indifferent to his studies and has recently discovered alcohol. “Who else is standing in line, waiting for my attention?” she asks. “I sometimes think that the head and heart that God gave me don’t actually belong to me.”

  As much as anything, “The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma” is about the limits of self-sacrifice. Even good teenagers make crash-test dummies of their parents, conducting blithe experiments in casual cruelty. “After all the work that you both have done,” Bobby asks, referring to Renu and his father, “do you actually think that your poor bodies will survive long enough to enjoy these great things?”

  Renu has to restrain herself from running to the bathroom to cry.

  So what she craves, really, is escape. Vineet is an escape. A vacation. She has never gone on a vacation, except her honeymoon. “When I am near him I feel calm,” she says. “I feel like I feel when I see photos of snow.”

  But does she find release? I cannot say without revealing how the novel resolves itself — it takes a couple of turns I didn’t expect. But we know, from experience, that someone’s desires must be thwarted for this kind of story to end. Affairs seldom last in perpetuity, and the shot-clock, in this case, is running: “The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma” marches toward Renu’s husband’s return from Dubai for a long overdue family visit. As the days wind down, the tension builds. We may all have stories to explain ourselves. But others are much harder to figure out.

  Follow Jennifer Senior on Twitter: @JenSeniorNY

  The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma
  By Ratika Kapur
  185 pages. Bloomsbury. $16.

  A version of this review appears in print on Decemb

• The Irish Times
  https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/review-the-private-life-of-mrs-sharma-by-ratika-kapur-1.2471217
  Word count: 1040

  Review: The Private Life of Mrs Sharma, by Ratika Kapur
  Private lives and public duties in a changing India are explored in this tender, funny novel

  Sarah Gilmartin

  Sat, Dec 19, 2015, 01:00
  First published:
  Sat, Dec 19, 2015, 01:00

  BUY NOW

  Book Title:
  The Private Life of Mrs Sharma
  ISBN-13:
  9781408873649
  Author:
  Ratika Kapur
  Publisher:
  Bloomsbury
  Guideline Price:
  £12.99
  One sign of a great novel is an ending that seems shocking when you read it but entirely inevitable when you look back over the events of the book. The Indian writer Ratika Kapur’s The Private Life of Mrs Sharma delivers this punch both emotionally and in terms of its plot. Tender and funny, this short second novel grabs the reader from the outset and builds with an air of menace to an unavoidable close. It should feature prominently on awards lists in 2016.
  The tension between tradition and modernity in present-day India is at the centre of the book, whose narrator, Renuka Sharma, is a dutiful mother and wife who is holding the fort in Delhi while her husband tries to make the family’s fortune in Dubai. An attractive and industrious 37-year-old, Mrs Sharma works as a receptionist in a doctor’s clinic, in addition to taking care of her difficult teenage son, Bobby, and her aging parents-in-law. The family live in a one-bedroom apartment, which Mrs Sharma hopes to someday own.
  In May 2011, when we first meet her, Mrs Sharma’s husband has been in Dubai for 19 months and she is counting the days until he returns for a holiday in August. Although she misses him, she’s a sensible and pragmatic woman, bound by financial practicalities: “When my in-laws’ medical bills grow into lakhs of rupees, when my son has to do this further studies, who will save us? Will love and romance save us?”
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  As Mrs Sharma does her best to keep herself, her family and even her husband’s spirits afloat (through touching Skype chats), a chance meeting with a handsome young man at a Metro station changes her course. The self-possessed Vineet is standing “calmly in one place, like a statue of some great man, waiting for the train”. Mrs Sharma uncharacteristically agrees to meet him for coffee the following Sunday. A relationship begins, about which she initially deludes herself: “I am not interested in anything but friendship, the type of friendship shared between two women.”
  Her journey to enlightenment takes the reader on a trip through the social and economic inequalities of modern India. It is a tragic awakening, reminiscent of Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin’s masterpiece The Awakening.
  Mrs Sharma is in many ways a traditional Indian mother who wants her family, Bobby in particular, to embrace the new Indian Dream: shiny shopping malls, college education, an MBA, emigration to England or America, a corporate career.
  She rides in the ladies’ compartment of the train. She cooks and keeps house for her family. She finds herself alone for the first night in 17 years when her in-laws bring Bobby to a cricket match.
  But encroaching on her traditional perspective is her awareness of a new world unfolding around her. Barista cafés, mobile phones, digital cameras, pornography on the internet: “Man on top, woman on top, this style, that style, doggy style. I was not born yesterday.” As the metropolis of Delhi blooms around her, Mrs Sharma’s role in society remains confined.
  With her husband working abroad, the confinement is exacerbated. Mrs Sharma has all the burdens of a marriage with none of the benefits. The author’s poignant portrayal of the marriage as arranged but mutually loving and respectful means that there are no easy villains in this story. Mrs Sharma doesn’t meet with Vineet because she hates her husband; she meets with the exciting stranger because she misses him.
  Kapur, whose debut novel, Overwinter, was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2012, is a gifted writer, strong on symbolism. Food and drink in particular are used to highlight loss, change, patriarchal structures and economic divides. The author’s language is vivid and brutally honest. Rich Indian wives are “skinny ladies with fat bags”; the role of women varies little, whether at work or at home: “And what is a secretary actually? Isn’t she just a substitute wife for the boss?”
  Kapur has crafted an excellent voice to convey her themes. Calculating when she needs to be – among other things, she shaves pocket money from her boss’s expenses – Mrs Sharma is also upbeat and matter-of-fact: “Confusion is actually a sickness, a sickness suffered by the weak-minded.”
  The book offers a razor-sharp take on gender and economic inequalities. As voiced by Mrs Sharma, it never appears preachy, only a sad reflection of India’s social stratification: “Men like Doctor Sahib drink alcohol, but they are different to our men. They drink for different reasons. M¼en like Doctor Sahib drink because they are happy, not to become happy.”
  Mrs Sharma is a clever, resourceful woman who can see how the world is changing around her, the advantages that technology and money have brought to some in India. It is our privilege to meet her at a point in her life when she has taken a step back from her daily duties, perhaps for the first time ever, to ask: what can this new world offer me?

• South China Morning Post
  http://www.scmp.com/culture/books/article/2057600/book-review-private-life-mrs-sharma-funny-plaintive-story-modern
  Word count: 747

  Book review: The Private Life of Mrs Sharma – funny, plaintive story of a modern Indian housewife
  Travails of an Indian wife and mother, anchored in an unremitting sense of responsibility and relayed through a first-person narrative, strike a universal chord in a novel destined for honours
  PUBLISHED : Wednesday, 28 December, 2016, 11:03am
  UPDATED : Wednesday, 28 December, 2016, 11:19am

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  The Private Life of Mrs Sharma
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  by Ratika Kapur
  Bloomsbury
  4.5/5 stars
  The Private Life of Mrs Sharma is a short, simple novel, the first-person narrative of several months in the life of a woman in New Delhi. There are just a few characters and settings, a straightforward plot and a wonderfully funny narrative voice. It is an easy pleasure to read.
  Yet this book will be remembered for years to come. The points it makes about motherhood, responsibility and self-deception are all close to home. At the same time, the feel of contemporary Indian life, caught between tradition and modernity, is brilliantly captured in the details of Mrs Sharma’s predicament.
  Mrs Sharma’s husband is working in Dubai. He has been gone for more than a year, and though coming home for a visit soon, he will remain there for years to come. As she explains, “People are always saying to me, Oh ho, you poor woman, your husband is so far away! … It is true that he is far away … And it is true that I miss him. But what can I say? We have duties. As parents, as children, we have duties. I could keep my husband sitting in my lap all day, but when my in-laws grow older and get sick, who will pay for the hospital bills?”
  It is exactly this sense of duty that will lead to Mrs Sharma’s Waterloo.
  Book review: The Parcel by Anosh Irani – a sordid story of sex for sale in Mumbai and a hard-fought reclamation

  As the novel opens, Mrs Sharma meets a younger man, a hotel manager named Vineet, who intervenes on her behalf when there is an argument about her place in line in the metro. Because she can tell that he, like her, is a good person from a good family, she accepts his invitation for coffee.
  Author Ratika Kapur.
  This friendship, which Mrs Sharma repeatedly points out is totally on the up-and-up, becomes the bright spot in her overburdened life. She lives with her adored 16-year-old son, Bobby, and her in-laws, Papaji and Mummyji, in a tiny apartment. She has a dull job as a receptionist in a doctor’s office. Bobby, for whom she foresees an MBA and a fancy career, has begun to rebel. He comes home one day so sick from bootleg liquor that he has to be hospitalised for a week. “Nobody in our family,” she says, “not even my uncle who gambled, nobody has ever, ever touched alcohol.” Unwilling to talk to her husband, in-laws or even Vineet, she bears the burden of worry and discipline on her own.
  Well, of course she can’t tell Vineet, because she hasn’t even told him that she is married. She plans to, just as soon as he asks – but he never asks her any questions. This deception is more a way of keeping him out of her real life than anything else, but that boundary will not hold.
  How Malaysian Chinese author Selina Siak turned cancer experience into catalyst for her creativity

  In describing her unremitting sense of responsibility, Mrs Sharma at one point repeats a story about two lizards on a ceiling. One asks the other if they might go on a little outing. Absolutely not! Is the reply. Who will hold up the ceiling?
  Mrs Sharma insists this story has nothing to do with her life – because in her case, the duty is real. Yet the widening gap between what she feels she must do and what she is actually doing brings this story to an absolutely unpredictable end.
  Kapur’s first novel, Overwinter, was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize; The Private Life of Mrs Sharma seems destined for such honours as well.

• LiveMint
  http://www.livemint.com/Leisure/lVK7GA85cSJ8ZeOT90JEJJ/Book-review-The-Private-Life-Of-Mrs-Sharma.html
  Word count: 980

  Book review: The Private Life Of Mrs Sharma
  A portrait of a woman caught between duties and desires
  Jai Arjun Singh
  Ratika Kapur writes a very ‘Indian’ novel. Photo: Priyanka Parashar/Mint
  Ratika Kapur writes a very ‘Indian’ novel. Photo: Priyanka Parashar/Mint
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  Reading Ratika Kapur’s new novel, I had the refrain from Bob Dylan’s Ballad Of A Thin Man playing in my head: You know something’s happening but you don’t know what it is/ Do you, Mr Jones? Or, in this case, “Mrs Sharma”.

  This book’s beguiling voice belongs to a 37-year-old woman who works as a receptionist for a well-heeled doctor, and lives with her parents-in-law and teenage son in one of south Delhi’s more modest crannies while her husband is away working in Dubai. Now, she could be on the brink of a relationship with a man whom she has met at the Hauz Khas Metro station. Throughout her telling of this story, there are ambiguous moments that will make you wonder: Is Renuka Sharma lying to us, fooling herself, or being forthright in her own mysterious way?

  Consider the passage where she tells us she decided not to go for a cricket match with her family: “I did not want to go, so I said that I was tired and had to take some rest at home.” But in the very next paragraph we learn that she went instead to meet her new friend Vineet. Stealth is involved—“since everybody was going for the match, I thought that this would be a good chance”—even though her tone is matter of fact and she maintains that this is a platonic relationship (“he could have just been a Vineeta to me”). Or take the scene where Renuka, having spent a few days looking after her ill son, meets Vineet and feels she has to explain why she hasn’t been in touch. “I told him that I had been sick, and that was hardly a lie,” she says. “A child’s illness is also his mother’s.”

  “Hardly a lie.” But we know that she is in no hurry to reveal her marital status, and as the narrative proceeds, the sophistries add up. Some words and phrases are tellingly repeated. She uses “actually” and “obviously” a lot, and defensive-sounding formulations like “I should say here that…” and “I don’t think that it was wrong” and “I think that what I want to say is….” In a different sort of book, this may have felt like unimaginative or careless writing. But the choices are deliberate, they are perfect for this protagonist, and for all its apparent simplicity this may be one of the most carefully constructed novels I have read in a while. It reminded me of Kazuo Ishiguro’s work, his sympathetic but unreliable narrators: the bereaved mother looking back on her past in A Pale View Of Hills, the emotionally repressed butler in The Remains Of The Day, or the elderly painter defending his country’s belligerent history in An Artist Of The Floating World. Kapur’s book has a similar tremulousness, the sense of a life being lived on the brink, even though the tone remains outwardly composed.

  The Private Life Of Mrs Sharma: Bloomsbury, 185 pages, Rs.299.
  Click here for enlarge
  But this is also a very Indian novel, if there is such a thing. Mrs Sharma shows some of the contradictions you would expect in a person living in a society in churn. She is liberal in some ways, insular in others (note her throwaway references to Muslims, who, one senses, are another species of people who exist on the periphery of her consciousness, barely registered except as her husband’s employers or as people who fly planes into buildings). She was encouraged by her parents to study and pursue a career; her husband always listens to her advice, she tells us, “even though I am a woman”; she condemns her son for the sin of drinking alcohol, but seems to accept that “like all boys, and all men”, he looks at dirty pictures on the Internet; she shows sexual frankness, even admits to touching herself once in a while.
  The more we read, the more we learn about her—just when you think you have her pegged, another bit of information slips in and provides new food for thought. One of the achievements of this book is that despite her many vacillations, I never felt like passing judgement—so credible are her responses to her circumstances.

  The Private Life Of Mrs Sharma is a lovely portrait of a person caught between duties and desires, conformity and self-expression, yearning to fly freely and being the worried house-lizard who is afraid to go for an outing. It is a low-key book, not the sort that is likely to be hailed as one of the year’s “important” publications (I would be glad to be wrong about this), but it opens a door to a very particular inner world while dealing with a universal human theme: the need to pursue little moments of pleasure in the midst of a difficult, responsibility filled existence—and dealing with the guilt that accompanies that pursuit.

  Jai Arjun Singh is the author of The World Of Hrishikesh Mukherjee: The Filmmaker Everyone Loves.

  First Published: Fri, Jan 15 2016. 10 25 PM IST

• The Hindu
  http://www.thehindu.com/books/literary-review/The-inscrutable-Mrs.-Sharma/article14028676.ece
  Word count: 629

  LITERARY REVIEW
  The inscrutable Mrs. Sharma
  Radhika Santhanam JANUARY 30, 2016 16:15 IST
  UPDATED: SEPTEMBER 23, 2016 04:07 IST
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  The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma; Ratika Kapur, Bloomsbury Publishing, £12.99.
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  She seems ordinary, like the woman who might sit next to you on a train. But she is extraordinary too.

  Some book titles are mysterious, some provocative, some inexplicable. But a few stories are true to their titles; The Private Life of Mrs Sharma is one of them. Ratika Kapur’s fast-paced novel, spanning four months, is what the title says it is, about the secretive life of a certain Mrs. Sharma. The setting is a metropolis where people who beat their sons for drinking alcohol co-exist with those who drink two glasses of whiskey every night before bed; where women clad in capris are stared at by women in Chanderi sarees. The city and Mrs. Sharma’s life are examples of the juxtaposition of the modern with the traditional: those twin words we see frequently in matrimonial ads. Mrs. Sharma is, in fact, that ad, except that she is far from your ideal kind. Most people try to live in both worlds, but no one could possibly oscillate between them the way this woman in her 30s does. Not only do Mrs. Sharma’s thoughts swing at dizzying speed between her traditional duties and modern views, her actions reflect this conundrum.

  Kapur’s book stands out for its unique way of storytelling. There is only one voice. The reader steps into Mrs. Sharma’s shoes and is immediately drawn into her world, which is her family and her big secret. The prose is fresh and consistent; it shows Kapur’s keen observation and she does a fine job of “collapsing the distance between the English writer and her Hindi-speaking subjects”, as she sought to do.

  Mrs. Sharma is not easy to understand. She seems ordinary, the kind you would find yourself next to in the Metro train. She is a dutiful mother, a responsible daughter-in-law, a loving wife. She makes good kheer, she does her chores unfailingly, she cooks for her in-laws, and she believes that her father is broad-minded (he allows two people of different sub-castes to marry, after all).

  But Mrs. Sharma is also all those things that feminists talk about. She is fiercely ambitious. She believes that her husband made the right decision to move to Dubai — he will make enough money to buy them a good life several years later, she says. She brainwashes her son Bobby, who wants to become a chef, to do an MBA. She is feisty: she spits on the man who offers alcohol to her 15-year-old son. She talks about her sex life freely. She befriends a man she meets on the Metro train. Why can’t women be friends with men apart from their husbands, she asks. It’s what “modern women” do.

  But Mrs. Sharma’s impetuousness lands her in trouble. When her methodical world collapses into disarray, Mrs. Sharma panics — though she believes she’s calm — and crossing the boundaries obviously come at a heavy price.

  The book is an easy read, even as it weaves complex themes together skilfully. The language is brutally honest, the characterisation neat. Kapur evokes the complexities of Mrs. Sharma’s character to a T. The suspense is chilling and builds up well. But what disappoints is the climax, overly dramatic and rather out of character for the protagonist. But given Mrs. Sharma’s unpredictability, perhaps none of us really knows who Mrs. Sharma is.

  The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma; Ratika Kapur, Bloomsbury Publishing, £12.99.

• The Times of India
  http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/life-style/books/features/Book-review-The-Private-Life-of-Mrs-Sharma/articleshow/50495399.cms
  Word count: 722

  Book review: The Private Life of Mrs Sharma

  IANS | Updated: Jan 8, 2016, 02.31 PM IST

  Book review: The Private Life of Mrs Sharma
  Book review: The Private Life of Mrs Sharma
  Title : The Private Life of Mrs Sharma
  Author : Ratika Kapur
  Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
  Pages : 192
  Price :Rs.299
  How fragile are the edifices of the lives of the Indian middle class women, built with some dedication, self-sacrifice, ceaseless devotion to elders, control over urges and desires, dutiful obedience to traditional roles and unflinching attention to securing a glittering future for their progeny, but liable to tumble down and shatter irredeemably with one indiscretion - and its consequences.
  In her second novel, Ratika Kapur, whose debut "Overwinter" was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize, gives us the engagingly dramatic story of one such woman who conscientiously fulfills all her responsibilities - towards her (absent) husband, her wayward son and in-laws but has her unconscious inklings towards some time of life for herself - a "little holiday" from the daily cares and concerns - lead to grief when they actualise.
  The unravelling of the life of Renuka Sharma, "a dutiful wife, mother, and daughter-in-law holding the fort in a modest rental in Delhi while her husband tries to rack up savings in Dubai", begins with a chance meeting at a metro station in south Delhi. On way to Gurgaon where she works as a receptionist in a leading doctor's office, she starts to encounter a young man who impresses her with his sang-froid.
  "Other men played with their phones or looked down the train tunnel or walked up and down the platform or stared at women, but Vineet always stood calmly in one place, like a statue of some great man, waiting for the train," she tells us.
  Revisiting events of four enjoyable but ultimately turbulent and tragically-ending months - between May 7 to August 31, she recounts how they strike up a conversation, get acquainted, look out for each other, progress to occasional outings, including selecting an apartment for him in the suburbs - the epitome of middle-class aspiration and achievement - and ultimately to sex.
  As Mrs Sharma, who may follow traditional values but is no innocent, reasons: "This time it was not about my family but about my body. I decided to free my body. I decided to free my body of suffering, another type of suffering, obviously, but actually it is not that different. It is still the type of suffering that comes from the pain of need."
  The problem starts when an apparently besotted Vineet wants her to abandon her husband and son and marry him. Our Mrs Sharma is understandably put out, while contending with her domestic problems, including a son who disdains the future as a hot-shot businessman she has planned for him with his dream to become a chef and once nearly dying after drinking moonshine liquor with his friends.
  Compounding the trouble, Vineet lands up at her home and kicks up a real violent fuss - on the very day her husband, who has finally managed a spot of leave from his taxing job in Dubai, is on his way back. Losing it, she can only respond one way - and it will ruin her life, forget marriage and family.
  The story of Mrs Sharma, who has not had the pleasantest of childhoods and had to forget any aspirations to follow the path dictated by parents and social norms - frequently involving matrimony - and hopes to get a vicarious pleasure through children's achievements may be familiar to many but Kapur renders it in an inimitable way, down to the cadences of speech, pattern of thought and choices of recreation. And also the small dishonesties at work, like seeking a cut from the office stationery supplier - but to indulge her son with some luxury.
  It is the story of a complex - and in some ways, a flawed woman - but its real import is that we may have such a woman in our neighbourhood, in the bus or metro coach we are in, working in our office building, and never come to know of her thwarted aspirations and ambitions, or even give it a thought!

• The National
  http://www.thenational.ae/arts-life/the-review/20151126/7518/book-review-ratika-kapurs-the-private-life-of-mrs-sharma-is-a-universal-tale-for-our-times
  Word count: 904

  Book review: Ratika Kapur’s ‘The Private Life of Mrs Sharma’ is a universal tale for our times
  Lucy Scholes

  November 26, 2015 Updated: November 27, 2015 12:04 PM

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  Topics: Book reviews World literature The Review Writers
  Ratika Kapur’s second novel is a fresh, contemporary take on marriage and motherhood. Her somewhat unlikely heroine is 37-year-old Renuka Sharma. She has one son, 16-year-old Bobby, and lives with him and her in-laws in a small rental flat in Delhi, while her husband, a physiotherapist, spends most of the year working in Dubai.

  As well as looking after her family – trying to keep Bobby on the straight and narrow, which, in Renuka’s mind is good grades at school, followed by an MBA, and thereafter a life of air-conditioned luxury in a modern office; making sure her father-in-law doesn’t slip into a diabetic coma; and regular Skype calls to her absentee husband reassuring him that all is well on the home front – she works as a receptionist-cum-office manager for one of the city’s most prominent doctors.

  Renuka inspires immediate empathy. Written as a first person narrative in a confessional, conspiratorial down-to-earth tone, Kapur opens up both the heart and the mind of her heroine, someone juggling the same responsibilities as women the world over. Each of which comes with certain sacrifices and worries, but Renuka is not one to "timewaste" bemoaning life’s injustices.

  "Oh ho, you poor woman, your husband is so far away! Oh ho, you poor woman, you must be missing him such a lot!" people commiserate. "But what can I say?" she rationally explains. "We have duties. As parents, as children, we have duties."

  Yet Kapur cleverly sets her scene only to then sweep aside certain stereotypes with the same industry as a diligent housewife cleaning dust balls from behind and beneath her furniture.

  It’s not that Renuka doesn’t embrace traditional values. She makes sure one of the first things we know about her is that she’s "a respectable married lady who hails from a good family," and she’s never been flighty, not even as a teenager; and she loves her husband and her son. But her head is most definitely not in the sand.

  She’s well aware that all around her the world is changing – she knows what goes on: "I was not born yesterday" – and she eagerly explores what these shifting boundaries offer her in terms of opportunities to make the best of the less than ideal situation she finds herself in.

  She’s become a "bold woman" her husband jokes with her one day, but what does this really mean? Renuka ponders: "When people say, ‘Oh, look at that woman, she is so bold,’ what are they saying? Actually, the only thing that they are saying is that she is not scared to make certain types of decisions."

  Renuka is a woman not so much torn between two worlds as one tentatively testing the waters of modernity from the once-firm but now increasingly slippery banks of tradition.

  In her, Kapur has distilled an admirable and eminently plausible amalgamation of mixed values, but it’s a cocktail that’s deceptively potent, especially when combined with the character’s no-nonsense attitude to decision-making: the perfect storm, if one will, for disaster. What begins as a simple conversation with a fellow commuter on the Metro one morning quickly escalates to secret assignations in the afternoon.

  Renuka, however, is no Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary. Born of cool-headed logic, a measured response to her husband’s absence (and backed up by advice about the legitimacy of women’s "needs" in the medical magazines in the doctor’s waiting room), her infidelity is no act of romantic desperation.

  And, most significantly, like everything else Renuka does in the course of the novel, it’s a decision shot through with agency. Her circumstances might not be the most empowering, but passive is one thing Renuka isn’t.

  No doubt Kapur will garner praise for her portrait of contemporary India, a world in which deep-rooted traditions, especially when it comes to views about a woman’s role in society and the family, clash with modern ideas about equality and emancipation.

  She captures the nuances of this tension with a clarity that inspires a shrugging of one’s shoulders and a murmured, "What can we do? These are the realities of life today."

  At the same time though, Renuka is as much the universal everywoman as she is the product of a specific geographical place and historical period, and this is a novel that should speak to women everywhere.

  Lucy Scholes is a freelance journalist based in London who writes for The Independent, The Observer, The Daily Beast and BBC Culture.

• Numero Cinq
  http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2016/12/09/cats-away-review-private-life-mrs-sharma-ratika-kapur-natalia-sarkissian/
  Word count: 1901

  While the Cat’s Away | Review of The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma by Ratika Kapur — Natalia Sarkissian

  ratika-kapur

  Traditional values and modern manners continue to clash throughout the pages of this engrossing book, leading to a shocking yet thoroughly appropriate finale. —Natalia Sarkissian

  private-life

  The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma
  Ratika Kapur
  Bloomsbury, 2016
  192 pages; $16.00

  .
  India Gate, Hauz Khas, Gurgaon, Barista in SDA, Shefali Sweets, Greater Noida, Shoppers Stop—these are the signposts that pepper the opening pages of The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma, Ratika Kapur’s brilliant and darkly comic novel about globalization and womanhood in 21st century India.

  The names of these places speak of an ever-modernizing century New Delhi. The India Gate, the country’s memorial to the 82,000 fallen soldiers of WWI, was inaugurated in 1931 and sits astride the 19th century Rajpath. It is where today’s residents flock on Sundays, buying balloons or toy helicopters for their children and eating ice cream. The Hauz Khas neighborhood, one of the most affluent in South Delhi, is built around a medieval core. In addition to a 14th-century mosque, madrasa and royal tombs, it boasts art galleries, bistros and designer boutiques. Gurgaon, a satellite located thirty-two kilometers southwest of New Delhi, is witnessing rapid urbanization. Offices of many Fortune 500 companies now occupy the area’s mushrooming glass-and-steel skyscrapers. Likewise, cities like Greater Noida have grown rapidly to accommodate the vast inflow of newcomers with apartment buildings, some even with 24-hour-a-day water and electricity. Meanwhile, Barista in SDA (a café in South Delhi) sells Italian espresso, Shefali Sweets sells fine chocolate, while Shoppers Stop (an Indian chain akin to Zara and H&M) sells department store merchandise.

  It is against this backdrop of the old versus the new, of tradition pitted against modernity, that the first person narrator, the thirty-seven-year-old receptionist in a posh Gurgaon gynecologist’s office, Mrs. Renuka Sharma, meets a stranger and her life takes a series of unexpected turns.

  As befitting the global age and the theme of the novel, Mrs. Sharma’s husband is an absentee physiotherapist who has gone to Abu Dhabi to work and provide for his family. Gone for seventeen months when the novel opens, he earns a good salary that is totally tax-free. Frugal, he saves his money and then wire-transfers it to Mrs. Sharma’s bank account. Meanwhile, she lives with their fifteen-year-old son, Bobby. Since she is a traditionally dutiful wife and daughter-in-law, she has shifted to an apartment where she can also live with her in-laws during her husband’s absence, keeping watch over her father-in-law’s diabetes. But the sari-clad Mrs. Sharma is also technologically savvy; on Fridays and Sundays she Skypes with her husband on her Dell computer. Likewise, she is also contemporary in her ambitions:

  One day when my husband and I save enough money, I will start a training academy for Office Management, Computer Proficiency, Personality Development and Grooming, Business English, everything

  She therefore willingly makes the sacrifice to live apart from him, choosing to ignore the voices of those who would pity her.

  People are always saying to me, Oh ho, you poor woman, your husband is so far away! Oh ho, you poor woman, you must be missing him such a lot! Oh ho, you poor woman! and what not. It is true that he is far away [….] And it is true that I miss him. But what can I say? We have duties. As parents, as children, we have duties. I could keep my husband sitting in my lap all day, but when my in-laws grow older and get sick, who will pay for the hospital bills? The government? […] And what about my son’s education? […] Bobby has to do his MBA because he is going to work in a multinational company or an international bank.

  She knows that in order to realize her dreams she can’t afford to take a wrong step. “Watch your step. Watch each and every step you take,” she says. But fatally, she doesn’t heed her own advice.

  Although she claims she never talks to strangers, one day, after a young man at the Hauz Khas Metro station does her a small kindness, she quickly decides there’s no harm in thanking him. After all, his shirt is wrinkle-free, his pants have a very nice crease up the center of each leg and he wears a nice, striped tie—the kind she buys for Bobby. And days later, when the man, Vineet, asks her to go for a coffee at Barista, she agrees because it’s just an innocent outing. There is nothing wrong with later riding in his company’s limo and helping him choose an apartment to buy in Greater Noida. Nor is there anything amiss about accepting an invitation to go for an ice-cream on a motorcycle to India Gate.

  But even if she claims there is nothing wrong with meeting Vineet, Mrs. Sharma lies to her in-laws, telling them she is going out with girlfriends or is working late. At the same time, she also lies to Vineet by omission: “I am a wife and a mother of a fifteen-year-old boy. This he does not know. And he does not have to.”

  But most importantly, Mrs. Sharma lies to herself:

  Who is he to me? He is just some man who I saw on the Metro, and I don’t know how, but we started talking to each other, and I don’t know how, but we have become something that is a little bit like friends, and that is all. We go on short outings together. That is all. And he has not even bothered to ask me anything about myself. If he does ask me, which I don’t think will happen because he seems to be the type of person who does not care about such things as your father’s name, your husband’s name, your address, your work and what not, but if suddenly for some reason he does ask me I will tell him.

  Yet Vineet doesn’t ask her. As time goes by, Mrs. Sharma still keeps quiet. She doesn’t volunteer information about her troubles with her adolescent son who is misbehaving and needs his father. Nor does she tell him about her longing for physical closeness that the magazines in the gynecologist’s office where she works say is legitimate—even for women. She continues to see Vineet, keeping her secrets until events force them from her, rationalizing that she is merely following her husband’s advice to take a break from the pressures of “holding up the ceiling” of their home and nurturing their family.

  …[M]y husband is probably right. From time to time everybody has to take a little holiday from this life, from all the big and small everyday things […] Maybe that is why I enjoy meeting Vineet. During those times, all the small, little difficulties of everyday seem far away

  For the most part, she manages to avoid introspection, however, she does briefly reflect on how she has broken with tradition and done something unusual. But she soon closes the door on guilt and the skeletons that are fast accumulating in the closet: “I have become a bold woman. Still, what does it actually mean? What is a bold woman? What does she do? Isn’t she just a person who, like the men around her, does certain things without feeling scared?”

  And thus, Mrs. Sharma continues forward along the course she has charted, not watching her step, not holding up the ceiling. Traditional values and modern manners continue to clash throughout the pages of this engrossing book, leading to a shocking yet thoroughly appropriate finale.

  The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma is Ratika Kapur’s second novel; her first, Overwinter, which investigated the upper class of South Delhi, was long-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize. Kapur, who originally worked in publishing as a fiction editor, has said in a recent interview with The Hindu that she found inspiration for The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma while riding the Metro. Sitting in the ladies’ car, she began wondering about the middle-class women she was observing. Reflecting on the state of writing in English in India, she also realized that none of it addressed this ordinary urban population. Instead, it was, she says, all about the exotic or the elite, including her own work.

  One of this novel’s biggest challenges was posed by the language itself. Kapur wanted to use English in such a way that it was flavored by the urban Indian middle class, but without turning it into a parody—a challenge faced by all those who write in English about non-English realities. As she eloquently explains in the interview:

  Wondering what this Hindi-speaking middle class [was] thinking is how I got started. The problem was the prose. […] I spent probably two years trying to get the voice right. I was basically trying to create a specific kind of prose aesthetics that would give voice to lives whose intimacies are coloured in Hindi, but whose ambitions are articulated in English. […] I didn’t want to do that quaint, cutesy […] patronizing prose. I wanted to collapse that distance between the English writer and her Hindi-speaking subjects. The idiom of this book doesn’t actually exist. Ever since Raja Rao, we have been grappling with that question: how do you capture in English an experience that has been lived in another language?

  That the author succeeds admirably attests to her acute sensibility. One of her tools toward creating Mrs. Sharma’s particular, vivid voice, is to flavor Mrs. Sharma’s speech with genteel titles—bhaisahib, mummyji, papaji, Vineetji—drawing the reader into an intimate space. Another is to refer to places and things with acronyms without giving explanations—SDA, IIT, BeD—treating the reader as an insider, a friend, a confessor. But it is the style of the sentences themselves—the breathy, delicious sentences, the declarations that the reader knows are rationalizations—that render Kapur’s The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma with its unreliable narrator truly memorable.

  In today’s global world, with significant others frequently posted across the globe, many of Mrs. Sharma’s experiences and dilemmas are not unusual. Traditional values all over the world are increasingly under fire. The sympathetic reader shakes her head, sighing, sometimes wryly smiling, but not condemning. Kapur deftly shows that separation and loneliness are the 21st century’s hard rows to hoe and she does it with grace.

  —Natalia Sarkissian

  N5

  Natalia Sarkissian-001

  Natalia Sarkissian holds a BA and MA in art history, an MBA in international finance and an MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her writing and photographs have been published in the US and Italy by the University of Texas Press, IPSOA publishers, Corriere della Sera, The Huffington Post, Numéro Cinq and other publications. She divides her time between Italy and the United States.

• Houston Chronicle
  http://www.houstonchronicle.com/entertainment/books/article/Mrs-Sharma-takes-a-lover-In-new-novel-an-10786370.php
  Word count: 891

  Mrs. Sharma takes a lover: In new novel, an affair gets complicated
  By Alyson WardDecember 9, 2016

  0

  IMAGE 1 OF 2

  Ratika Kapur's "The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma" starts with a cliché: A woman and a man meet cute when they see each other nearly every morning at a metro station. But the brief novel, set in India, ends with a punch to the gut. Along the way, it's a game to pluck the truth from the narrator's shifting, spiraling point of view.

  Renuka Sharma is the woman on the metro platform, and it's through her eyes this first-person story unfolds. She is 37 and married with a 15-year-old son when she begins to admire a younger man in the Hauz Khas station in South Delhi.

  She sees Vineet most days at the metro train stop on her way to work - watches him standing there confidently in his pressed pants and flawless shirts. Eventually they begin to speak.

  Vineet is 30 and single. He never asks questions about her life, so for some time Renu lets him believe she, too, is single. "Actually, I thought that Vineet would ask me some questions," she says. "But maybe he is too shy. Or maybe he does not like to interfere in other people's lives. Or maybe he is just scared to know too much."

  At first it is a platonic relationship, but over a single summer it progresses: They meet for ice cream, then lunch, then at the boutique hotel where Vineet works.

  MORE INFORMATION

  'The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma'

  By Ratika Kapur

  Bloomsbury, 192 pp., $16

  Renu - she'd probably prefer that we call her Mrs. Sharma - is not the sort of woman who cheats on her husband. She wraps herself in saris and respectability; she has always clung to traditional beliefs. But from the beginning, she must lie to her family to make time to see Vineet. And, of course, she lies to Vineet.

  Renu's husband is working in Dubai, with few opportunities to return home. Renu, meanwhile, takes care of her in-laws and struggles with her son.

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  "It is difficult just now, I can't lie," she confesses. "I am alone, I am tired, and my husband is far away. But this is how it has to be."

  Her husband has urged her to learn to relax every once in a while. And if it relaxes her to spend time with Vineet, why shouldn't she enjoy their time together guilt-free?

  "I know my limits, and I have set them," she tells the reader and herself. "I can meet Vineet from time to time, enjoy his mind, enjoy his body. But I am a good woman."

  She learns to compartmentalize: "Anybody is free to call me bold or mad or both, but nobody can point a finger at me and say that I am not still a respectable woman," she says, defiant. Why should some meaningless extramarital sex diminish her virtue?

  Vineet, however, doesn't compartmentalize quite so well. He's not content to be her occasional distraction; he wants to come to her house, befriend her son, marry her.

  Her account is impersonal at first, holding the reader at arm's length to prove that she is proper and morally upstanding. By the end, she confesses to behaviors we didn't see coming, and with the same matter-of-fact frankness.

  "I have not gone mad," she insists early on, and she alludes to madness more often as time goes by. But as time goes by and her narration becomes a loop of twisted logic, what seemed like a figure of speech begins to sound more like diagnosis.

  Renu is utterly unlikable at times, but in a way that feels chillingly familiar: We can't help but see ourselves in her twisted justifications, her desire to have the world just as she wants it.

  In the end, she can't even have Vineet just the way she wants him. She's a tired mother seeking escape, but the escape she found has become another prison. By the end, when her husband comes home from Dubai for vacation, Renu's affair has become a miserable snarl of lies and half-truths, and she has to make a decision. The action she chooses is jaw-dropping and weird - and yet, looking back, it seems unavoidable. Watching Mrs. Sharma tangle her life into knots isn't easy, but it's impossible to look away.

  Alyson Ward
  Alyson Ward
  Staff Writer, Houston Chronicle

• Read Addict
  https://readaddict.com/the-private-life-of-mrs-sharma/
  Word count: 791

  The Private Life Of Mrs.Sharma
  April 2, 2016 In Books By Asha KD
  The Private Life of Mrs.Sharma
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  The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma, by Ratika Kapur, angers and soothes readers at the same time. It makes universal themes and yet it speaks in a very localized Indian theme. The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma is a book about a Delhi lady living in the contradictions of the traditional and modern Indian society. On the surface, she is just another of the millions of Indian middle-class ladies but on deeper examination the book reveals her uniqueness. Rather, she is a complex puzzle, very hard to be understood.

  So why should one read, The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma? The glimpse into the private life of Mrs. Sharma, as the title suggest, is a joyful one. Ratika Kapur brings out the daily contradictions of being rooted to the traditional Indian lifestyle while trying to be a reasonable lady. Mrs. Sharma is a common house-holder trying to maximize her living in a crowded megalopolis.

  She is true to her emotions yet feels responsible enough to let go many of her desires for the larger cause at hand. In a way, she represents the paradox of trying to live life to the fullest along with negotiating the situation at hand.

  Ratika Kapur’s prose may not impress the reader but it certainly delights a reader. She has weaved a lifetime through the four months in the life of her central character Mrs. Renuka Sharma. Mrs. Sharma’s husband is in Dubai making a living while she stays with her parents-in-law, along with their teenage son. Their South Delhi house is at the intersection between Indian value system, with less scope for individuality and the metro life of great sense of self.

  As she goes about her daily life in the metro train, she meets Vineet, whom she likes. Now, she seems independent and liberal enough, in her own way, to befriend a man, a rarity for a householder in Indian society. But she also feels the need to hide her marital status from him. The reader may wonder, about her ultimate position and hence glide through the pages.

  But, even she is unsure about her status, which makes The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma very strange, even to her self. One the one hand, Mrs. Sharma thinks its okay if her son’s raging hormones make him search for internet porn and on the other, gives him a sound thrashing after she finds out about his drinking adventure. Ratika Kapur’s heroine tries to balance her life in the extremes of a modern living and the traditional one, in her own peculiar way.

  Mrs.Sharma’s double-minded character, makes for a funny and absorbing read. Her narration makes Ratika Kapur’s novel more pleasurable to read. The clever word play gives the impression that she is being honest about her emotional responses in various situations but her actual words defy this logic.

  Mrs. Sharma has a very naive understanding of what being ‘modern’ means and wears this modernness on her sleeve. But she is also judgmental and quite reserved in her opinion on the other religions, as Ratika Kapur depicts, in the way Mrs.Sharma describes Muslims. She is representative of a large section of women living on the edge of confined idealism of Indian culture and the demands of a more liberal western way of living.

  Mrs.Sharma is desperate to achieve a balance between both her worlds but is failing to do just that and it lands her in serious trouble. The reader is amused at her refusal to be bracketed into any particular kind. She is in a relationship, maybe a platonic one, but her justification of being just friends with a man, who could just as easily have been a girl, is frank and misleading.

  Thus, the difficulties of Mrs.Sharma, in being the woman of her thoughts, is what drives makes Ratika Kapur’s novel a hit. It is in many ways a very candid and keenly observed take on the big city life in India. Ratika Kapur makes us see the world around through her, less than perfect character, who actually believes she is perfect. One cannot help, but admire Ratika Kapur’s success in enabling a reader to get a deep insight into the life of Indian female through that lady’s eyes.

  The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma is a very casual read, but one that will certainly make us keep reading.

• Shabd Studio
  http://shabdstudio.com/book-review-the-private-life-of-mrs-sharma/
  Word count: 595

  BOOK REVIEW: THE PRIVATE LIFE OF MRS. SHARMA
  January 14, 2016
  Fiction
  “When people say, ‘Oh, look at that woman, she is so bold,’ what are they saying? Actually, the only thing that they are saying is that she is not scared to make certain types of decisions.”- Mrs. Renuka Sharma, protagonist from The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma

  What happens when a married woman, living with her son and in-laws tries to go out and live a little? The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma by Ratika Kapur is a story about Mrs. Renuka Sharma. She has a son, 16-year-old Bobby and lives with her in-laws in a small rental flat in New Delhi, while her husband is based out in Dubai, working as a physiotherapist, saving for the family. A long distance marriage and perfect upbringing of her son keeps Renuka busy, until she creates a private life for herself, The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma.

  Mrs. Sharma’s life revolves around her clinic where she works as a office manager, her husband with whom she skypes twice a week, looking after a diabetic father in law who can go into diabetic coma anytime and trying to keep Bobby on a straight timeline, starting with good grades in school to college to an MBA degree and finally a swanky executive job in an air conditioned office.

  Besides these mundane tasks, she has a private life to handle, which started off with a conversation with a random stranger on Hauz Khas metro station. The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma, something which turned out to a total shocker!

  Overall, The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma is pretty amazing! The story starts with the background and mundane life but takes an unexpected turn which is like BAM! in your face. I mean when we were reading the book we never expected the plot to be like this.

  The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma inspires immediate sympathy with a first-hand account of her life. Though she cribs from time to time about her circumstances, but Mrs. Sharma is not someone who would waste her time bemoaning about injustices of her life. One minute she is crying and the other minute she transforms into an action taker, taking control of her son and her life.

  Mrs. Sharma claims that she was not born yesterday, she knows everything. She is traditional and down to earth in real life, but one corner of her brain can analyse moves of every single person in her life. She is calculative and practical as well. She knows the difference between need and want and she knows how to perfectly balance her regular and private life. Only one time, when she lost control, The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma happened.

  “I was not born yesterday” – and she keeps on experimenting with different opportunities to make best of the less ideal situation she comes across.

  You will love the smooth transition of The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma from a personal journal to a twist that will stun you! We fell in love with the simplicity and traditional methods of Mrs. Sharma and her bold avatar as well. Ratika Kapur has made sure that a perfect balance is there in the book. The Private Life of Mrs, Sharma is pretty engaging though you might feel it has been dragged a bit in the beginning. But all in all, it is one book that you must read!

• Outlook
  http://www.outlookindia.com/magazine/story/winter-light/280097
  Word count: 299

  12 MARCH 2012BOOKSREVIEWWinter Light A startlingly accomplished first novel, a stunning debut that ventures bravely into terrain where seasoned writers fear to treadMANJU KAKMailPrintShareShareAAA INCREASE TEXT SIZE
  OVERWINTERBY RATIKA KAPUR HACHETTE | PAGES: 248 | RS. 495
  Overwinter is a startlingly accomplished first novel, a stunning debut. Ratika Kapur ventures bravely into terrain where seasoned writers fear to tread, adeptly handling the nuances of incestuous love with sure and nimble prose.
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  Ketaki’s need and longing for Deepak Uncle, who lies comatose, leads her to fitfully seek other men, closer her own age, in casual sexual encounters. Handsome Deepak Uncle can no longer give her the devotion he once did, one that he denied his bitter, lonely wife, her own Neera Masi. But be it Ketaki’s standby lover, Krishan, or the courting Siddharth, she is unfulfilled. Kapur draws you into her existentialist dilemma which takes on the suspense of a thriller.
  South Delhi’s elite Defence Colony, Lodi gardens, Khan Market, Okhla Barrage, and Gymkhana Club form the backdrop but it’s not about the loneliness of two upper-middle-class Delhi women, nor of the secret that keeps them apart. But in its artful unravelling, a delicate, tenuous web is woven within which these intricate relationships are caught.
  Amongst today’s deluge of bestselling writers, Kapur’s voice rings with a rare integrity. And like a slow river reaching its estuary, the truth is finally revealed: the haunting betrayal of the two mute spectators—Ketaki’s father in New York and her Neera Masi in Delhi. Will Deepak’s death bring release, maybe new relationships, a new home, a healing?
  Overwinter’s freedom of choice for today’s young is more complex and challenging than we would allow for.

• The Sunday Guardian
  http://www.sunday-guardian.com/bookbeat/a-city-carefully-etched-a-life-closely-drawn
  Word count: 919

  Overwinter
  Ratika Kapur
  Hachette India
  Pages: 248 Rs. 495
  A city carefully etched, a life closely drawn
  Ratika Kapur’s debut novel is enriched by intricate characterisation, poignant writing and a protagonist who renders a voice to the contemporary Indian woman, writes Deepanjana Pal
  DEEPANJANA PAL 4th Mar 2012

  Kapur’s intimacy with Delhi lends a unique flavour to the work
  o overwinter is to wait out the worst of winter. Generally, animals overwinter by either migrating or hibernating. In Ratika Kapur's debut novel, the protagonist Ketaki faces a winter of not just discontent but also tragedy and confusion. Ostensibly, Ketaki has a charmed existence. She's a graphic designer who studied in the right school, went to New York and then returned to India. Her work is impressive and there are clients looking forward to her designs. She has her own flat. She has a string of lovers at her beck and call. There seem to be no struggles and no reasons for angst. But this well-ordered life is like the thin film of ice that covers a lake in winter. One misstep, and it can crack and plunge you into the tangled, emotional mess that lies beneath.

  Overwinter opens with Ketaki lying in the dark, on a bed next to a man. Her hand traces his body, from Adam's apple to his genitalia. The man is brain-dead and incapable of feeling or responding to her touch. He is also her uncle — her maasi's husband — and the man who raised her like a father. Ketaki's story, however, is not a standard story of abuse suffered silently within the confines of a family. Neither is it a Lolita-esque tale of how an older man lusted after a little girl. Overwinter unfurls elegantly, revealing unexpected details and twists that serve to both untangle and tighten the emotional knot that Ketaki carries around with her all the time. It impacts her every relationship, whether it is with her aunt, her biological father, her lovers or her dead mother. In terms of plot, events take place steadily: Ketaki's uncle suffers from a stroke, Ketaki finds herself in the middle of a modern arranged marriage setup, Ketaki's father tells her a family secret that has been the elephant in the room for decades, Ketaki's uncle dies, and so on. However, the story of Overwinter is one that is about the intangible feelings and abstract, emotional meanderings that rush like currents beneath the river of these plot points.

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  Overwinter is, in most parts, a finely-crafted novel and it’s not surprising that Kapur was on the longlist for the Man Asian Literary Prize for this book
  Somewhere near the middle, Ketaki wonders about herself while sitting with a group of friends, all of whom seem to be balanced and settled.

  "She has been told she is a coward, and then she has been hailed fearless; she has been called a bitch, a baby, an angel; kind, too kind, some have said; aggressive, depressive, a basket case, said others. Now does that make her more fascinating...Or just out-and-out f**ked up?"

  There are no simple answers in Overwinter, but the questions give both Ketaki and the reader a lot to think about. As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that while some people really are as balanced as they appear, few facades are uncomplicated. (Warning: those who don't like spoilers should skip to the next paragraph.) Ketaki learns from her father that her mother and uncle had a long-standing affair. As she remembers her own relationship with her uncle, she realises that he had been moulding her to become like her mother. He made her learn the same sport, he tried to encourage Ketaki to be an artist like her mother. Suddenly, Ketaki finds herself floundering. For years, her anchor has been the closeness she shared with her uncle. Now it seems that she was loved because he saw her as a clone of a dead woman.

  verwinter is written entirely from Ketaki's perspective, thus earning the novel the tag of being 'woman-centric'. Fortunately, Kapur's men are as credible as her women and they're not the villains. There are no bad guys in Overwinter; only many confused ones. The character of Ketaki doesn't feel conventional or clichéd. Instead, she feels powerfully real. Through Ketaki, Kapur eloquently articulates the complexity of being a woman in contemporary India and walking the tightrope of social expectations. Neera, Ketaki's aunt, is another beautifully-etched character. Her silences and whimsical shifts in mood seem petulant at first and then, as the novel delves deeper into family history, they become poignant indicators of how terribly trapped Neera felt in her circumstances.

  While there are sections that slacken the pace of the novel (particularly Ketaki's foray into arranged-marriage territory) and some of the conversations do feel forced, Overwinter is, in most parts, a finely-crafted novel and it's not surprising that Kapur was on the longlist for the Man Asian Literary Prize for this book. One of Kapur's strengths is her ability to describe her chosen setting, Delhi. From Sarus cranes in Okhla to Nizamuddin to Gurgaon, each area that Kapur has picked is perfect for the scenes that she locates in them. In her descriptions is the simple intimacy that comes from knowing a place well. Add to that well-observed characters, and you have a story that lingers with you.