Brick By Brick: Review of Avni Doshi’s ‘The First House’

First, a word about the title of Avni Doshi’s second novel. In astrology, the first house governs identity and the self. The unnamed narrator of The First House has a keen interest in astrology; it is, in fact, one of the means she relies on to make some sense of the chaos in her life. When readers first meet her, the narrator is 'unspooling' after her husband of 13 years walks into their room one night (their two daughters have been tucked into bed) and informs her that he doesn’t want to be married anymore. Doshi tracks the emotional aftermath of this revelation with a surgeon’s precision.

Like her Booker-shortlisted debut novel Burnt Sugar, The First House is a story of love and betrayal and the complex dynamics of familial bonds. At the heart of Burnt Sugar was a mother-daughter duo whose relationship had plenty of shades of darkness. The First House too is darkly hypnotic, weighed down by heartbreak, and occasionally uplifted by glimmers of self-awareness and the yearning for renewal.

Right at the start of the novel, the narrator is stripped of the protection of the familiar. Her new reality leaves her utterly disoriented. The markers of her life—marriage, a home in suburban America, the roles of wife and mother—look increasingly confusing to her after her husband walks out. She had married him in the hope of living in a fairytale. “Marriage was a solution,” she says, “and I wanted to be dissolved.” But the fairytale had frayed over the years, reminding her that “protection was a slippery promise”. She is ill-equipped to run her household on her own. Being a stay-at-home mom, she had let her husband manage their finances all these years. Her mobility is limited since she can’t drive. Her cousin, a supportive soul, drives her to the grocery store when she has to go food-shopping for the family.

Devastated as she is, when she looks back at the time she spent with her husband, she doesn’t paint him as pure evil. “I could also see that he was frustrated with our relationship,” she says at one point, clear-eyed and unsentimental. “And perhaps with his life in general.” But she is also aware that her “suffering had been greater”, boxed into the sole role of caregiver, spending all her time and energy on taking care of their children. “He had been the one who had wanted children,” she remembers. “And in the end, I was the one to look after them.” Memorably, she decides that she is not interested in turning this into “a competition of grievances”. 

 As the narrator slips and slides between the ruptured present and the past, she is affected by myth and memory, astrology and dreams; she sees metaphors of annihilation and renewal in nature like the cicadas swarming around her garden who live brief lives, shed their old selves periodically, and promise to return. Brooding on the ruins of her marriage, she realises, “The way I had engaged with the world was no longer possible. I was meeting myself as someone new.”

The self is a house built of many bricks. When the narrator’s parents and sister arrive on the scene, the family dynamics that have shaped her self come into full view. Their arrival triggers memories of the expections placed on the narrator as a daughter; of comparisons with her sister, the ‘perfect’ daughter who lives to please her parents; of the less than blissful equation between her parents and their 'mistake' of a marriage; of  the shadows of emotional and physcial violence haunting her childhood home; of the community she grew up in, which considered marriage the “only respectable destination”. Received wisdom was that to be a single woman was to resign oneself to a “sad and strange fate”.

In an attempt to break free of the opinions of others and the stranglehold of received wisdom, she heads to India in the end, with her daughters in tow. Some call her reckless for dragging her children to the overcrowded venue of the Kumbh mela. Some warn her that she will need medication or worse, hospitalisation, after this misadventure. Others praise her and declare that this journey will liberate her soul from the exhausting cycle of life and birth.  At the Kumbh, she merges into “a group of other misfits, all women, queer, single, divorced”. Myth and ritual have always brought her closer to something deep within herself, something she keeps circling. So, will this trip set her free from the burdens of pain and grief and fear? Will it help her find her way back to herself and start life afresh? Doshi leaves it to the reader to imagine what the future holds.