UAE-based Booker-shortlisted author Avni Doshi’s second book examines horror of relationships

We build many myths around our relationships. In marriages, it is usually the myth of happily ever after. Sometimes, marriages are our escape from the terror our families unconsciously inflict on us. Marriages then become a refuge until the very institution collapses.

Dubai-based Booker-shortlisted author Avni Doshi’s hugely anticipated second novel The First House begins with a husband announcing his decision to part ways. He has made a choice, but the woman has to put the pieces of the puzzle together. What really went wrong in the marriage? Has he found someone else? How will their two daughters process the separation?

The First House post-mortems relationships in a way that we come to understand that a broken home isn’t always the one where a man simply leaves a woman and his children, it is also one where we constantly brush aside issues to build makeshift peace. As Doshi herself says, “(in the novel) not knowing is a way to survive.”

In a conversation with Khaleej Times, Doshi spoke at length about why we have to sever a version of us to truly rediscover ourselves — one of the many poignant ideas that is at the heart of The First House. Excerpts from an interview:

How did the story find you?

The First House is the story of a woman in America who thinks she has a perfect life — she has stability and security, and it seems that nothing much will ever change. It’s like a fairytale. She and her husband and her children will live happily ever after. But one day, out of the blue, everything falls apart. She is forced to question herself and what she believed about her life. The world around her begins shifting. Strange things are happening in the garden. Cicadas begin to crawl out of the ground as memories crawl out from the hidden corners of her mind. This is a novel of domestic horror.

At the beginning, I had a specific idea for a story, one that centred around a girl and her family — her controlling parents and her uncanny siblings. That was really where the journey began. But other images and ideas started closing in. I became fascinated with cicadas, insects I grew up with in my childhood, living in New Jersey. I remember being terrified of them as a child, the screeching sound they made in the summertime.

And then I encountered this incredible statue of the goddess Diana by the American sculptor, Augustus Saint-Gaudens. I found it so compelling and I wasn’t sure why. I thought that I would write a short story about it. And maybe an essay about cicadas too. They were three separate projects in my mind when I started writing, but somehow, I couldn’t get a handle on any of them.

I recall that I was about to attend a full moon circle at my astrology teacher’s home and had arrived early. Not wanting to be a bother, I started walking up and down the street outside of her house. And suddenly, after months and months of confusion, it dawned on me that the three ideas had to be woven together, that they were, in fact, the same book.

I notice that whenever I begin writing something new, the book is opaque, unavailable to my understanding. I only know that I’m being drawn toward something. It’s coming toward me and I’m moving toward it. In the same way, I think that other ideas and images are being pulled toward the novel. Sometimes, my work is to recognise them, and not dismiss them as a distraction.

Your novels — whether it is Burnt Sugar or The First House — begin viscerally. A reader immediately knows the crisis that is at the heart of the story. What informs your decision to employ this trope?

In Burnt Sugar, the novel begins with a feeling of anger, of rage. In The First House, the novel begins with a scene. The reader is placed in a moment of action, a conflict that is unfolding. I like visceral beginnings. Javiar Marias’ novel A Heart So White was very influential for me when writing this book, and I cannot think of a more gripping beginning than in that novel.

Relationships, for the protagonist of The First House, are not refuge but a source of agony. As a wife, she knows she has not exactly been in a happy marriage long before her husband walks away. Parenting too brings its own set of challenges. As a daughter and a sister, she fails to relate to her family. Is this a commentary on the human condition where relationships have stopped being the psychological safe space that traditional wisdom has us believe?

In The First House, the narrator believes that family is safety. And when one set of familial relationships begin to fray, there is the possibility of finding home in another. But what is the cost of having to fit in?

I don’t think that this only shows up in families. This can occur with friends, in a job, or even in a nation, or with a political party. C.G. Jung is very influential to me, and he wrote about the danger of the collective, and how the individual can become subsumed in the mentality of the mob. I was interested in interrogating whether this can happen in families. For example, in the novel, the narrator contemplates marriage as a Procrustean bed. This image comes from the myth of Procrustes, where a thief places people on a narrow bed and cuts off the parts of them that do not fit.

To what degree do we have to cut off parts of ourselves to be a part of something larger? And I’m questioning at what point it becomes too much. At what point are we no longer ourselves, totally unrecognisable?

Diana — whether it is the sculpture that the protagonist encounters in the museum or as a weathervane at her neighbour’s house — is a motif that runs through your story. Can you elaborate on why the legend of Diana remains central to the story? Also, how does your background in art influence the writer in you?

My background as an art historian (though not a very good one) is fundamental to the books I write. Images are the lenses through which I understand narrative. Art pulls words and scenes and events out of me.

I encountered Diana for the first time in 2018, and found the sculpture to be very compelling, enigmatic in some way. But I didn’t know anything about the history. I visited the artist colony where the sculptor Saint-Gaudens lived and was keen to know more. But then, as often happens, that line of inquiry was forgotten in favour of other things, like the myths about Artemis (who is the Greek counterpart of Diana).

I became interested in the symbols of this goddess. She is associated with bears and wild animals, even bees. In ancient Greece, the priestesses of the goddess were known as melissae, which literally means bees. I loved that image, the way the bees in a hive work purely in service of the queen. I even decided to name a minor character in the novel Melissa.

It was only much later that I discovered the specific history of the statue, how it was made, and the scandal around it which rocked New York during the Gilded Age. And I was stunned by the degree of symmetry that this modern myth in New York had with the ancient stories about her.

In truth, some aspects of Diana remain mysterious to me — I have a feeling the sculpture will be part of an ongoing discovery process.

There is a poignant passage in the novel where the protagonist speaks of how ‘not knowing’ served her marriage well. This is obviously a reference to an innate rejection of seeing the realities of her relationship. As someone acutely aware of the problems in her other relationships, why does she live in ‘denial’?

This question came to be from the novel by Javiar Marias I mentioned. It is the central idea in A Heart So White, but it has deep taproots in our evolution as social animals. For the woman at the centre of The First House, not knowing is a way to survive, to continue being part of her family. It’s a form of loyalty to the people she loves, it is a form of protection to fortify the larger unit. And this makes sense, right? If we focus on the faults and flaws of our families, if we don’t let things go, turn a blind eye to certain foibles, it could mean that intimacy would become impossible. This can occur in different ways. We might not notice that our father tells the same boring story at lunch every weekend, or that our mother is addicted to sleeping pills.

But I was interested in exploring — what happens when not knowing comes at the cost of ourselves? What happens when the thing we are refusing to know is also the thing that is harming us? I was interested in when not knowing turns into a deep denial of reality — when it becomes neurotic, maladaptive or even pathological.

One of the heartening aspects of the story is how it also makes room for happiness in the aftermath of a separation. How did you want the narrator and her daughters to process those moments? 

I was fascinated by midlife when I was writing this book. Not so much about the possibility of happiness after crisis — but more about the transformation that is required, and whether or not we are up to the task.

Transformation, as the cicadas show us in their gruesome, screeching rebirth, is not always beautiful. Metamorphosis is not all butterflies. Rebirth requires death and decomposition. There is blood and terror alongside the dizzying will to live, and a question that we don’t always want to ask — what happens if we don’t survive this? What happens if this crisis takes us down?

I was fascinated to learn that when a butterfly is in a chrysalis, it turns to liquid during this process of becoming. For a moment, there is nothing left of the caterpillar and still no sign of the elegant butterfly. And the cells that make up that liquid are called imaginal cells. That feels perfect. Transformation is an act of imagination made manifest.

And death is a necessary part of the process. Without that ending, without the ability to let go, new life isn’t possible. In The First House, I also explore what happens when the family cannot let go, when they cannot change, when they are frozen in ice, like the mother’s food, or made of stone, like the sister’s face, that never grows old. There is a powerful image from the legend of Parzival and the Grail. In that story, the King is sick but he will not die. And because the King is sick, the whole kingdom is sick.

How do you explain the inner worlds of the women in the novel? Sama’s conventionality informs her role as the narrator’s conscience keeper. The sister has chosen to stay unmarried to serve her parents. The mother is assertive and yet docile. 

The inner worlds of women in The First House all explore the inner battle with patriarchal structures. They are all daughters of a system that is schizophrenic, that espouses ideas of equality and the pursuit of happiness, but which is simultaneously undermining those same values.

When the narrator begins to explore other possibilities, Sama is horrified that she has been radicalised in some way. She is going too far in her cousin’s eyes. You can be yourself, as long as being yourself looks like everyone else. These inner conflicts become apparent in the narrator’s dream life too. Dreams offer an important vision of interiority in the novel, particularly in the areas that are still unconscious, still too difficult to be fully integrated.

Part 1 of the book, where you talk about the gradual ‘dismemberment’ of the marriage, is also deeply psychological. What did it take for you to enter the inner world of the narrator? 

Dismemberment is fascinating to me, because living in the world requires psychic dismemberment. All the characters in The First House are cutting some parts of themselves off, except the mysterious neighbour perhaps.

I found myth to be the most powerful way to enter into the character psychologically. There are so many rituals and myths of dismemberment from the Hindu tradition and the Greek and Egyptian, and these speak profoundly to the psychic beheading the narrator undergoes. The more I read the myths of Sati, of Chinnamasta, of Iphegenia, of Osiris and Isis, the more clearly I understood that these processes are still taking place in the world around us if we can recognise them.

Did you write the novel in Dubai? If so, how did the sights and sounds of the city influence your writing even though the setting of the novel is not UAE?

I wrote the first draft of the novel in Dubai, most of it during a residency at the Alserkal Foundation. I was inspired by my garden when I was writing the novel. It starts to wither in the summer here, when the weather in the UAE is very hot, and this was extremely inspiring. The cats in the UAE also found their way into the book in a big way. Observing them everywhere, I was moved to include them, and a cat became an integral part of the second half of the book.

What does independence look like for the narrator given the ending?

The ending is multivalent. In one sense, a chapter has closed. But in another, it is a new beginning. I don’t know what it means for the narrator beyond the scope of what is in the pages of the novel. My imagination for my characters stops there. I can tell you that she is emerging, coming out of the birth canal, and that is a treacherous journey. Will she take her first breath?