We’ve spent the last decade debating about representation at the level of casting and cataloguing. Sunetra Gupta among them memories of rain Worked 30 years ago on the slow problem of migration, marriage, class, how thoughts feel under the pressure of work. The book respects complexity, makes people aware of their contradictions and then demands that we keep an eye on them. The new edition of Westland Ashoka University takes readers back to their 1992 debut.
Since winning the Sahitya Akademi Award for his first book in 1996, Gupta has written five more books while teaching and working as a scientist. Those facts matter because Memories of Rain reads like the work of someone trained to observe systems of ecology, epidemiology, feedback loops, and not afraid to put all the variables into play.
The marriage between an Indian woman and an Englishman is a story you can tell in one sentence. The experience of that marriage and its personal season takes three days, four volumes and long, tense sentences that stop time. A young Indian woman, Moni, marries British expatriate Anthony. London absorbs them and years later, after the birth of a daughter and Anthony’s affair with Anna becoming public, Moony decides to return to Calcutta with the child. This decision is timed to the birthday party. This is a dramatic exit. Gupta’s narration goes through a stream of consciousness and a lot of feedback.
Rain works as a memory metronome and is not an aesthetic choice. Gupta opens one of the book’s most interesting series on Oxford Street where Moony watches a woman crush ice cream cones and pour water into a bowl to feed pigeons. This moment gives rise to a line from her childhood: “Many years ago her grandmother told her that pigeons could quench their thirst only by opening their beaks to raindrops.” And that’s how novels work. A present action pulls up a memory, which then re-keys the present.
When the drizzle of London became a gateway to Calcutta in 1978, Gupta interpreted the dichotomy of place and emotion without any condescension. Calcutta is remembered as the season when “rain pours from the sky not to purify the earth but to defile it, to turn parched fields into festering sores, to wash out the city drains clogged in the streets, to sprinkle the vomit of fungus on the pillows…” The prose is precise about hatred. This is also true about attraction. Here rain breaks boundaries and binds memory to the event. If the British novel uses weather as atmosphere, Gupta uses it as argument.
Readers who call it “Wolffian” are pursuing a lineage. Stream of consciousness, yes. Sensitivity to light and water, yes. But Gupta’s book blends the chronology of one weekend with the longings that preceded it. This technique works almost like accounting. It tells what was said, what was left unsaid, what a character imagined themselves saying, which is often their truth. memories of rain Considers internality as evidence. This is why long sentences seem deliberate rather than indulgent. They do the work of making cases.
Morality is also at work here. Anthony’s affair with Anna is not hidden. Anna and Moni share some care of the child. Everyone knows and no one says enough. Silence is a tool here. The free indirect mode lets Gupta steal the voices of her characters even as she reveals their thoughts.
This is where the East-West argument becomes interesting. It is often described as an allegory of the novel, colonial vestiges of East-West marriage. It’s not wrong, but it’s only half useful. Gupta is careful to show that the machinery of silence works in both contexts. In England, Mooney lost his facility with speech and song; In India, she moves from her parents’ house to her husband’s house and later back to her parents’, which raises the neat Western question: why not have an apartment of your own with your child? Because the book is rigorous about material and social constraints such as inheritance norms, gender expectations, and the practical arithmetic of care. Tagore’s lyrics are threaded through the text as a musical technique to sustain the idea when speech fails. All four segments behave like motion. Each repeats the motif with slight variations.
Anthony receives no acquittal. He’s a man who wants to be a poet of his own intensity, then finds an office job and becomes quietly annoyed by the bureaucratic structure of his time growing up. He “will always love her, even if their passion has ended.” That sentence should be framed and nailed above every workshop table. It shows the moral laziness of love as a permanent excuse. The eligibility of a traveler-scholar is imprinted on his self-thought. “He came to this land, as his ancestors did, with the belief that everything he wanted would be his; he came not with greed, only with a desire for knowledge, for experience.” Rhetoric is classic extraction disguised as curiosity, meaning that colonial grammar has made intimate.
If you have a low tolerance for long sentences, the novel will test you. This becomes unbearable even for Moni as she seems to consent to her downfall. But the form reveals the tension of that consent. She wants, she fears, she counts the cost, and she fails to speak up. But this is certainly not a parable about humility. In fact, it seems like a case study in how norms win when speech fails.
Gupta is also not serious about the childish politics of divorce. have a child. A party has been planned there. There is a timeline for departure. The narrative collapses into a weekend to reflect the sickening pace of the ending. The alternation of Moni and Anthony’s viewpoints is a way to overcome their lack of mutual understanding. He considers himself an intellectual relative of Anna and is emotionally connected to Moony over history. She recognizes the posture and feels the pull of family, language, and the idea of rescue. Return to India becomes both a plan and a myth. She envisions a life of service, of helping the poor. It is a practical self that she can name when others feel seized.
Gupta resorts to the device of stream of consciousness as if staging the central problem of the speech. The power of the narrator “virtually” steals the characters’ voices. The result is that we learn how much a person can say without even saying it out loud. Silence becomes legible. In this sense, the book is less Woolf than clinical. It seems as if Gupta is testing how long a social system can stifle expression before the pressure forces a decision, to give up, to stop, to perish, or simply to confess.
Marriage exists and is accepted as an image of empire. But it does not dominate. The banner line is, “He came…as his ancestors did,” but the daily colonialism that matters here is the management of another person’s (woman’s) day. Calendar imperialism. Who gets Tuesday afternoon? Who handles school pick-up? Who chooses the books at home? The scenes at Anna’s mother’s house are precisely about a hybrid system that pretends to be modern and humane while reaffirming the old hierarchy. The book rejects scandal as a plot engine and prefers routine pain.
One of Gupta’s best choices is the use of Tagore songs. They give Moni a way to think. They also remind the reader that culture is not a dress you wear to the Western eye, but an audio library you listen to when alone. The decision to leave – The decision to take the daughter and go back to the original city feels like liberation. I don’t see it that way. There is pain everywhere because the child is involved in both the houses. There is no speech act that dissolves fact. Moony’s friend who says, “You should just leave the bastard,” is speaking in the register of individualistic freedom that the novel respects and also tests against real odds.
There is an absence of court-style confrontations where the truth is spoken and order is restored. Gupta wants us to realize how a culture trains us to accept certain arrangements as inevitable. Then she shows what the cost of resisting that training is when you have a child and have a history.
The prose is beautiful. The London scenes take on a wet yellowness and the Calcutta scenes sparkle with detail. There are places where the novel leans towards romantic thinking. Like the fantasy of wounding a lover through a grand exit, the idea of returning home as a form of moral purification. The book knows the allure of these scripts and stages them anyway. And she emphasizes that the intersection of gender, class, and empire is a climate. You don’t spoil the atmosphere by giving speeches. You change residence. you move.
The new edition brings back a book that argues that even the personal is historical. The line “He will love her forever, even if their passion has died out” is the sigh of a man who mistakes feeling for loyalty. And “the pride of martyrdom ran deep in his caste” is a diagnosis aimed at the reader as well as the character. What stories do we like to read about suffering? What things ring true because they appeal to our sense of being?
Pranavi Sharma writes on books and culture. She lives in New Delhi.
