There are books that are seemingly so different from your life, yet feel like they were written keeping your journey in mind. The Immigrant was one such book for me. The synopsis at the back of the book reads –
“Nina is a thirty-year-old English lecturer, struggling to make ends meet for herself and her widowed mother. She sees herself as increasingly off the shelf – after all what prospects would an impoverished girl have without a father to marry her off? Them unexpectedly, a proposal arrives. Ananda is a dentist in Halifax, Canada. He has spent his twenties painstakingly building his career, and has had no time to get married. The two start to write to each other, then talk on the phone, and finally Ananda arrives in New Delhi to propose – at first uncertain, Nina eventually agrees. When the two marry, she leaves her home and her country to build a new life with her husband. But there is always more to marriage than courtship. And as Nina discovers truths about her husband – both sexual and emotional – her fragile new life in Canada begins to unravel.”
This book is as different as it is similar to my life. I drew a million parallels while reading it. Nina’s journey seemed so close to my own that sometimes it was hard to differentiate. So maybe my view about this read is biased, but I loved it.
I picked this book up during a time when I knew I had to feel certain feelings so that I could move past them. I hoped this book would deliver, and deliver it did. All through the book, I could empathize with Nina completely. Her frustration, her helplessness, her confusion, the apparent drowning of all her hopes and dreams took me back to a time when I had acutely felt these feelings. But the beauty of experiencing them now was in knowing that there was light at the end of the tunnel; and if I didn’t see the light, I could create it myself.
I love how Kapur has the inherent ability to just knock on your door, asking to let the avalanche of feelings in, but she leaves it to the reader to decide whether they really want to open that door or just wave to these feelings from a window. I needed to let the feelings in. So I did. We chatted over a nice cup of coffee.
Coming back, this book was like an entire support group rolled into one narrative. I am glad I read it when I did because had I read it when I was actually in the throes of my experience, I would most definitely have slipped further into the abyss. My brain would have combined the two experiences and made it much worse than it needed to be.
Someone once said, “What’s meant to be will always find a way”, and that was exactly my experience with this book. It found me when I needed to find the means to work through my feelings and journey back in time from the comfort of my safe space, with a warm, soothing cup of coffee.
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