Book Review | At home with the Masanis

Khushwant Singh’s blurb on the cover of Zareer Masani’s And All Is Said: Memoir of a Home Dividedclaims that it is a beautifully written memoir that reads like a novel. This was an assertion that I found myself disagreeing with soon into the book. It is beautifully written, but it is so far ahead of the vast majority of novels that the comparison does it no justice.

Zareer is the son of Minoo Masani, one of the founders and members of Parliament of the classical liberal Swatantra Party in the days when the Indian National Congress dominated Parliament, and Shakuntala Masani (neé Srivastava)—heiress, society lady and, later, bureaucrat.

In the course of telling their stories, it manages to be a history of the independence movement, and of newly independent India too.

The book also has a third aspect—of confessional, or mea culpa. Zareer confronts his own role in the breakdown of his parents’ marriage, never explicitly accusing himself of playing a part, but always returning to the possibility that he contributed.

It is easy to be in love, but to behave with kindness is terribly and tragically hard. His parents had managed the easy part of being in love, but had faltered on the hard part. Reading through Zareer’s fears of having played a part, and the pain of this guilt, I felt like finding him, and dashing over to comfort him and reassure him that changing his behaviour wouldn’t have made any difference. No matter Zareer’s willingness to join in the elder Masanis’ power games, they might have played those games anyway. Zareer has also written about his parents’ large egos, insistence on mixing the personal and the political, and emotional insecurities. That is a terrible cocktail.

They did have a happy marriage for a few years, but it was not to last. Minoo resumed his philandering lifestyle, but Shakuntala had her affairs too. The couple fought over money, over Zareer’s upbringing and manners, and eventually over politics, with Shakuntala and Minoo campaigning for rival parties during the 1977 general election. Minoo’s stubbornness in standing up to the status quo infected his marriage, and he confronted and challenged Shakuntala in all things.

After the 1977 election, they stayed separated through the 1980s. In 1989, when Shakuntala finally agreed to a divorce, Minoo was going blind and she had started a slow decline through old age and possibly mental illness.

In the introduction, Zareer writes that the memoir was to give his mother the dignity that her final years denied her. He has succeeded. The writing is slow, personal and emotional without being overwrought, and achieves the level of excellence that any tribute should.

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