Content warning: discussions of suicide and sexual assault. Spoilers for “The Complex.”
In his new novel, “The Complex,” Karan Mahajan invites readers to spend over a decade with the worst family in the world. Living in building A-19 Modern Colony in Delhi, the illustrious Chopras exist in the shadow of their deceased patriarch SP Chopra, a lauded political hero who built the apartment complex before dying suddenly of a heart attack. In this residence, scandal and betrayal reveal the unsavory inner psyches of abusive husbands, conniving matriarchs and unstable children — all set against a backdrop of the intense political turmoil of predominantly 1980s India. With insightful prose and nuanced characterization, Mahajan’s work provocatively questions what we owe our families and countries alike.
One of the ways “The Complex” most prominently drives at these themes is through its layered depiction of sexual assault and patriarchal power structures. Perhaps the most obvious example of this is when Gita, recently married into the Chopra family before immigrating to America with her husband, is raped by her uncle-in-law, Laxman, at a family wedding during her visit to Delhi. Although she keeps her assault hidden from the other characters for most of the book, this secret informs and shadows the plot as other abuses come to light. The novel moves between characters, but Laxman’s perspective dominates the narrative. It is through his eyes that readers observe the fraught power imbalance between genders in a household where his behavior is normalized. While the Chopra family crumbles in a Shakespearean fashion and political instability rages in the larger country, this idea that “violence begets violence” proves central.
Mahajan’s greatest strength lies in his multifaceted characterization of even the most outwardly despicable individuals. Laxman is introduced in the context of Gita’s assault. However, his affair with another niece-in-law, Karishma, reveals his underlying insecurity in any kind of mutualistic relationship; when a consenting woman is allowed to wield any power over him, his confidence falters. This vulnerability complicates his unabashed depravity.
At the center of the family’s story, Laxman’s humanization puts the rest of the characters’ questionable choices into context, even if he remains unsympathetic. His and Karishma’s affair is well-known among the Chopras but willfully ignored by both their spouses, though there is a continuous sense that this fragile affair is untenable. When Laxman rapes Karishma at the novel’s end to reassert control over her after she attempts to break things off, it comes as a fatalistic reminder that the family was doomed from the beginning.
The scandal of Karishma and Laxman’s relationship is what ultimately upends the complex’s equilibrium, driving Karishma to commit suicide and her husband to murder Laxman. No one in the complex can be considered good: Karishma is a neglectful mother, her husband an abuser and Laxman a rapist. It comes as no surprise then that they all meet unsavory ends. When Laxman is made a political martyr, achieving the same fame as SP Chopra, Mahajan shows how often the mythologies surrounding one’s family and country are just that: fiction.
Outside this enclosed ecosystem rife with scandal, “The Complex” explores topical themes of cultural identity and immigration. In America, Gita and her husband, Sachin, struggle to reconcile their differing dreams for the future. Gita misses India, if only for the version of herself she left behind in a more accepting and supposedly egalitarian society. Sachin, meanwhile, sees America as an escape from his tumultuous family life. Separated from not just her culture but her personal history, Gita loses a sense of individuality. This predicament directly contrasts her relatives’ fantasies of sending their children to America and their obsession with the consumer luxuries of the Western world. Once Gita and Sachin return to India and enter the chaos of the complex, they bear witness to the Chopra family’s disorder but slowly grow closer to each other through the comparative mundanity of their own lives; Mahajan’s aim here is neither to villainize nor to glorify the West.
The novel consistently draws parallels between India’s political divisions and the hatred that prevents connection between the Chopras. Both collectives have long, sordid histories of different groups endlessly wronging one another without meaningful communication. It is no coincidence that Laxman, the worst of the Chopra family, rises to a position of power in a Hindu nationalist group with the same self-serving ruthlessness that allows him to wrong his relatives. Through the lens of the Chopras’ involvement in the Anti-Sikh riots of 1984 and Mandal Commission protests of 1990, Mahajan applies a humanist perspective to the tribalism that so often encourages violence. The Chopras are shown to participate in these events not with a great sense of political clarity but an instinctual sense of ego and self-righteousness; much of the distress occurring both within and outside the walls of A-19 is fueled by irrational people with nonsensical motivations. India as a state is strong enough to survive, but the Chopra family is so unstable that it is the cause of its own undoing.
Though “The Complex” ends in tragedy, it leaves readers with some optimism. Gita and Sachin adopt a child after more than a decade of childlessness, symbolically mending their disconnect and representing their embracing a new future together. For most of the novel, there is a clear correlation between the anger dominating Indian politics and the drama raging within A-19 — powerful figures rise and fall without warning, great betrayal undoes social order and, still, there is the possibility of reinvention. Gita and Sachin free themselves by choosing to leave the complex, proving that their lives in India need not be dominated by the past; they are free to be individuals, not just parts of a whole.
Daily Arts Contributor Sofia Thornley can be reached at tsofia@umich.edu.
