#MeToo & beyond: Shuma Raha’s book, The Sea has the Answers, uses a wife’s journey to reflect on society

It’s then that the author touches on the palpable “cold clutch of horror” that consumes the woman, the protagonist Urmi Das, who is sick with fear, imagining her young lover being beaten and bloodied by a manic mob.

This is a slice of contemporary India that journalist-turned-author Shuma Raha wades into briefly, even as she tells the story of Urmi, an upper-class wife of an advertising executive in Kolkata. After her husband is outed in the #MeToo movement, Urmi embarks on a journey of self-realisation.

The author, however, does not stick in the #MeToo lane but more or less uses it as a springboard to explore misogyny in marriages and at workplaces, questions the straitjacketed identity of a wife and mother and then ventures off into the world of creepy ‘godmen’ and the blind faith they evoke in gullible devotees.

If you are looking for a deeply layered and nuanced literary exposition on the #MeToo movement, you are in for a disappointment. But The Sea… is still an engaging read, as Raha — whose debut novel, The Swap, is slated to become an OTT series — is essentially a storyteller and an accomplished writer.

Into a sexual predator’s mind

After 19 long years of marriage, Urmi learns that her charming, loving husband is a working girl’s veritable nightmare – the quintessential “work pest” on the prowl, whose hands linger on a woman’s back a bit too long and a hug could very well turn into a full-blown kiss. Either she has been wilfully blind or truly naive, but Urmi is clueless that her husband is a sexual predator who has been cheating on his wife for many years.

The shocking revelation, when it comes, shatters her cosy, structured life in her posh Alipore (a Kolkata neighbourhood) home. As her life comes crashing down, Urmi flees to her seaside home away from Kolkata and has an affair with a young journalist and eventually, realisation dawns what she needs to do with herself.

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Interestingly, Raha gives us a glimpse into the mind of Urmi’s husband, too, the philandering Shankar Das. How did the smooth-talking 48-year-old high-flying advertising guru find himself, much to his irritation (for didn’t the girls love it while he bestowed them with his attention and bedded them?), in the docks, dubbed as a sex offender, preying on the pretty young things in the office?

It’s interesting how Raha builds the image of an arrogant man, who had been top dog for a long time, surrounded by "admiring vassals and cupbearers", and sunk so deeply in the folds of hubris that he fails to recognise his misdeeds. He is not in the wrong, he believes, because the women were not forced to jump into bed with him.

Suddenly, the #MeToo movement catches him in its whirl and casts him out in the doghouse and he is frankly befuddled; unsure what went wrong.

Where does mere flirtation stray into the realm of harassment in a workplace when a CEO is indulging in it? It is a question the internal complaint committee set up by Shankar’s office asks. It is not really a big conundrum.

Not a victim

Having worked as a journalist in leading newspapers in Kolkata, Raha may have had a ringside view to the ugly aftermath of the downfall of big icons in Indian journalism in the #MeToo movement. Maybe, she tapped into those stunning exposes that shook the industry to create Shankar Das and to show how the misogynistic workplaces in India function as they move to quickly swing things in the favour of men.

Predictably, Shankar remains remorseless and expects his wife to shed her pain, angst and hurt and forgive him and return to the family fold. He points out that she has to fulfil her duty as a mother to their teenage daughter, who needs her.

Raha's heart evidently lies with the "ignored third dimension" of these sordid #MeToo sagas — the wives.

Urmi is shown as a graceful, beautiful woman with a poignant backstory. Her mother had tragically committed suicide after trying to live with a feckless, dissolute husband who never cared for her at all. Urmi had been naturally wary of marriages after her mother’s experience but is actively wooed by Shankar, who, ironically, in the end turns out to be just like her father, or worse.

Urmi ruminates that while her father openly conducted his extra-marital affairs to insult and torment his beautiful wife, Shankar led a merry double life even while behaving as a model husband. She painfully dwells on the accusations made by the women at his workplace. It doesn’t matter to Urmi whether there are shades of untruth in their allegations; what becomes crystal clear to her is that he had cheated.

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The author deals with Urmi with empathy but doesn’t make her out as a victim. Urmi is a strong woman who has come from a broken home. She has no sympathy for all the women who lined up to rudely destroy her veil of delusion about her husband. They ripped her life apart and forced her to see that her marriage had been a sham. She may not stand by her husband and deny their claims, but neither is she going to champion their cause.

The novel is not only about the #MeToo movement that had sparked off conversations on male entitlement in offices in India in 2018, but weaves in other socio-political issues.

As Urmi is on her quest hunting for answers in her ancestral home situated beside the sea (which Raha describes evocatively as a “dazzling mirror shot through with the molten sun and the waves bringing fat tongues of gold on to the beach”), she finds solace and sexual excitement in Zakir’s arms and also takes up cudgels for a young girl raped by her 'godman' neighbour.

In the end, the reader does not really feel Urmi’s tragedy at being betrayed but is left with a curiosity to know what kind of choices she will make to reclaim her life from the rubble of deceit.