Marriage of a Thousand Lies by S.J. Sindu (review)

At the beginning of S.J. Sindu's stunning debut novel, the narrator, Lucky, recounts an anecdote of how when she was a girl, she asked her mother for a button-down shirt to wear for a school play, a request that was her first lie. The moment causes her to realize her love for her best friend, Nisha, and pries loose a thread that slowly unravels over the course of the novel as she comes to terms with Nisha's upcoming arranged marriage. Lucky hides imperfectly within her own marriage to Krishna, a gay man, an arrangement that allows them to remain members of their Sri Lankan-American community. Both Kris and Lucky chafe under the pressure to conform to her family's expectations. After Nisha's engagement party, Kris tells her, "'Because of me, you can seem like the perfect little brown wife.'" The façade Lucky wears gradually hardens and cracks as she discovers that she has been lying to herself as much as to her family and friends.

Sindu's narrative highlights how members of the South Asian queer community negotiate cultural norms that strictly delineate expressions of love and fidelity differently from each other. In addition to Lucky and Krishna's arrangement, Lucky discovers how other members of her family imperfectly balance traditional roles with their own desires. While Lucky's mother and sister are heterosexual, they both live outside of expected female roles. Lucky's mother is divorced and her father remarried her mother's best friend, while her sister Vidya ran away from home after falling in love with an American boy. These family struggles make it more difficult for Lucky to fully come out of the closet. She notes that while many of her classmates rebel against their parents, eventually "they shape up … and everything is forgiven. As long as you follow your directives in the end, no matter how many lies you have to tell." Lucky desperately wants to fit in even as she falls more deeply in love with Nisha. Sindu's first-person narration offers a great deal of compassion for Lucky's struggles as she comes to terms with her own choices and how they differ from that of Nisha, who seemingly sees no problem with continuing their affair while planning her wedding.

As Lucky becomes lovesick with Nisha, she continuously asks her to make a decision: "What do you want?" or "What do you want me to do?" are recurring questions, and it becomes clear that Lucky is not only asking them of Nisha, but also herself, though neither woman knows how to answer them. In one moving passage early in the novel, Lucky articulates the dilemma of coming out: "Most people think the closet is a small room. They think you can touch the walls, touch the door, turn the handle, and walk free. But when you're inside it, the closet is vast. No walls, no door, just empty darkness stretching the length of the world." As the novel progresses, the darkness begins to take over Lucky's mind. Lucky finds herself living out one of her favorite Bollywood movies, a love story in which a man tries to win back his lover who has an arranged marriage. Lucky repeats a line from the movie—"The bride belongs to the man who brings her home"—like a talisman. As the novel progresses, it becomes increasingly uncertain whether her fantasy will come to fruition as Nisha marches through her engagement ceremonies with ritualistic certainty.

A talented dancer, Lucky finds relief by rediscovering her passion for Bharatanatyam. She notes how "Dancing saved me" when she was a girl, and learns that Nisha found a similar community in her college's rugby team. Nisha introduces her to Tasha, an athletic queer woman, who allows Lucky to become more comfortable with her preference for masculine clothes and mannerisms. The juxtaposition between the openness of Tasha's friendship and Lucky's secrets heighten the tension between Lucky and Nisha. Lucky's actions prove inscrutable to her...