Book review: The First House by Avni Doshi
Falling apart
Avni Doshi`s debut work, `Burnt Sugar,` was a reflective look at family relationships, specifically the relationship between a woman and her daughter. This book, her second novel, is another look through the slightly fogged-up window of a family home, to the persistent accompaniment of cicadas in the garden vegetation, and a slightly creepy statue of Diana the Huntress in the neighbour`s lawn.
Doshi opens with a killer of a line: when my husband comes into the bedroom we have shared for thirteen years and tells me he doesn’t want to be married any more, I reach for my neck. My head is missing.
The first thing that strikes the reader is that none of the characters are given names. The narrator is the wife whose husband has suddenly announced the end of their marriage in as gentle a manner as he can possibly summon. The wife is totally blindsided, and goes through all the stages that follow: denial, apathy, grief, then anger.
And then the doors of the marital house open to her parents and her elder sister. With their advent, the story pulls back to offer a wider perspective, giving us a look at family relationships, their twists and turns, their predictable and unpredictable trajectories. Has our narrator been a good daughter? Why is she unable to rein in the deep-seated competition she feels with regard to her seemingly impeccable sister, the good daughter who has stayed behind to be a prop to her parents?
Meditations on marriage
The second thing that strikes the reader is how the abandoned wife is completely helpless. She`s wealthy, she married seemingly well, and she has no spine. The edifice of her life is now crumbling and there is no attempt to portray any courage I had no income of my own, no idea how the house I lived in was run, no bank account under my own control, she tells the reader. She seems lost in her interior world, unable to look after her young daughters. She doesn’t drive, so cannot go grocery shopping unless someone takes her to the store. The credit card she shares with her husband keeps getting blocked and rather than getting to the root of the problem, she quickly takes out her father`s card with apparently limitless spending, and swipes that. Her garden is falling to bits but she cannot explain to the landscapers just what it is they must do. And so, she has a meltdown in front of her children after wishing she could be stronger for them.
This is a woman unable to help herself yet deeply resentful of her maternal family taking over her life, her house, her daughters. When I was whole, my family always seemed unsure of what to do with me. But as I was now, broken, I began to make sense (to them), she states.
Then, she broods a lot in the days that follow her husband`s bombshell, and makes clear to both herself and to the reader that her married life was anything but a bed or roses. Yet, it is as if she peers through curtains of gauze, unable to actually pull that curtain and face whatever awaits her.
The third thing that strikes the reader? That the externals that impinge on this woman`s life are a slightly inchoate quartet of factors: the invasion of the summer pests, the cicadas; the statue of Diana on her neighbour`s lawn; her memories of Hindu goddesses; her growing belief in astrology and reading signs of change, upheaval, chaos, in both her estranged husband`s and her charts.
The story`s conclusion is as opaque as its progression. She takes her young girls on a trip to the Kumbh Mela; if she finds actual closure is something left to the reader`s imagination.
The reader gets to see the husband through a rearview mirror, all through. Wearing blinders, I was left with no peripheral vision, the wife reflects at one point. It is a tale of betrayal, insecurities, of love lost and a foggy future studded with lookback epiphanies. We read and we wish the protagonist a full course of healing, the ability to start a new life with courage and optimism. Except, we aren’t sure that is what she will indeed do.
But we read. Because Avni Doshi is a writer of talent, and much of her tracing of lives and relationships, her melancholic meditations on marriage, will resonate with us. And we will be thinking of this nameless narrator for a while after we read her story.
The First House by Avni Doshi. HarperCollins Books. Rs 599. 209 pages.
This appeared in Deccan Herald of 26 July 2026.
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Sheila Kumar • July 26, 2026