We don’t immediately learn our main character’s name at the start of the narrative, but this makes no difference in the reader’s ability to understand him. When we are finally entrusted with Ved’s name it does nothing to change what we already know about him: this young boy's sense of self was shaped by burden from a young age. We quickly learn that Ved was born out of a tragic ultimatum he had no part in. His mother could choose to live, or she could choose to give birth to her son and die. Given Ved’s presence in the story, we know what happened on that fateful night. It sets the scene perfectly for so much of the emotional turmoil that grounds this book.
Born out of his mother’s death, Ved is granted an inheritance of guilt and potential, a feeling that he has to live not only for himself, but also for the years that he unknowingly stole away from a mother he never got to know. The family joke that Ved was his mother’s final and most precious investment is meant lightheartedly. It is handed out by a husband grieving his wife but grateful for the living reminder she left behind. However, it is a message that echoes deeply within the tumultuous psychology of a young brain searching for meaning and explanation. Ved knows that he is loved by his father; their love is the beacon that shines through the book’s pages and explains its title. But sometimes love isn’t enough, even when it should be.
This is the message that this novel, Da, imparted on me. Yet, it is such a shapeshifter of a story that I imagine a hundred people could read it and come away with a hundred different interpretations. That places me in a troubling position. I cannot become a hundred people. I can, however, shed light on some of Da’s key themes.
I knew from its blurb that Da was going to be a story of love,but I wasn’t ready for the sheer depth or types of love that would unfurl within its pages. Nor did I expect it to hurt so much. The most important relationship, the bread and butter of the book, is the one shared between Ved and Da (his dad). It is not that common within literature, including modern fiction, to read a story about a single father raising his son. Usually the single parent is the mother, or if it is the dad, then we are given a story of a recalcitrant father learning to love his equally recalcitrant teenage daughter. Because these cliches are so common, I was bracing myself for a grieving husband, shaped by an emotionally cold upbringing, would close himself off from Ved in a way that would cause irreparable damage to them both. Fortunately, this was not the case. Ved and Da’s relationship defies toxic masculinity with both glee and simplicity. There is never a thought in Da’s mind that he would rear his motherless child in the same rigid, disciplinarian way that his own parents raised him. This is not a story of trauma begetting trauma; it is a story of love flying high in the face of tradition and convention. Da bears his own burdens, just as his son does, and yet he refuses to let them fall onto Ved. Instead, he creates an environment where he is free to explore himself in the one safe space available to them in this world. Their home becomes the only form of sanctuary available for a single father who loves other men, and a son who suspects he might too. Unfortunately, as we soon come to discover, it is a safe space that love alone cannot save.
Perhaps I should have expected this book to make me cry. Yet, it still caught me off guard when I shed a tear on my phone screen, coming across a line that could have been torn straight from the hearts of so many queer or questioning people (adolescent or adult alike): “If I am gay, will I have to hang myself?” It is a line that perfectly sums up the terror of feeling different, and the agonising question of how you are supposed to carry on living your life as normal when you no longer feel you belong — especially when the world insists you don’t.
Ved grows up with the fairly steady presence of his Da’s male romantic partners around the house. It is something that he never really questions; it’s just a part of who his father is. But we discover that this acceptance stems from his deep love for his father rather than true understanding, because it is not a grace he easily extends to himself when he starts to suspect that he might be gay. Through Ved, we see the direct consequence of societal fearmongering about queerness as we follow his inner monologue on a journey to navigate his sexuality. Unfortunately for Ved, this journey is born not out of a desire for self-exploration, but by a sense of grim defeat. He knows he would be physically safer never acknowledging the feelings stirring in his heart. But what kind of a life is that?
Ved is a compelling example of the way bigotry is not something we are born with, but rather something we learn. Before going to school, he never questions his father’s love for men. Though he is sometimes jealous when attention is stolen away from him, the gender of his father’s lovers makes no difference to him. There is no grand coming out between Da and Ved, just a simple acknowledgement of identity. However, as Ved starts to explore the wider world, we see him begin to internalise the prejudices of a society that deems his Da’s life unnatural. We see how hard Ved tries to fight these toxic thoughts from contaminating him, and how deeply he wishes his father would help him understand them.
And yet, for as much as Da loves Ved, the one boundary he refuses to cross is discussing his sexuality or his relationships, a respectable boundary, perhaps, but one that Ved resents. At first because he feels it prevents them from being a traditional family, and then because it keeps him from speaking out about his own sexuality. Maybe Da intended to one day verbalise what loving men meant for him,but within the pages of this story, he never does. As you will discover if you read the book, if Da’s silence was meant to protect Ved from how the world views families such as theirs, the shield falls flat quite spectacularly. Unable to receive counselling or mentoring from his dad about what it means to be different in the exact way that Ved suspects they might share, his brain is left assailable to the unsavoury opinions of others on the topic. They are opinions he knows are rubbish, to say nothing of hateful, and harmful, but they cut him into an unfamiliar shape all the same.
Da is a beautiful coming-of-age story about family and sexuality. At times it is wonderfully humorous (Ved taking an ‘am I gay quiz’ had me snorting out loud given what a familiar memory I’m sure it is for many of us), it is also rather disturbing. Ved’s journey of self-exploration is far from healthy as he tries to force himself into a hetrosexual relationship to prove he ‘can't’ be gay. Yet, that does not mean it is unrealistic. Arathi Menon perfectly encapsulates the intense fears and anxieties of being a teenager, more specifically one who is afraid that they are different from their peers in a very profound way. Ultimately, Da is not a conventional story about coming out of the closet, because for many of us the closet is something that arrives rather late into the narrative of queer stories. Instead, it is a story that explores what it would feel like to grow up as a child of a gay parent in a country and a time when simply existing was considered a crime.
The harmful rhetoric that queerness is somehow both dangerous and infectious to children permeates this narrative —a prejudice we still sadly know all too well today. For this reason, along with those outlined in the content warnings, I would highly recommend reading this book only if you are in a headspace that can handle it. Because, despite loving his father, Ved does not want to be gay. He does not want to be gay in a world where his friends bully people who show even the slightest sign of effeminacy; in a society where loving someone of the same gender is a criminal offense —as it was in 2013 India under lingering colonial laws; and certainly not in a society where Da’s rights over the child he loves, the child who is the only reminder of a beloved but lost wife, are put into question because of who he is.
Ved sees all of this and more, despite his father’s ignorant but well meaning attempts to protect him. He learns the bitter truth that sometimes love is not enough, not if it is deemed the ‘wrong’ type of love by the outside world. And so, Ved does not greet his potential queerness as he would a friend or a relief, but rather, at least initially, something to be exorcised. It is an identity he tries to suffocate by forcing himself to like who he is ‘supposed’ to like, putting himself in situations that risk his autonomy just in the desperate hope that it will shock him back into being ‘normal’. He does this not because he is disgusted by his own desires, but because he spends every single day watching his father worry if today might be the day he loses his life for the sheer crime of being in love.
Da starts as a gentle and heart-warming story of a single father doing his best to love and raise his son in a world without his mother —a world where the simple act of fatherhood is seen as a radical overthrowing of ingrained gender roles, rather than pure kindness and instinct. But the narrative becomes so much more than that. It transforms into a political thriller in places and a fictional memoir of a questioning teen in others, but throughout it all permeates a profound sense of grief, grief for what should and could have been if queer love did not have to be a political statement or a constant fight.
The story left me feeling sick, as though the pages had torn open a hole inside of me and retreated, leaving me entirely hollow. Ved is left feeling a similar emptiness after the book's climax when Da's private love is exposed to a hostile world, the consequences of which instantly age a teenage boy into a man. Yet, for all his grief, Ved never stops fighting. He doesn’t just fight for himself, but for all those that cannot or will not. Love might not always be enough, but sometimes it is all we have. And it sure as hell can start a revolution.