You Are My Dear Friend by Madhuri Vijay

In Madhuri Vijay’s You Are My Dear Friend (The New Yorker, 8/12/2020,) 29-year-old Geeta leaves her au pair job to marry much older divorcee Srikanth. They adopt eight-year-old Rani, an orphan girl from “the jungles.” The sometimes surprising story about what happens proves to be a powerful allegory about tradition, change, feminism, identity and struggle.

Change is painful, physically and emotionally. The more deeply embedded the status quo, the more wrenching the change. Despite the violence, even to the very land where she lives, Geeta is romanced by the revolution she sees in Rani and we get a glimpse years later of both the more-subtle violence (a cosmetic clerk scolds Geeta for putting face cream sampler on her wrist) and the flame Geeta holds for it: she can’t take her eyes off the clerk.

This story is also a study of the person who might identify as sympathetic to the revolution (in this case the feminist revolution in traditional India,) but afraid to actually act on her sympathy. From the standpoint of people who want to make progressive changes in society, Geeta is the villain the story — someone who wants change but is too afraid to even express it, much less act on it.