"The day my sister tried to drag the baby fox into our house was the same day my mother had her first mental breakdown." The poet Mona Arshi has put her skills to good use in a debut novel full of arresting imagery and startling lines. Somebody Loves You is narrated in short, titled sections, a coming-of-age tale in snapshot form. Sometimes just a paragraph long, these beautifully detailed passages speak to a young girl's difficulties in communicating her desires and fears to the outside world.
The epigraph – “I have to make of my soul an ornamental thing” – is taken from the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, an apposite choice by Arshi as her novel features a protagonist who doesn’t speak. The source of Ruby’s trauma is never quite unpacked, but we know that she’s been ill since childhood, in and out of hospital, a mystery to specialists: “The first time I was ill all the talk was about virus-related elevated liver enzymes and organ stress. Now my vital organs had recovered perfectly and this time it was my legs.”
Ruby is also a mystery to her parents, her schoolmates and teachers: “I was the unwalking, untalking, uncomplaining miracle.” The only one who kind of gets her is older sister Rania. There is no easy dichotomy of good sister, bad sister. Rania is considered difficult in a different way, a rebel and rule breaker whose love of gore sees her befriend boys at school who are prone to nosebleeds.
This is one of many instances of quiet humour in a story that blends the tragic and comic to fine effect. While the sections are short, the insights are considered and occasionally profound. Writers such as Jenny Offill and Maggie Nelson, or particularly Han Kang's The White Book, with its fragmented meditations on existence, come to mind. Life, and narrative, stripped back to its bare essentials.
Arshi was born in west London and worked as a human-rights lawyer with the advocacy group Liberty for a decade before doing a masters in creative writing at the University of East Anglia. Her debut poetry collection Small Hands was published in 2015, winning the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and her work has since appeared in the Sunday Times, the Guardian and the Times of India.
Her depiction of an Indian immigrant family in London is one of the triumphs of her debut. The racism ranges from casual – “Even little brown girls can dance to it” – to vicious and endemic. A letter from a penpal arrives two days after Ruby’s 12th birthday: “Dear Ruby, I am really sad and sorry, but my dad has said I have to send you this letter and tell you I’m not allowed to be your pen friend anymore because he found out you’re a Paki.” Elsewhere, the lived experience of their maternal grandmother, who comes from India to stay with the family, is an eye-opener to western-educated Ruby and Rania: “Biji told us she was married to my grandfather when she was ten years of age. Two months after starting to bleed, and not yet fourteen, she was finally taken to her new home.”
Biji arrives to help the girls’ mother, who suffers with her mental health. While a teacher links Ruby’s silence to her mother’s problems, Arshi is careful not to jump to the same clear-cut conclusions, instead choosing to give a layered depiction of a woman unable to take care of herself or her family, preferring the garden and outside world. The mother’s depression, or “Mugdays”, the atmosphere of uncertainty they live in, waiting for these periods to come and go, is compassionately related, with humour again proving a vital tool: “My mother had taken to her bed, and my father had hidden the knives.”
Mental illness, racism, a rape and the aftermath – brilliantly rendered – are just some of the serious subjects Arshi explores in this short book. That it all fits together is credit to the elegance of her writing and her artful way with structure. As life breaks down for Ruby and Rania, form matches content, in a way that recalls Rebecca Watson’s recent debut, little scratch. Arshi understands the power of blank space on a page, the gaps that speak volumes.
Somebody Loves You is a refined and considered piece of work about the power of silence and the great value to be found in listening. “Look in the margins for the truth,” is one memorable piece of advice. It is silence as a refuge from the madness of the world, an attempt to tell the stories that don’t get told: “That was the way it was, you could never ask why, you had to work it out in between the gaps.”
