Lucky Boy brings to light the impossible tasks society gives its most vulnerable members for those members to prove they are worthy of the most basic of rights. This is made abundantly clear with the courtroom scene on page when Kavya and Rishi are seeking continued custody of Ignacio. Soli has been prevented from calling in to the hearing and the detention center will not allow her lawyer to speak to her. She has been prevented at every turn from fulfilling the tasks set out in the reunification plan so she may have custody of her own child. The judge expresses some sympathy, but, in the end, places a higher value on the law than on the morality of the situation. He gives custody to Rishi and Kavya because, though it is clear the reunification plan is impossible, he still asserts that it must be fulfilled.
Sekaran does not shy from the ugliness Soli faces both as she immigrates to the United States and when she is held in detention. She is raped and starved and humiliated. As she is prevented again and again from doing what is legal, she finds a way to do what is possible (though horrifically difficult). She may not have been able to fulfill the reunification plan, but she escaped detention and reunited with her child. She had grit.
And though it would have been easy to paint Rishi and Kavya in a sort of adversarial way, to demonize them and give them every flaw, Sekaran doesn't do that. Instead Sekaran takes a much more effective route. She makes them normal. They're incredibly relateable, the quintessential good people doing bad things--or, at least, taking advantage of bad laws. Kavya obviously loves Ignacio deeply. She wants a child, and she wants him to be her child and she can't seem to get beyond that in a way that is almost primal. If they'd been easier to hate, the book would have been much less complicated and definitely not as good.
Hi Hilary,
ReplyDeleteHmmm. Your post made me pause. I'm interested in the characterization you make of Rishi and Kavya as normal, good people doing bad things. I'm interested I guess because I don't necessarily think what they are doing is "bad" or that the law is wholly "bad." Flawed, sure. Imperfect, absolutely. It is abundantly clear that Kavya loves Ignacio so much, and not just because she wants a child, but because she sees herself as his mother. And this is flawed too. But I think Soli, too, has flaws. Soli seems more difficult to criticize for me--her choices are often impossible. But does that completely excuse her from culpability for her actions? This book made me think deeply about how we assign blame. I recently read Celeste Ng's Little Fires Everywhere. There's a similar set up in that book. A mother who is an immigrant (though I believe documented in that case) abandons her baby at a fire station. A wealthy white couple ends up with the baby. Ng's presentation of a similar incident was much less complex. It felt much easier in that story to side with the birth mother even though she abandoned the baby, a much harder to forgive mistake than Soli's. All this to say, that I agree, sort of, and not at the same time.
-Kari
I love that you looked at the ways that Shanthi presents the problems with the laws regarding immigration and how undocumented peoples are treated and prevented from doing what other laws require of them. It's like these laws prevent people from following other laws and cause them to be considered "criminals" or "bad" mothers because, in Soli's case, she hasn't been able to take steps in the reunification plan because there aren't laws that require ICE to allow undocumented people from following other laws (idk if that makes sense or if I just talked myself in circles or am speaking gibberish).
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