The ring of recollection : transgenerational haunting in the novels of Shashi Deshpande 9789042031012, 9042031018, 9789042031005

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Introduction
1 The Kernel, the Shell, and a “fish-stinking ring” - Notes Toward a Cryptomimetic
Reading of Deshpande’s Fiction
2 Haunted Beginnings - The Roots of Domestic Terror in Deshpande’s Early Fiction
3 “I am like a house full of unclean things, never cleaned, never opened” - The Maternal Crypt in The Dark Holds No Terrors
4 “you can never be the heroine of your own story” - Peering Into the Other’s Crypt in That Long Silence
5 “This book is mine as all can tell, if you steal it you will go to hell” - Transgressing the Other’s Crypt in The Binding Vine
6 “What could my mother be to yours?” - Disinheriting the Phantom in A Matter of Time
7 “healing in the words” - Deshpande’s Contract with the Dead in Small Remedies
Coda — “Still it moves”
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

The Ring of Recollection

C

ROSS ULTURES

Readings in Post / Colonial Literatures and Cultures in English

126 SERIES EDITORS

Gordon Collier (Giessen)

Bénédicte Ledent (Liège) CO-FOUNDING EDITOR Hena

Maes–Jelinek

Geoffrey Davis (Aachen)

The Ring of Recollection Transgenerational Haunting in the Novels of Shashi Deshpande

Nancy Ellen Batty Foreword by Jasbir Jain

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010

Cover Painting: Raja Ravi Varma, Shakuntala Looking for Dushyanta (lithograph, from original painting: oil on canvas, c. 1870, Sri Chitra Art Gallery, Trivandrum) Cover design: Gordon Collier & Pier Post The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-3100-5 E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-3101-2 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2010 Printed in The Netherlands

And into what labyrinth, what multiplicity of heterogeneous places, one must enter in order to track down the cryptic motivation? — Derrida, “Fors,” xivii

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements Foreword Introduction

ix xi xv

1

The Kernel, the Shell, and a “fish-stinking ring” — Notes Toward a Cryptomimetic Reading of Deshpande’s Fiction

1

2

Haunted Beginnings — The Roots of Domestic Terror in Deshpande’s Early Fiction

39

3

“I am like a house full of unclean things, never cleaned, never opened” — The Maternal Crypt in The Dark Holds No Terrors

71

4

“you can never be the heroine of your own story” — Peering Into the Other’s Crypt in That Long Silence

109

5

“This book is mine as all can tell, if you steal it you will go to hell” — Transgressing the Other’s Crypt in The Binding Vine

143

6

“What could my mother be to yours?” — Disinheriting the Phantom in A Matter of Time

185

7

“healing in the words” — Deshpande’s Contract with the Dead in Small Remedies

229

Coda — “Still it moves”

277

Works Cited Index

289 297

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Acknowledgements

My sincere thanks to the following individuals and groups for their support during the writing of this book: the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute and the Government of India; Red Deer College Faculty Professional Development and Scholarship Recognition Programs; American College, Madurai; Premila Paul, Paul Love, R.P. Nair, and all of the staff in the S C I L E T library at American College; Jasbir Jain; Amrita Bhalla; G.J.V. Prasad; Pamela McCallum; Clara Joseph; Roderick McGillis; Frances Batycki; Paul Nonnekes; and Gordon Collier. Of course, this book could not have been completed without the support and indulgence of my colleagues at Red Deer College, my family, and my friends in North America and India. I would also like to acknowledge the impact on this work of Jodey Castricano’s Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida’s Ghost Writing, a text that accompanied me to India and back and that continues to haunt me until this day. Not least, I want to acknowledge my enormous debt to Shashi Deshpande, whose generosity toward her critics, if my own experience has been any indication, is unparalleled.

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Foreword

I

H A V E J U S T F I N I S H E D R E A D I N G Nancy Ellen Batty’s work The Ring of Recollection and have enjoyed reading it from one end to the other. Nancy and I have never met, except that I was once a referee for one of her articles. Then why do I begin on such a personal note? The common ground is the work of Shashi Deshpande and her multi-layered narratives, which refuse to yield meaning in their entirety and compel a sensitive reader to turn them round and round to find the missing key. Writing and reading are both complex tasks; words have long-range meanings and often carry cultural and political baggage with them. Concepts such as guilt and penance also have cultural underpinnings. Batty has moved across cultures, working with an India-based writer’s perceptions and representations of culture. She has skillfully woven together the running strands of continuity in her study by using the Sakuntla-Dushyant story from the Mahabharata, the references to the gothic in the novels and in Deshpande’s non-fiction, and the psychological conflicts expressed through the surrealistic dreams. In this, there is a serious attempt to penetrate the cultural density – the many gaps that are bound to exist for the reader from another culture. The framing of Shashi Deshpande’s work in the postcolonial and ‘home-grown’ debate right in the opening chapter, clearly hints at the difference in the writing of the diaspora and that of the stay-at-home writer. Other writers like Nayantara Sahgal and U.R. Anantha Murthy have also, on occasion, entered into this debate and commented on the raw reality they experience as well as their strong embedding in home cultures. The very terms the West considers limiting are the ones that indicate confidence and pride. It is an issue which, once again, highlights the importance of location – this time not of the reader/critic but of the writer. In India, a land of many languages, there is a large body of work which

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does not address itself to the West. For this very reason, even as it works with resistance, history, and modernity, it treats them as subjects of perennial interest and value to any reader, not specifically the West. Resistance is like a phoenix which resurrects itself in all great writing. It is defiance of and resistance to a system, hegemonic or hierarchical – and not necessarily British imperialism. Have we ever considered the fact that postcoloniality is Janus-faced, split in its initial premise? It looks towards the West and its own colonial inheritance (as in Kiran Desai) and, contemporaneously, it also turns its face away and is engrossed in the telling of its own tale, spelling out a strategy of freedom. This writing is not at all unduly aware of the reader; is not concerned with the need to project over-explicit explanations, but carries on merrily because it is confident of communicating meaning to the right reader and is assured that the serious reader will make the necessary effort to unearth meaning – or a part of it – by striving to penetrate the layers that hide it. Shashi Deshpande is a writer belonging to the second category, anchored in her world of perceptions, reflections, and lived experiences, and Nancy Batty the reader who is willing to go across. Salman Rushdie’s Vintage Book of Indian Writing, produced in celebration of India’s fiftieth independence celebrations in 1997, devoted twothirds of its contents to writers living in the West and writing in English, with the sole exception of Manto. Its strength lay in the fact that it covered different generations, styles, and strategies. Debates on anthologies which represent a selective view are just as essential as the foregrounding of literary movements like postcolonialism; they go on to unfold the multiple ways in which meaning is constructed, located, worked out, and later opens itself to interpretation. The Ring of Recollection, beginning with this kind of framing, quickly moves across to the writing under consideration. This preliminary framing does not prepare one for the intricate manner in which Nancy Batty weaves her connections between myths, individual fears, psychological conflicts, and the notion of guilt in its interplay with action through Deshpande’s writing, moving from novel to novel and living up to the subtitle, Transgenerational Haunting in the Novels of Shashi Deshpande. The attention Batty gives to the neglected early novels of Deshpande, Come Up and Be Dead and If I Die Today, is fully justified by the elaboration of these themes and strategies in Deshpande’s more mature work. Even in her latest novel, In the Country of Deceit (2009), Deshpande uses

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an unwritten part of the narrative of Come Up and Be Dead. Batty’s tracing of this underlying continuity points towards the recurrence of some familiar themes, where every successive repetition highlights a different perspective: of recognition, memory, guilt or reassertion, as the case may be. The validation and legitimacy of every interpretative strategy is likely to be judged by two things – its anchoring in the text and the fresh insight it offers. Batty’s work meets both these measures as it proceeds to add a new dimension to the body of criticism on Shashi Deshpande, freeing her from any limited lodging in either feminist or postcolonial theories and simultaneously opening up new ways of looking at her work, many of them still awaiting further exploration. She establishes an active relationship between reader and text as she explores the mysterious ways in which memory works, fear travels, and the writer’s own impressions merge with narration. And, in the process of writing this foreword, another two-way crossing is evident. Can there be a better way of expanding our perceptions and breaking the hold of our insular and parochial ways of relating to other cultures than this? JASBIR JAIN

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Introduction “Oceans of Room, My Dear Copperfield”1 — The Question of a Reader for Shashi Deshpande

I do not think of any specific readers, or of any reader at all when I am writing.2 By definition the reader does not exist.3 I am still unknown.4

A

C R I T I C I N I N D I A O N C E A S K E D M E why I was writing a book on the novels of Shashi Deshpande at this point in time: so much, she said, has already been written. This is certainly true: hundreds of reviews and articles and over a half-dozen collections of essays have been published on Deshpande’s work, almost all in India. There have been fewer monographs, only one of which has been published outside of the subcontinent (Amrita Bhalla’s Shashi Deshpande, for the Writers and Their Work series). Still, why do we need more essays and more books, barring, of course, commentary on Deshpande’s latest publications? As the critic mentioned above had suggested, hadn’t it all been said and done? And wasn’t the field best left to Indian critics? In

1

Shashi Deshpande, Small Remedies (New Delhi: Penguin, 2000): 79. Deshpande, Writing from the Margin, 75. 3 Derrida, “This Strange Institution Called Literature,” in Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992): 74. 4 Deshpande, Interview with Vanamala Viswanatha, “A Woman’s World … All The Way!” (c. 1998), in The Fiction of Shashi Deshpande, ed. R.S. Pathak (New Delhi: Creative Books, 1998): 234. 2

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other words, what could I, a Westerner, an ‘outsider’, contribute to the overcrowded field of Deshpande criticism? Perhaps these claims have some validity, but having come to Deshpande as a reader first – in other words, only through her novels and short stories, before knowing of her reputation or having read any of the criticism of her work – I sometimes found myself perplexed when I did encounter the reception of that work in India. What I read in the criticism often did not even touch upon what I was seeing as significant elements of Deshpande’s writing. Yes, relationships between men and women in her work are important; yes, Deshpande is saying something about women’s difficulty in having their voices and viewpoints heard; yes, she uses many terms and references that are difficult for a Western reader to understand. But when I read over and over again in much of the criticism that Deshpande’s work is narrowly focused on women’s issues, but that her feminism is entirely “home-grown,” or that her writing makes few allowances for a Western readership, or that Deshpande’s narrative style is transparent, straightforward, and realistic, I had to scratch my head. What was I to make, then, of Deshpande’s frequent references, in her novels and in her essays, not only to Western literature but also to Western philosophy and feminism? Or of the pervasive tropes of haunting and ghosts in her novels that remind me of the kind of gothic literature with which I am familiar, especially in the light of Deshpande’s admiration for Dickens, the Brontë sisters, and Anglo-American detective fiction? Or of those moments and structures in Deshpande’s fiction that clearly violate the conventions of straightforward, realist narrative? What was I to make, in short, of the fact that I, a Western reader, responded on a very deep level to this ‘very Indian’ writer’s novels? Was I caught in some sort of cultural parallax, completely blind to what others were seeing in Deshpande’s novels, reading her work entirely through what Chandra Mohanty has aptly termed “Western eyes”? It was not until I encountered the Indian critic Jasbir Jain’s exhaustive 2003 monograph Gendered Realities, Human Spaces: The Writing of Shashi Deshpande that I felt entirely comfortable confessing that much of the criticism of Deshpande’s work that I had read to that point had failed to capture for me the sheer complexity of this gifted writer. Arguing that “The easy, stereotypical manner in which many a researcher has approached [Deshpande’s] work has been a matter of provocation to me,

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leading me to dissatisfaction,”5 Jain valiantly attempts, in this monograph, to broaden the approach to Deshpande’s work, a critical project that she admits began with Mrinalini Sebastian in The Enterprise of Reading Differently: The Novels of Shashi Deshpande in Postcolonial Arguments (2000). Both Jain and Sebastian offer serious challenges to previous critical assessments of Deshpande’s work and attempt to inaugurate an approach that reveals its complexity and range. According to Jain, the criticism of Deshpande’s work to date has been too narrowly focused: “Critics, by and large, have focused on her women protagonists and issues related to feminist concerns and modes of resistance. […] None of them really interrogates any serious issue.”6 Moreover, she argues, very little of this criticism “necessarily takes into consideration Dehspande’s own stand that the impulse behind her work is more than the ‘woman question’.”7 In her monograph, Sebastian encourages critics to read Deshpande’s novels against the grain, or, to use Sebastian’s term, “contrapuntally,”8 to reveal the complexity of the author’s portrayal of women. But while Sebastian’s monograph seems at times to accept the ‘women’s writer’ label quite often attributed to Deshpande and is quite defensive about the neglect of Deshpande’s work by postcolonial critics, Jain throws down the gauntlet, arguing that Deshpande’s considerable body of work is worthy of consideration in its own right, without the critic having to defend Deshpande’s work as ‘postcolonial’, as ‘Indian’, as ‘feminist’, etc. Several years have passed since Sebastian’s and Jain’s books were published, yet, to judge from the criticism that has followed, very few critics since have risen to their challenge: to read Deshpande’s novels differently. Nor do they seem to have taken into account these ground-breaking monographs. For example, Amrita Bhalla’s otherwise very fine introduction to Deshpande for the Northcote House Writers and Their Work Series, published in 2006,9 mentions neither Sebastian nor Jain’s work. In 5

Jasbir Jain, Gendered Realities, Human Spaces: The Writings of Shashi Deshpande (Jaipur & New Delhi: Rawat, 2003): 9. 6 Jain, Gendered Realities, 28. 7 Gendered Realities, 29. 8 Mrinalini Sebastian, The Enterprise of Reading Differently: The Novels of Shashi Deshpande in Postcolonial Arguments (New Delhi: Prestige, 2000): 94. 9 Delay in publication of this monograph, which appears to have been completed by Bhalla in 2003, may account for the omission of Jain’s work; but not Sebastian’s.

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another book published in 2006, the critic Anita Myles includes a chapter on the work of Deshpande that not only fails to cite either Sebastian or Jain (or any other critic, for that matter – it relies entirely on published interviews with the author), but also clings steadfastly to the stereotypical critical line that Deshpande’s work is autobiographical, wholly womancentred, and “simple”: “[Deshpande] uses simple language to describe simple life specially of the Indian women”;10 “She wrote of simple dayto-day Indian middle-class life”; “Incidentally, she writes of all that she had experienced personally. Her women characters are so much like their creator.”11 Of course, within the corpus of Deshpande criticism there are many essays that offer insightful commentary on Deshpande’s novels. My work in this book inevitably builds on and gratefully acknowledges this criticism, but it owes perhaps its largest debt to critics like Sebastian and Jain, who raise similar questions to the ones I am exploring and with whose approaches I feel the greatest affinity. The only substantial point of difference that I have with these two critics is their assessment of Deshpande as a realist writer.12 Perhaps because I have come to Deshpande from such a different place and different background from that of her critics in India, and perhaps because I came to her work before knowing anything at all about her critical reputation, I believe that I do approach her work differently, from an ‘other’ perspective. The specific scholarly background on which I draw – critical work on William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, and, more recently, Arundhati Roy that has been informed by poststructuralist psychoanalytic theory and gothic poetics – cannot help but influence my reading. From this perspective, I find astonishing the number of times that Indian critics, especially Jain, use the words “haunting” and “ghost(s)” to talk about Deshpande’s texts, but never allude to the gothic genre, in spite of the fact that Deshpande is a self-confessed fan of the Brontës and of

10

Anita Myles, Feminism and the Post-Modern Indian Women Novelists in English (New Delhi: Sarup & Sons, 2006): 63. 11 Myles, Feminism and the Post-Modern Indian Women Novelists in English, 64. 12 Sebastian notes that, in A Matter of Time, “we can really see the breaking of the accepted notions of a realistic mode of writing” (The Enterprise of Reading Differently, 195). However, I would argue that this anti-realist tendency can be found in all of Deshpande’s work.

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romance and detective fiction and has alluded specifically to the gothic in at least one of her novels.13 This book, therefore, arises from what some might call a heretical question: if Deshpande is well-known and celebrated as a writer in India, but barely acknowledged by the critical establishment outside of it, how much of this has to do not with her writing per se, but with its reception in India, and, consequently, its representation in much of the existing criticism? Could it be that, represented differently (and not just read differently, as Sebastian suggests), Deshpande’s work might appeal to a wider audience, even to readers in the so-called Western world? It may seem an odd question to ask, the question of a reader for Shashi Deshpande. Obviously, Deshpande has an audience for her work, as her book sales and major awards demonstrate. Yet, why is it that the question of Deshpande’s limited readership is raised in almost every interview with her and virtually every monograph on her work? The critic Arnab Chakladar has published an entire article devoted to the question. Of course, one might argue, this question of readership, even when it is being posed by India-based or Indian diasporic critics, is always really the question of a Western readership for Shashi Deshpande’s work. The question these critics (and even at times Deshpande herself) have been asking is, ‘Why is Shashi Deshpande not well known to literary scholars and readers outside of India?’ In introducing this book with the question, I, too, am guilty of contributing to the surfeit of speculation on Deshpande’s readership and also of succumbing to the critical anxiety and defensiveness that inevitably attend upon such a project. If Deshpande’s work is really as good as her (mostly) Indian critics say it is, why has it not been embraced by discerning readers abroad? However, I would like to shift the ground a bit by asking a slightly different question: what is it about Deshpande’s work – or perhaps the sedimented reception of her work – that has failed to elicit for it an influential champion within India or the Indian diaspora, something that is arguably an essential step toward obtaining an international reputation?

13

In The Binding Vine, Urmi refers to a family story that has “a touch of the Gothic about it” and makes her think of Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre; Deshpande, The Binding Vine (1993; New York: Feminist Press at C U N Y , 2001): 96.

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I shall take as my example par excellence here Salman Rushdie’s and Elizabeth West’s controversial anthology of Indian writing (mostly) in English, meant to mark the fiftieth anniversary of India’s independence.14 Published in 1997, just a year after Arundhati Roy’s first novel, The God of Small Things, stunned the literary world by winning the Booker Prize, it contains a chapter from Roy’s novel, but not a single one of the more than fifty stories nor a chapter from one of the seven novels that Deshpande had published to that date. By this time, Deshpande had already received the Sahitya Akademi Award, India’s most prestigious literary honour, for That Long Silence, published in 1988, and her seventh novel, A Matter of Time, had come out to good reviews in India in 1996, the same year Roy’s novel was published. In other words, Deshpande certainly was not an unknown writer in India at the time the anthology was compiled. Rushdie’s narrative style and West’s anthology, celebrating such an important political anniversary and riding the wave of publicity (both positive and negative) generated by Roy’s Booker-winning novel, garnered considerable attention around the world, ensuring significant international exposure for the writers included in the volume. Of course, it is difficult to determine the impact of inclusion on a writer’s career. Whether Rushdie and West were prescient or whether their inclusion of a chapter from Kiran Desai’s first novel (selected for the anthology even before the novel was published15) assisted her career, Desai, daughter of the internationally celebrated Indian author Anita Desai, did go on as well to win a Man Booker Prize in 2006 for her second novel, The Inheritance of Loss. The editors’ selection of two young and promising writers may be viewed as a bold vote of confidence in a new wave of Indian literary genius; however, it is somewhat curious that an anthology celebrating 14 The controversy largely stems from Rushdie’s pronouncement that “the prose writing […] created in this period by Indian writers working in English, is proving to the a stronger and more important body of work than most of what has been produced in the 16 ‘official languages’ of India […] during the same time”; Salman Rushdie, “Introduction” to Mirrorwork: 50 Years of Indian Writing, 1947–1997 (New York: Henry Holt, 1997): viii. 15 Shakuntala Bharwani, “The Family Trap: A Native Response to Three Indian English Novels,” in Native Responses to Contemporary Indian English Novel, ed. Rangrao Bhongle (New Delhi: Atlantic, 2003): 120.

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fifty years of Indian writing to 1997 contains an excerpt from a novel by an ingénue writer whose work would not be published until 1998. Admittedly, any list of Indian writers excluded from the anthology would be infinitely longer than the list of those that could be included in its finite pages; in other words, Deshpande is only one of a large number of notable Indian authors, writing in English or otherwise, whose work is not included in the anthology. Obviously, editorial judgments must be made, writers, inevitably, included and excluded. In answering an anticipated objection that only one work in translation from an Indian language had been deemed worthy of inclusion in the anthology, Rushdie stands firm: “It is of course true that any anthology worth its salt will reflect the judgements [sic] and tastes of its editors. I can only say that our tastes are pretty catholic and our minds, I hope, have been open. We have made our choices, and stand by them.”16 Since one can do no more than speculate on the reasons for and impact of Deshpande’s exclusion from this anthology (although I will come back to the issue of Rushdie’s influence later) let us treat this example for now as just one of the symptoms of what I would like to call Deshpande’s known/unknown, recognized/unrecognized – uncanny – status as a writer. So I return to the question: if Deshpande is so well known in India and is, according to the major literary awards she has received, one of the most distinguished and respected novelists writing in English currently living in that country, why has her work been overlooked by the “global knowledge industry”?17 Even setting aside for now the symptom of her absence from the Rushdie and West anthology, Deshpande’s difficulty in finding a North American publisher for all but three of her novels (in spite of the fact that she writes only in English) merits some attention. To be sure, Deshpande does not require a Western audience: she has access in India to one of the largest literary readerships in the world.18 And while international acclaim for her work would, no doubt, be the crowning glory on a long and productive literary career, such recognition is not required to certify Deshpande’s credentials or credibility as a writer. 16

Rushdie, “Introduction” to Mirrorwork, ix. Graham Huggan, Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001): 78. 18 With an English literacy rate of 3–5 percent in a country of one billion people, there should be a large potential market for Indian writing in English. 17

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As Makarand Paranjape bluntly asserts, “Things Indian have an existence and significance of their own apart from how they are perceived by the West.”19 Still, I am compelled to ask again, what is it about Deshpande’s work that fails to resonate with the cultural gatekeepers on both sides of the literary world? In her monograph on Deshpande, Mrinalini Sebastian offers a fairly comprehensive list of questions with regard to the reception (or lack thereof) of Deshpande’s work, and, since an exploration of these questions will structure the rest of this introduction, it is worth quoting her at length here: Why has Shashi Deshpande not succeeded in attracting much critical attention? Is she too old-fashioned for the feminist critics? Is she unable to make an allegory of her writing and therefore does not qualify to be a postcolonial writer? Has she no views at all about the postcolonial aspect of her context? Is it just a matter of the international recognition that she does not possess? Has she proved herself to be no modern writer, with her not so experimental literary techniques? Her novels cannot be thrown into that ignominious category “Second Class Literature.” But it is not pleasant to notice that she still has to be advertised as the daughter of “the renowned dramatist and Sanskrit scholar, Sriranga.” Her writings are not political in the traditional sense of the word; but they do expose the different politics of human sexuality as experienced by a woman, and also the politics of power among women, coming from a certain province with a certain class and caste background.20

Sebastian’s summary of the critical quibbles most often raised about Deshpande’s work can be rounded out with another common claim about her work, that Deshpande’s writing is too rooted in a parochial, vernacular Indian context to be appreciated outside of India. But I will return to this issue later. For now, I would like to draw attention to some of the paradoxes buried within Sebastian’s litany of objections to Deshpande’s work, paradoxes that arise in most discussions of the author’s reception. The first of 19 Makarand Paranjape, in “Coping with Post-Colonialism,” Interrogating PostColonialism: Theory, Text and Context, ed. Harish Trivedi & Meenakshi Mukherjee (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1996): 42. 20 Mrinalini Sebastian, The Enterprise of Reading Differently, 37–38.

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these can be found at the beginning of the quotation: “Why has Shashi Deshpande not succeeded in attracting much critical attention?” Yet, as I have already mentioned, hundreds of articles have been published in India on Deshpande’s work, and there are quite likely hundreds more in preparation as I write this sentence.21 To be sure, there is a dearth of booklength treatments, considering how much Deshpande has published, but Deshpande’s work has not been entirely neglected, either by reviewers, critics, or literary academies in India. So what does it mean to say that Deshpande’s work has not succeeded in attracting much critical attention? Is it, as Jasbir Jain says, that, while there has been a great deal of criticism published on her work, much of it seems to recycle previous ideas and rarely moves the discussion of her work in any “serious” direction? But even setting aside the question of quality, there is a more serious concern with regard to accessibility of criticism on Deshpande for scholars outside India who rely on electronic databases, such as the influential Modern Languages Association International Bibliography.22 Arnab Chakladar observes in a 2006 essay that the M L A Bibliography shows three times as many ‘hits’ for criticism on Arundhati Roy’s single novel The God of Small Things, as it does for the criticism of all of Deshpande’s novels.23 Chakladar’s observation curiously echoes one made almost twenty years earlier by Viney Kirpal and Mukta Atrey, this time in relation to Deshpande and another internationally acclaimed Indian writer, Salman Rushdie: Conceding the difference between the two writers, it is still very intriguing that just a handful of critical studies or reviews on Desh-

21

In 2003, R.S. Kimbahune noted, disparagingly, that Deshpande is “the latest attraction of Ph.D. aspirants”; “The Contemporary Indian English Novel: A Minority Report,” in Native Responses to Contemporary Indian English Novel, ed. Rangrao Bhongle (New Delhi: Atlantic, 2003): 102. 22 The most perplexing instance of a critical blind-spot in the case of Deshpande is the omission from the M L A Bibliography of Jasbir Jain’s 2003 monograph on Deshpande, Gendered Realities, Human Spaces. While the bibliography lists 44 works authored or co-authored by Jain, some of them produced by the same publisher, it omits reference to what is arguably the most exhaustive critical treatment of Deshpande’s work by one of Indian’s foremost critics. 23 Arnab Chakladar, “Of Houses and Canons: Reading the Novels of Shashi Deshpande,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 37.1 (2006): 94n3.

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pande exist, even sixteen years after her first novel appeared. Rushdie, by contrast, has been the subject of innumerable studies.24

Again, considering Deshpande’s reputation and status within India, for the researcher outside of India, there is really very little internationally recognized, peer-reviewed Deshpande criticism, and this may be what Sebastian means when she observes that Deshpande’s work has not attracted very much critical attention. Sebastian proceeds to speculate about why Deshpande’s work has been neglected: “Is she too old-fashioned for feminist critics?” One needs to place this question in the context of Deshpande’s early reception and her vexed relationship since the 1970s with the term ‘feminism’, as applied to her work. Because almost all of Deshpande’s novels and many, but certainly not all, of her short stories explore the inner lives of women characters, and also because many of her earliest works were published in the Indian women’s magazine Femina, her work was very early characterized as feminist, and, as such, was either praised or vilified by critics, depending on their attitudes toward and understanding of the concept of feminism. Amidst a plethora of articles and edited collections dealing with ‘man–woman’ relationships in Dehspande’s work, a debate ensued as to what kind of feminist she might be: Western, or Indian? A great deal of ink has already been spilt over this question, and I am loath to add much more to that here. Amrita Bhalla, in her monograph on Deshpande for the Writers and Their Works series, does an admirable job of exploring the Indian context for Deshpande’s feminism. Much more work needs to be done in exploring and understanding the impact on Deshpande of Western feminists such as Simone de Beauvoir and Erica Jong, to whom Deshpande frequently refers, both in her novels and in her critical essays. Sebastian’s claim that Deshpande’s feminism is of the “old-fashioned” kind, however, is worth consideration. Admittedly representative of a younger generation of feminists within India, Shalmalee Palekar labels Deshpande’s feminism ambivalent, “a kind of gendered humanism of a

24

Mukta Atrey & Viney Kirpal, Shashi Deshpande: A Feminist Study of Her Fiction (Delhi: B.R. Publishing, 1998): Preface.

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liberationist kind”25 that approaches women’s issues from a middle-class and liberal, rather than radical, perspective: One can, reading from my positionality as a younger, urban, Indianfeminist reader, critique Deshpande’s reluctance to posit alternatives to marriage and motherhood – whether lesbianism, as in [Deepa Mehta’s movie] Fire, or other choices such as divorce or single motherhood – as being extremely difficult, but valid and realistic for financially stable, educated, contemporary Indian women.26

Palekar faults Deshpande for her failure to escape heteronormative liberal values, her inability to portray agency in lower-class women (such as that of the hapless Shakutai in The Binding Vine), and for her sometimes uncritical use of a Hindu mythology steeped in patriarchal, Brahminical values. However, Palekar does admit that Deshpande’s work is important in that it explores the conflicts experienced between women’s traditional roles in the family as mothers, wives, daughters or daughters-in-law and the demands made on educated women ‘caught amongst conflicting attitudes towards Gandhian nationalism and the language of Western feminism’. She maps out the cultural determinants, overt or covert, that structure the ‘desirable role perception’ of an Indian wife and mother. She also engages in demythologizations of archetypes like Sita and Savitri, through her protagonists’ search for self-identity and self-expression.27

Judged from a contemporary feminist point of view, then, Deshpande’s work does have some merit. Nonetheless, Palekar’s positive, if qualified, evaluation of this work is predicated upon the assumption that Deshpande’s literary project is – or should be – a feminist one. Albeit somewhat reluctantly, as she resents being forced into the category ‘woman writer’, Deshpande has attempted to clarify the relationship between her writing and the feminist movement, notably in her essaycollection Writing from the Margin. After resisting the imposition of the

25

Shalmalee Pakekar, “Gender, Feminism and Postcoloniality: A Reading of Shashi Deshpande’s Novels,” in Writing Difference: The Novels of Shashi Deshpande, ed. Chanchala K. Naik (Delhi: Pencraft International, 2005): 57. 26 Palekar, “Gender, Feminism and Postcoloniality,” 68. 27 “Gender, Feminism and Postcoloniality,” 69.

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feminist label for some time, Deshpande has long since embraced the ‘accusation’ that she is a feminist, but she still quite rightly, in my view, argues that her work is not protest literature, or literature written with an agenda in mind. She argues, further, that being associated with any ideology merely entraps the writer: The question always is: Do you adhere to the feminist ideology? But I, who am a feminist in my personal life, find it hard to see any human being living out her or his life according to any ideology. I know there is as much confusion in the character, as there is in me, as many contradictions. Which, according to the critic looking for feminism in a woman’s writing, is not acceptable. [….] Why do your women stay within their marriages? Why do they not walk out? Why do they compromise? These are some of the questions addressed to me. All this seems a long way from the time when a critic took me to task for, as he said, waving my banners of protest in The Dark Holds No Terrors; but I don’t see it as a major improvement on that earlier situation. The bottom line now is, Are you a feminist? If you are one, why aren’t your women feminists? Why is it, I was asked, by an academic, that your women, who are so troubled by patriarchy, who suffer under patriarchy, don’t rebel? The problem is that rebelling is generally understood to mean walking out on a marriage (the echoes of the door Nora bangs behind her seem to haunt us!), the problem lies in thinking that walking out is a liberating process. Whereas, to me, it is always clear that an understanding of oneself is what really liberates, it is this that opens out a number of possibilities. To walk out, or away, is to carry the old self with oneself.28

Despite Deshpande’s repeated pleas to broaden the critical perspective on her writing, critics persist not just in stereotyping her work as feminist, but in marginalizing it as a result. A.S. Dasan, for example, after describing Deshpande as “one of the leading India-based (Bangalorean) women writers today with strong feminist concerns,”29 blithely affirms that Deshpande “prefers to be in the category of ‘niche-writers’,”30 those who are 28

Shashi Deshpande, “Writing From the Margin,” in Writing from the Margin and Other Essays (New Delhi: Viking Penguin, 2003): 158–59. 29 A.S. Dasan, The Rains and the Roots: The Indian English Novel Then and Now (Mysore: Sahrdayata–Global Fellowship Academy, 2006): 60; emphasis mine. 30 Dasan, The Rains and the Roots, 61.

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content with representing “women’s” concerns. Dasan’s characterization of Deshpande’s work is figured in a double marginalization of her identity: as parochial (Bangalorean) and as female (and feminist). While she values her female (and feminist) readers, Deshpande clearly resists such a narrow, limited, and, one might add, condescending approach, arguing that that her novels should claim a space within, and be judged according to the standards of, “mainstream” literature: The books I’ve written are not insignificant. But when the media talks about writers in English, you’ll find my name was most often omitted, until maybe two years ago [2000]. […] Or they put me among the women writers. Invariably, I get asked: ‘Is your next novel about women?’ I think that’s ridiculous! If you’re writing about domestic things or the family, they immediately put you in an inferior slot. Somehow, women’s writing is always the zenana. Criticism has not learnt to deal with writing by women as just writing, whether it’s good or bad. I think it’s deprived me of my true place in literature.31

Of course, not all writing by and about women is marginalized to the extent that, arguably, Deshpande’s has been, both in India and abroad. Moreover, the ‘feminist’ label may have actually contributed to Deshpande’s first major breakthrough in the North American market: A Matter of Time was reprinted in 1999 by the Feminist Press at City University of New York three years after it came out in India. The Feminist Press followed up by re-publishing Deshpande’s 1993 novel, The Binding Vine, in 2001. But if some of Deshpande’s work has benefited from the ‘feminist’ label, it has rarely, if ever, been promoted under or has benefited from the ‘postcolonial’ banner. Sebastian asks: Is [Deshpande] unable to make an allegory of her writing and therefore does not qualify to be a postcolonial writer? Has she no views at all about the postcolonial aspect of her context? Is it just a matter of the international recognition that she does not possess?

In other words (and this is the question that Arnab Chakladar attempts to answer as well), where is the ‘postcolonial’ in this post[-]colonial Indian 31

Cited in Aditi De, “Breaking That Long Silence,” Boloji.com (7 May 2002), http://www.boloji.com/wfs/wfs026.htm (accessed 17 January 2008).

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writer? The term itself, however, is loaded with a sedimented and controversial history of its own, one which Sebastian spends two-thirds of her book exploring and critiquing. Specifically, Sebastian reveals the limitations of the major postcolonial theorists when it comes to particular kinds of writing from the ‘Third World’: There seems to be an unwritten assumption that postcolonial or third world literature must deal with the nation, with colonialism, with the trauma the colonial era has created in order to receive recognition in the international scene.32

In support of her claim, Sebastian cites Aijaz Ahmad’s observation that The range of question that may be asked of the texts which are currently in the process of being canonized within [the postcolonial] counter-canon must predominantly refer […] to representations of colonialism, nationhood, post-coloniality, the typology of rulers, their powers, corruptions, and so forth. […] a whole range of texts which do not ask those particular questions in any foregrounded manner would then have to be excluded from or pushed to the margins of the emerging counter-canon. Worse still, a whole range of other kinds of questionings – pertaining to other sorts of literary influences and experiential locations, the political affiliations of the author, representations of classes and genders within the text, and myriad such issues – would then have to be subordinated to the primacy of the authorized questions: about ‘nation’ and so on.33

As a writer whose work does not foreground the issues of nation, Sebastian argues, Deshpande has been largely overlooked or even dismissed by postcolonial critics. But while Sebastian at one point argues that to be a writer in postIndependence India should be qualification enough for Deshpande’s inclusion in the category of ‘postcolonial’, she does capitulate to postcolonial critics’ alleged demands for political salience in the postcolonial text when she claims that Read differently, the protagonists and the other female characters in [Deshpande’s] novel could problematize the centre-margin binary and 32 33

Sebastian, The Enterprise of Reading Differently, 37. Aijaz Ahmad, cited in Sebastian, The Enterprise of Reading Differently, 37.

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suggest that postcolonial arguments could be used as reading tools even when nation, narration, history, hybridity are not serious issues in the world of the novels.34

In particular, Sebastian calls for a reconsideration of class issues in Deshpande’s novels to reveal the way that middle-class women’s privilege is predicated on the exploitation of lower-class women. While this is a perfectly legitimate – and perhaps even necessary – reading strategy, Sebastian’s argument that such a move is a postcolonial (rather than Marxist or even feminist?) project, clearly intended to bring Deshpande’s work within the purview of postcolonial studies, is one that aims, paradoxically, to recover Deshpande’s work for what Sebastian considers to be a flawed critical project. Under these terms of engagement, such an initiative serves only to legitimize the reading strategies of a postcolonial criticism that is otherwise programmatically indifferent to Deshpande’s work. Perhaps this is why Sebastian’s next question reads as a tautology: “Is it just a matter of the international recognition that she does not possess?” A ‘woman’s’ writer, but one who is either not feminist enough for some critics or too feminist for others; a postcolonial writer (geographically and temporally), but one who is not sufficiently political, allegorical, and/or globally aware (unless read against the grain) to attract attention from postcolonial critics. In Sebastian’s text it is clear that, when interpellated into these categories, Deshpande’s unruly work resists classification and stubbornly refuses the call to order. Sebastian’s anxiety reaches a peak in the following sentences: “Has [Deshpande] proved herself to be no modern writer, with her not so experimental literary techniques? Her novels cannot be thrown into that ignominious category ‘Second Class Literature’.” The former question is awkwardly worded as a series of negations, as though Sebastian realizes, to an extent, the tenuousness of the claim about Deshpande’s style, and the even more tenuous link between that claim and her next comment: “Her novels cannot be thrown into that ignominious category ‘Second Class Literature’.” What, exactly, is the implicit relationship between literary style (what Sebastian refers to as Deshpande’s “not so experimental literary technique”) and literary value? 34

Sebastian, The Enterprise of Reading Differently, 36.

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According to the critic R. Radhakrishnan, this association stems, at least in part, from the arbitration of influential critics, such as Salman Rushdie, who “had used form and figuration [in an article for the New Yorker] as the basis of separation between literatures that had come into their own by virtue of their rhetoricity and figural autonomy, and those that were still seeped [sic] in the poverty of mere realistic content,”35 Radhakrishnan suggests that in Rushdie’s argument, globalization is being valorized as a particular kind of post-nationalist cultural capital, and coordinated as a specific kind of post-national habitus, to borrow from Pierre Bourdieu. It is this way of hoarding the privileges of dominant / western / eurocentric nationalism that is renamed effectively as global and cosmopolitan, whereas the “other” nationalism remains vernacular, identitarian, and theme-infested.36

Radhakrishnan points out the irony of this classification: It is interesting to note that what Rusdhie downgrades as mere realistic content is the very stuff that Fredric Jameson, in his controversial essay on Third World literature, allegorizes as the political capital that is intrinsic to third world literature: something that Jameson thinks is lacking within the postmodern play of first world literary and cultural production.”37

I would argue that the emphasis placed on Deshpande’s feminist and local or parochial (as opposed to national and therefore allegorical) concerns in most of the criticism of her work has resulted in a kind of critical orthodoxy – a sedimented and reified reception – that has the effect of subordinating her work to that which is perceived to have more “rhetoric[al] and figural autonomy.” Moreover, Sebastian and many other critics of Deshpande – even those who admire and defend her work – and even, at times, Deshpande herself,38 almost fully capitulate to this orthodoxy: 35

R. Radhakrishnan, “Globality is not Worldliness,” in Theory as Variation, ed. R. Radhakrishnan et al (New Delhi: Pencraft, 2007): 321. 36 Radhakrishnan, “Globality is not Worldliness,” 324. 37 “Globality is not Worldliness,” 321–22. 38 Deshpande has echoed Radhakrishnan’s claim about Rushdie’s significant role in shaping the tastes of a cosmopolitan (read: Western) audience: “The advent of Rushdie

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that Deshpande is a writer in the vernacular and identitarian mode, a liberal, bourgeois writer whose work is invested in a non-radical feminism and an unfashionable realism, but who is nonetheless meritorious, mainly because of her indigeneity and her refusal to submit to cosmopolitan tastes. Sebastian implies as much when she complains that It is very tempting to consider certain types of novels as being worthy of postcolonial considerations or as being postmodern in nature while disregarding many others for not fitting into this framework. The fear of choosing something which even distantly smells of realistic mode of representation seems to be great in many of the modern critical tendencies and this fear has resulted in the neglect of certain authors and their works.39

At the same time, however, as I have indicated above, Sebastian argues for an extension of both the postcolonial and feminist critical purviews to include such works, particularly if they – more specifically, in this case, Deshpande’s work – can be read “differently” or “contrapuntally” to reveal a latent critique both of realism and of the privilege of Deshpande’s middle-class female protagonists. From a Barthean, poststructuralist perspective, Deshpande’s “readerly” writing invites and profits from a “writerly” reading that can, it is hoped, massage it into critical acceptability. Sebastian is by no means the only critic to express the view that Deshpande’s work is stylistically straightforward, transparent, and realist and that it deals predominantly with depictions of contemporary ‘man– woman’ relations in Indian society – these claims, as I have argued, have formed the orthodox frame of reference for her work. Moreover, for those critics who admire Deshpande’s fiction, these characteristics of her writing are deemed a virtue: they distinguish her writing as ‘authentic’, as being grounded in Indian ‘reality’, and, in the sense of being un-self-

and his imitators / admirers marginalised our kind of writing even more” (cited in Sebastian, The Enterprise of Reading Differently, 143). Rushdie and Deshpande have historically had a vexed relationship. Infamously, Rushdie, after losing out to J.M. Coetzee in the contest for the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize in 2000, described the Indian chairperson of the panel as “spectre of the feast, the stone-faced Indian judge, Shashi Deshpande,” whose “curdled judgment” cost him the prize. 39 Sebastian, The Enterprise of Reading Differently, 144.

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conscious, as ‘unliterary’, as Y. Sunita Reddy implies when she says that “Deshpande’s writing is unplanned and quite spontaneous.”40 For critics less inclined to see these putative characteristics of her writing as a virtue, Deshpande’s work appears too autobiographical and uncrafted: Shashi Deshpande, like many others [including Anita Desai], is satisfied with telling rather than showing. These novelists do not risk articulation of the potential in their subject matter. They employ first person narration or variations thereof. They have to depend on memory and therefore the immediate past. The breakdown of the joint family, the decadence of the feudal system, the enticement of Western modes of living are rendered with nostalgia. To write about history and decadence sans nostalgia has proved nearly impossible.41

While it is unclear whether this critic identifies all first-person narration, or just that written by women, with autobiographical impulses, what is clear is that he disparages this technique in two female writers who he can only imagine are writing solely from immediate personal experience. Similarly dismissive of Deshpande’s writing in a negative review of The Binding Vine, Subash K. Ja states, first of all, that “Deshpande’s is the everyday middle-class world of assiduous iron-willed women in starched saris with jam-packed routines” and concludes with: “what The Binding Vine calls for is craftsmanship.” Even more telling is a scathing anonymous review of the same book that begins by claiming that “feminists like Shashi Deshpande [are] carrying on the polemical tradition” and ends by dismissing the novel’s value by noting that “No kind of love could ever hope to compensate for the hell these characters go through.”42 According to all of the above critics, even the critic who reviewed Deshpande’s work positively, one would assume that the reply to Sebastian’s disclaimer – “Her novels cannot be thrown into that ignominious category ‘Second Class Literature’” – is a distinct ‘yes, they (or at least some of them) can!’ The answer, therefore, to the question of Deshpande’s literary reputation is equally clear: she lacks an international 40

Y.S. Sunita Reddy, A Feminist Perspective on the Novels of Shashi Deshpande (New Delhi: Prestige, 2001): 142. 41 Kimbahune, “The Contemporary Indian English Novel: A Minority Report,” 102. 42 Review of The Binding Vine, The Independent (22 May 1995).

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reputation because her work lacks literary merit. She is still referred to as the daughter of the famed Kannada playwright Sriranga because she has failed to earn her own place in the literary world. Like Sebastian, I, too, want to reject the label “Second Class Literature” for Deshpande’s work and to claim a different place for Deshpande in literary history (all the while aware of my own narcissistic investment in such a project). And like Jasbir Jain, I, too, would like to dispense with the defensiveness that attends every project to do so. But how to accomplish this without engaging in the sciamachy of claim and counter-claim, without pitting either critic against critic or author against author in a losing battle to define literary merit, and without challenging old orthodoxies only to erect new ones? Let me begin that impossible task with the received idea that Deshspande is firmly rooted in an Indian context: that she is, as R.S. Sharma notes, “thoroughly home-grown.”43 While Deshpande might agree with that comment, she is hesitant to call herself an ‘Indian’ writer, at least in the sense that she can be said to be writing ‘about India’. In fact, she says that “writers rarely, almost never, I should say, write about a country!” She goes on to explain: Neither Dickens nor Jane Austen wrote ‘about England’; their novels strongly evoke a picture of the times and places their people live in, but it is never a deliberate creation of England as a country. Closer to home, Tagore’s people live in Bengal, not India, and Shivram Karanth’s live in South Kanara. The thought of ourselves [resident Indians] as living in India comes to us only when we are outside the country. Our passports are needed only when we travel outside. It is the residue of the colonial attitude that refuses to see writing from countries like India as just literature, refuses to accord it a place in the mainstream of literature.44

With a remark that is quite telling in other ways as well, as it locates Deshpande in yet another context – that of a British-educated middle class that chooses to live in India but has the means to travel abroad – Desh-

43 R.S. Sharma, “The Question of Indianness,” in Indian Writing in English: The Last Decade, ed. Rajul Bhargava (Jaipur & New Delhi: Rawat, 2002): 212. 44 Deshpande, “Where Do We Belong: Regional, National or International?,” in Writing from the Margin, 55.

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pande offers a subtle critique of the rising nativist (read: nationalist) literary movement in India, while inserting herself into a much wider literary tradition, one that broadems out to include not only Tagore but also Charles Dickens and Jane Austen. Strikingly, what Deshpande reminds us of in this statement is that Dickens and Austen were as bound to their specific time and place as was Tagore and is Deshpande herself, a point that is reiterated even more clearly later in her volume of collected essays: Why does it never occur to us that if we can read Hardy’s painfully rustic dialects, if we can read all of the ramifications of Russian society in Tolstoy, if we can read the Latin American writers, surely a reader outside India can read an Indian writer in the same way?45

While the “we” to whom Deshpande refers is highly problematic, inevitably excluding, as well as including, readers of different cultural, national, and class backgrounds, her point is that much of what “we” in the West consider great literature today is strongly identified with a specific, identifiable location. The literary touchstones that Deshpande invokes in the quotation above – Hardy, Tolstoy, the Russian and Latin American writers – along with most of the other authors that she obviously reads and values, such as the Brontë sisters, Dickens, and Mrs Gaskell, are all figures associated with a highly particularized regional (not national) and vernacular literary tradition. These writers are parochial, if we are to consider the definition of that word in its least pejorative sense: that of describing a literature that is “limited in range or scope (as to a narrow area or region)” (Merriam–Webster). In following Deshpande’s lead in seeking to redeem a certain kind of parochial literature at a time when the thrust of postcolonial theory is toward a valorization of globalism and cosmopolitanism, my approach to Deshpande is, perhaps, more in line with that of Ahmad or Appadurai than with Appiah or Rushdie. I will articulate my position vis-à-vis the parochial and the gothic further in the chapter that follows: here, suffice it to say that parochial need not be disparaged as identitarian, nor confused, at this particular point in time in India’s history, with communalism. On the contrary, texts that are most firmly grounded in a local context are often those that most urgently register and engage with the specific national and even interna45

“Dear Reader,” in Writing from the Margin, 136.

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tional tensions of the day, as countless twentieth- and twenty-first-century readings of the authors Deshpande mentions have demonstrated. Indeed, if we are to take the meaning of the word ‘parochial’ literally and to apply it to the Indian context, we will see – particularly in novels like That Long Silence, A Matter of Time, and Small Remedies – that it is often within the equivalent of the parish, or the local community, that the most compelling dramas of friction and accommodation are daily enacted. As Emma Parker argues, in defence of contemporary British women’s writing, “serious political, social and cultural issues […] arise from fiction that has been dismissed as limited or trivial.”46 Anything but limited or trivial, Shashi Deshpande’s novels, while they are firmly set in the south Indian context, have the potential to resituate the south Indian subject and her milieu vis-à-vis a cosmopolitan readership familiar not only with the (mostly) nineteenth-century texts to which Deshpande most often refers, but also with literary modernism, which, I would argue, is the register in which Deshpande writes. The persistent tendency to call Deshpande a realist writer ignores many of the most distinctive characteristics of her writing: her frequent use of modernist narrative techniques such as first-person point of view, free indirect discourse, and stream of consciousness; the temporal disruptions in her work; and the implicit and explicit debt in her work to mid-twentiethcentury existential writers such as Sartre, Camus, and de Beauvoir. Listen closely to this exchange between Deshpande and her interviewer Gita Viswanath. Viswanath comments on what she sees as the author’s preference for a “straightforward narrative style that goes by the name of realism rather than the more fashionable innovations like magic realism etc.” Here is how the author responds: S D : I wish I could agree it is straightforward. G V : By straightforward, I mean it is not gimmicky. S D : It’s not simple and it’s not straightforward. I have a non-chronological narrative. I have to work extremely hard, it doesn’t come to me in a linear fashion. I work through a person’s memory. There is a person’s narrative and the story comes through her memory. I have to

46

Emma Parker, “Introduction: ‘The Proper Stuff of Fiction’: Defending the Domestic, Reappraising the Parochial,” in Essays and Studies 2004: Contemporary British Women Writers, ed. Emma Parker (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004): 6.

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put together a chaotic mass of material. It’s neither simple nor straightforward as far as I am concerned. But in a way, it’s realism. It’s not magic realism.47

Given the choice only between magical realism and realism, Deshpande chooses the latter, albeit with a slight caveat. Of course, there are other possible ways of accounting for a narrative structure that takes its cue from the labyrinthine operations of troubled human memory: the most obvious of these is literary modernism. The critic Saikat Majumdar has made a strong case for viewing Deshpande as a modernist, rather than realist or postmodernist, writer. He notes, for example, that Deshpande presents a much more atomized and individualistic set of characters than those found in postmodernism: while national allegories seem to proceed from the direction of certain privileged narratives of the pan-Indian public sphere into the lives of individuals who seem to exist as vehicles of the symbolic reflection of such narratives, in Deshpande’s fiction, on such rare occasions when the locally rooted, family-enclosed (or stifled, as it often is), wellrounded private lives spill into the larger patterns or upheavals of the public domain, epistemological and narrative primacy is still fixated on such private lives that might be swayed by such patterns or upheavals but are never rendered into flat narrative vehicles of the same.48

But while Deshpande’s focus on individual lives in her novels and her concern with issues such as the limits of personal freedom within a south Indian context are not at all inconsistent with the concerns of modernist writers in India such as Anita Desai and Nayantara Sahgal, her literary technique, I would argue, has more in common with the experiments of early modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and William Faulkner.

47 Gita Viswanath, “In Conversation with Shashi Deshpande (3 June 2003),” in Writing Difference: The Novels of Shashi Deshpande, ed. Chanchala K. Naik (Delhi: Pencraft International): 231. 48 Saikat Majumdar, “Aesthetics of Subjectivity, Ethics of ‘Otherness’: The Fiction of Shashi Deshpande,” Postcolonial Text 1.2 (2005), http://www.pkp.ubc.ca/pocol /viewarticle.php?id=33

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I mention the latter writer, specifically, as a bridge to my next observation about Deshpande’s literary style: that it has obvious affinities with a very long tradition of gothic literature, one that has continued to this day in writing as diverse as cyberpunk, mystery fiction, romance, and some recent postcolonial novels. The claim that Deshpande’s fiction is both modernist and gothic is not at all contradictory, as my mention of Faulkner in this context suggests. The critic Jean–Paul Riquelme, arguing that the “origins of literary modernism lie in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century, a time when important Gothic writing was being published,”49 notes that The crossing of boundaries into darkness by […] authors […] throughout the twentieth century is frequent and emphatic. The refusal of conventional limits and the critical questioning of cultural attitudes often proceed within a Gothic structuring of elements or with a Gothic inflection. The transformations, adaptations, and other prominent traces of the Gothic in modern writing indicate the persistence of a cluster of cultural anxieties to which Gothic writing and literary modernism, along with postcolonial writing and some popular forms of expression, continue to respond. The dark side of the discourse and experience of modernity is evident in all these cultural forms.50

In Chapter 1, I will discuss more fully the concepts of gothic structure and “inflection”; for now, I will simply assert that, in answer to Sebastian’s question, “Has [Deshpande] proved herself to be no modern writer, with her not so experimental literary techniques?” I would argue that Deshpande has, indeed, proven herself to be exactly a modern[ist] writer. However, as long as her work is categorized as woman-centred, realist, and transparent, critics will continue to see the modernist and gothic aspects of her work as aberrant, uncharacteristic, un-‘Indian’, and flawed. Rather, I would argue, we need to take seriously Deshpande’s claims that her work is neither straightforward nor programmatically feminist; we also need to listen carefully to Deshpande’s assertion that her protagonists, both male and female, are fighting not just traditional structures but

49 Jean–Paul Riquelme, “Toward a History of Gothic and Modernism: Dark Modernity from Bram Stoker to Samuel Beckett,” Modern Fiction Studies 46.3 (2000): 587. 50 Riquelme, “Toward a History of Gothic and Modernism,” 589.

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also internal demons and shadows – that many of them are deeply haunted by shameful secrets and desires that they dare not confess to anyone, not least themselves. Most importantly, though, we need to pay closer attention to the texts themselves, noting the gothic tropes of fear and haunting that characterize and structure Deshpande’s writing. Given that there is something so uncanny about Deshpande’s status as one of the best known/unknown contemporary writers living in India, it is perhaps not surprising that the critic should turn to contemporary theories of the gothic to explore and remap the terra (in)cognita of her work. Such an approach finds its roots in the psychoanalytic writings of Sigmund Freud and the poststructuralist work of Jacques Derrida. However, I find the most relevant source for my work in the intersection of psychoanalysis and poststructuralism – in the theories of transgenerational haunting espoused by the psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. As I will argue in Chapter 1, “The Kernel, the Shell, and a ‘fish-stinking ring’: Notes Toward a Cryptomimetic Reading of Deshpande’s Fiction,” characteristics of Deshpande’s writing that have previously been viewed as deviations from her realism (and sometimes as flaws in her work) can be re-situated in the light of a poetic of the gothic as those junctures at which characters and/or the reader gain glimpses of the deepest secrets of the text. I won’t say ‘hidden’ secrets, because that would imply not only a motivated action on the part of a particular character but also a reading strategy that deliberately sets out to ‘discover’ or ‘uncover’ what has been hidden from view and thus ‘solve’ a particular problem of/in the text. Rather, I would suggest, these secrets are rendered (barely) legible through a reading practice that respects the status of dreams, nightmares, recalled terrors, fragments, memories or ‘screen’ memories, and that is attuned to disturbances and unexpected, violent ruptures in the verbal fabric of the novels. These strategies allow us glimpses – and sometimes little more – of (a) transgenerational secret(s) that is (are) carried, like a crypt, in a character or characters. Often, in Deshpande’s novels, the content of the secret itself is less important than the horrible experience of knowing that the cold empty space of someone else’s secret resides, undigested, indigestible, in the self, like the ring of recollection carried in the belly of a fish in Kalidasa’s c. fourth-century Sanskrit play Abhijnanasakuntala, a text that haunts the oeuvre of Shashi Deshpande and leads me to the psychoanalytic theories of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok.

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In Chapter 2, “Haunted Beginnings: The Roots of Domestic Terror in Deshpande’s Early Fiction,” I offer a re-reading of Deshpande’s earliest published novels, two of which have been classified as mystery or detective novels. Keeping in mind the gothic genealogy of the mystery novel, I attempt to read these ‘minor’ works as flawed experiments in a genre to which Deshpande claims she has always been drawn. In novels such as Come Up and Be Dead (1982) and If I Die Today (1982), however, we can also trace the existential roots of Deshpande’s obsession with the effects of secrecy and disclosure within a closed or cloistered environment. While these attempts at genre writing were unsuccessful by many standards, including the author’s own judgment, they provide valuable clues to the theme of domestic terror found in Deshpande’s later work, including Roots and Shadows (1983). I argue that, while Deshpande has long since abandoned writing detective novels, her work continues to explore the darker and more mysterious aspects of human behaviour. Chapters 3 through 7 of the book offer “cryptomimetic” reinterpretations of five of Deshpande’s major novels, published over a period of twenty years: The Dark Holds No Terrors (1980), That Long Silence (1988), The Binding Vine (1993), A Matter of Time (1996), and Small Remedies (2000). These are the novels that have most firmly established Deshpande’s critical reputation as a ‘woman’s’ writer whose major concern is to break the “long silence” of women in Indian society. In these chapters, I attempt to shift the ground of analysis in several ways. First and most obviously, I argue that Deshpande’s fictional world encompasses more than just female characters. I note, for example, that the men in her novels are often less articulate and therefore sometimes less capable of breaking their silence than are her female characters. In fact, Deshpande portrays a society in which silence about shameful events that have happened in the past can control the destinies of entire families – men, women, and children. So we see in her novels characters whose lives are disturbed and sometimes even controlled not just by traumatic events that have occurred to them in the past but also by transgenerational family secrets to which they often do not have access. Moreover, the breaking of silence – the opening of family crypts and revelation of their contents – can have devastating consequences. In Deshpande’s modern re-interpretations of the Shakuntala story, the restoration of memory may have the power to reorganize the past and change the future, but it rarely possesses

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the magic required to reunite lovers or to restore wholeness to shattered lives. Focusing on the effects of secrecy and the way that secrets are concealed and revealed in Deshpande’s narratives, rather than only on what might be called the ‘manifest content’ of the novels, I also shift attention to the structure and style of Deshpande’s fiction. Without exception, the narrative structure of Deshpande’s novels can be described as labyrinthine, as narrators circle around and defer disclosure about significant traumatic events. Stylistically, these novels are complex and anything but “straightforward” and “realistic.” As a modernist writer, Deshpande understands the deep wells of irrationality and existential fear that lie beneath the ‘normal’ day-to-day existence of characters and that manifest themselves in disturbing and even life-changing visions, dreams, and nightmares. She depicts human consciousness and memory as fluid and dynamic, responding not just to the demands of the present but also to unresolved issues in the past: as one of Deshpande’s characters asserts, “We are always giving the past a place in our lives.”51 Finally, I challenge the critical orthodoxy that Deshpande’s fictional world is narrowly focused on domestic and women’s issues. Novels such as That Long Silence, The Binding Vine, A Matter of Time, and Small Remedies are situated within specific historically and geographically recognizable landscapes. Moreover, in the latter two novels, Deshpande engages with one of the most complex political issues of her time: the rising fundamentalist movements in India (both Hindu and Muslim) that not only incite violence but also promote a kind of cultural amnesia that operates along much the same lines as the “crypt” described by Abraham and Torok in their clinical practice. In the final chapter of the book, on Small Remedies, I argue that Deshpande extends her notion of haunted subjectivity to an entire nation, caught in the grip of a phantasmic paranoia about the figure of the ‘good Muslim’. 

51

Shashi Deshpande, A Matter of Time (1996; New York: Feminist Press at C U N Y ,

1999): 100.

Introduction

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By definition the reader does not exist. Not before the work and as its straightforward “receiver.” The dream […] concerns what is in the work which produces its reader, a reader who doesn’t yet exist, whose competence cannot be identified, a reader who would be “formed,” “trained,” instructed, constructed, even engendered, let’s say invented by the work. Invented, which is to say both found by chance and produced by research. The work then becomes an institution forming its own readers, giving them a competence which they did not possess before: a university, a seminar, a colloquium, a curriculum, a course. If we trusted the current distinction between competence and performance, we would say that the work’s performance produces or institutes, forms or invents, a new competence for the reader or the addressee who thereby becomes a countersignatory. It teaches him or her, if she is willing, to countersign.52

The “course” inaugurated by my reading of Deshpande’s work has presented me with a rich and challenging curriculum. Had I known earlier that Deshpande’s work would “invent” me, I would have had a very different career and would have developed quite different competencies: I would have paid more attention to Charles Dickens and Jane Austen and less to William Faulkner and Toni Morrison; I would not have strayed from Anglo-Indian literature into American literature and science fiction; I would have read the Gita, Ramayana, and Mahabharata much earlier in my life, as these are long and unfamiliar texts and they demand a young, agile, and retentive mind; I would have enrolled in comparative religion and philosophy classes. I would have read more Kierkegaard, Sartre, de Beauvoir, and, especially, Camus; I would have learned Sanskrit or Marathi or Kannada, or all three. I might, perhaps, have chosen different parents. However, reading Deshpande, which is to say “countersigning” Deshpande’s work, does not require Indian citizenship. It requires only a willingness to be possessed: to have a certain kind of faith, a belief in the crypt. I want to be careful here to say that reading Deshpande does not require a belief in any specific secret that the crypt holds, for that varies 52

Jacques Derrida, “This Strange Institution Called Literature,” in Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992): 74. Cited in Jodey Castricano, Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida’s Ghost Writing (Montreal & Kingston, Ontario: McGill–Queen’s U P , 2001): 51–52.

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from text to text and cannot be known in advance, if at all; what the secret is, in fact, is less important than that we know the secret exists, and that we believe this secret exists for an ‘other’, an other we can’t anticipate, but whose crypt haunts and awaits us. In “thinking the unthinkable”53 relationship between Deshpande’s fiction and a readership outside of India and employing the tools and poetics of Western criticism, this author ventures into territory that is cryptic: territory that is, uncannily, both known and unknown. I hope, sincerely, that the omissions and mistakes in the book you hold serve only to prompt more reflection on this important author. I firmly believe that there is “oceans of room”54 for further exploration of Deshpande’s work by both Indian and non-Indian scholars. My effort here is precisely to estrange Deshpande’s work from its current critical contexts by reading it the only way I can – as an ‘outsider.’ But as an engaged outsider, one who is willing to try to understand, but also willing to risk mistakes, to yield up misreadings alongside insights, with the understanding that misreading is an essential critical tool. Deshpande herself has opened the door for this enterprise: Why don’t we realize that what our writers, what all writers, as a matter of fact, really need is a reader who, quoting Spivak […], is ‘listening with care and patience.’ A reader with a sensitivity to the voice that is speaking, to the silences that are part of it and to the echoes that it contains as well. Only with such a reader can there be a bonding of writer and reader, a coming together in the text.55

I have tried, in response to Deshpande’s generous invitation into her world, to be the kind of reader that she imagines for her work, one who tries to listen for its silences and echoes. In other words, one who is, like Deshpande herself, not afraid to live with ghosts.

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53

Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, tr. Sarah Cornell & Susan Sellers (Wellek Library Lectures; New York: Columbia U P , 1993): 38. 54 Shashi Deshpande, Small Remedies, 79. 55 Shashi Deshpande, “Dear Reader,” in Writing from the Margin, 136.

1

The Kernel, the Shell, and a “fish-stinking ring”1

— Notes Toward a Cryptomimetic Reading of Deshpande’s Fiction

Should a child have parents “with secrets,” [. . . ] he will receive from them a gap in the unconscious, an unknown, unrecognized knowledge – a nescience. [. . . ] The buried speech of the parent will be (a) dead (gap) without a burial place in the child. This unknown phantom returns from the unconscious to haunt its host and may lead to phobias, madness, and obsessions. Its effect can persist through several generations and determine the fate of an entire family line.2 The soul of family life is not The Spoken.3 haunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony.4

I

I N T R O D U C T I O N T O T H I S B O O K , I attempted to demonstrate that critical views of Shashi Deshpande’s fiction have become sedimented into a kind of orthodoxy that blinds critics to some of

N THE

1

Deshpande, A Matter of Time, 106. Nicolas Abraham & Maria Torok, “‘The Lost Object – Me’: Notes on Endocryptic Identification,” in The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, ed. & tr. Nicholas Rand (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1994): 140 n1. 3 Deshpande, in Vimala Rama Rao, “In Conversation with Shashi Deshpande,” in The Fiction of Shashi Deshpande, ed. R.S. Pathak (Creative Books: New Delhi, 1998): 2

257. 4

Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning and the New International, tr. Peggy Kamuf (Spectres de Marx: L’État de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale, 1993; London & New York: Routledge): 46.

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the more interesting features of her work. For example, as long as critics continue to classify her work as ‘too Indian’ for Western readers, they will continue to treat Indian and Western audiences as homogeneous and monolithic entities and to downplay Deshpande’s deployment of a rich vein of reference to European literature and philosophy. These allusions remind us that Deshpande, while she has lived in south India for most of her life, has received a Western education and still looks to canonical British literature, in addition to the Indian Vedic tradition, as a source of inspiration for her work. Deshpande’s fiction, therefore, places significant intellectual demands on readers, both Indian and Western, and this factor, more than any other, may limit her potential audience – again, both in India and abroad. Similarly, as long as critics continue to classify the work of Shashi Deshpande as realist and transparent, as well as belonging to a particular tradition of women’s protest literature, not only will that work consistently fail to satisfy some critics’ expectations, but critics will also fail to convey to potential readers the complexity and richness of Deshpande’s narrative style and its appropriateness to the kind of psychological insight that she provides into the lives of her characters, both male and female. In Deshpande’s work, in fact, narrative style and structure are intimately wedded to the revelation of character through the labyrinthine exploration of the dark secrets that haunt them, as occurs in most gothic fiction from its inception to its most recent literary manifestations in the modernist and postmodernist movements. To invoke the gothic5 in relation to the work of an Indian woman writer – particularly one who is seen as an Indian regionalist writer working in a realist mode – may seem puzzling to those who identify gothic solely with its historical roots in a certain kind of British fiction of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. However, I have already argued that to limit Deshpande’s range of reference to an Indian cultural milieu is to overlook her frequent references to European literature, including literature that is either gothic in nature or associated with the gothic. To ignore gothic elements in Deshpande’s fiction, particularly in the light of recent, 5

I have chosen not to capitalize the letter ‘g’ in this word. The decision is not entirely arbitrary; rather, it is motivated by a desire to minimize confusion between the Gothic literature of the British and American Romantic periods and that of the postRomantic writers.

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highly sophisticated critical interventions in gothic studies, is to risk misreading, or ignoring altogether, some of the more interesting and enigmatic – and maybe even characteristic – aspects of her texts. For example, reading Deshpande’s novels from the perspective of a ‘gothic poetics’ can shed light on what Arnab Chakladar has noted in Deshpande’s 1996 novel, A Matter of Time, as an (aberrant) stylistic tendency toward the “baroque”6 or “melodrama[tic]”7 in a “realist” novel that, he argues, is intensely engaged in a feminist question, that of India’s inheritance laws. Possibly reacting to some of the same “baroque” elements in her generally positive review of A Matter of Time, Meenakshi Mukherjee praises the novel for not “fully explain[ing]” the “enigmas” of the text and only “hinting at something unspeakable,” a strategy that “invests the novel with the rich inconclusiveness of life.”8 But she also complains that the writer needed a firmer editorial hand, as “The red herrings implanted in the plot are so numerous that they must either be part of a design undecipherable to us or the result of careless writing. Also there are too many references to a future that lies outside the time frame of the novel – tantalising at first, but by the end unsatisfactory.”9 Less sympathetic critics, such as the following reviewer of The Binding Vine, have responded with exasperation to some of the macabre and ‘melodramatic’ elements of Deshpande’s work: The scope for anguish in [The Binding Vine] is considerable. During the course of the novel, three young children die; a grandfather hangs himself; a mother dies in childbirth; and an entire family is run over on the pavement. Why? [. . . .] I’m not convinced. No kind of love could ever hope to compensate for the hell these characters go through.10

Despite the clearly negative tone of this review, I find it interesting that it is only in such reviews, and in brief critical asides or caveats, such as we find in Chakladar’s essay and Mukherjee’s review, that critics take note of the ‘excesses’ in Deshpande’s novels, excesses that often manifest them6

Arnab Chakladar, “Of Houses and Canons,” 92. Chakladar, “Of Houses and Canons,” 93. 8 Meenakshi Mukherjee. “Sounds of Silence,” review of A Matter of Time, Indian Review of Books 6.6 (16 March–15 April, 1997): 30. 9 Mukherjee, “Sounds of Silence,” 31. 10 Anon., review of The Binding Vine, The Independent (22 May 1995). 7

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selves in grotesque, and sometimes seemingly gratuitous, forms of violence that one does not expect to find, to this extent, in realist fiction. But what if we were to consider, instead, that these anomalies are characteristic of, rather than aberrant from, Deshpande’s style? And, if that is so, why would we not then consider the possibility that her style owes its debt largely to a gothic poetics? It is, after all, precisely in gothic literature that we find a preoccupation with the ‘baroque’ laws of patriarchal “inheritance” such as Chakladar points to in A Matter of Time; it is in gothic literature that we find the ‘unspeakable’, which can only, finally, be spoken through an enigmatic amassing of clues, some of them, perhaps, ‘red herrings’; it is, after all, in gothic literature that we witness, with only the “compensation” that attends our horrified shudder, “the hell […] characters go through.” In answering the question, ‘What haunts Deshpande’s novels and disrupts the realist trajectory of her narratives?’, I find traces of a gothic poetics that manifests itself in a complex narrative architecture, mobilizing Western and Indian literature, history, philosophy, and mythology to interrogate the all-too-literal and linear trajectory of patriarchal desire. Rather than merely condemning or attempting to exorcize this doomed patriarchal history, a move that might be expected of a realist writer with a positivist feminist agenda, Deshpande’s novels propose instead an overdetermined economy in which the spectres of the past, not just the immediate, personal past, but family and social history, as well as the spectres of the future, insist on disturbing the present, on being acknowledged and rendered visible and audible to characters who, often unwittingly, preserve their secrets. An economy in which, as one of Deshpande’s characters realizes, “nothing is lost” (A Matter of Time 238). In other words, both Deshpande’s characters and her readers must “learn to live with ghosts.” 11 This economy is also very similar to that described by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok in their books The Shell and the Kernel and The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonomy, which contain theories that are uncannily prefigured in one of the most important intertextual allusions in Deshpande’s work: the story of Shakuntala,12 first told in 11

Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx, xvii–viii. There are two major variations of the spelling of this name. Rendered with Sanskrit diacritical marks, which are not reproduced in the present text, the spelling is “akuntala.” I have kept that spelling (as “Sakuntala”) in the title of the play and in 12

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Vyasa’s13 Mahabharata and then retold, and considerably revised, in Kalidasa’s c. fourth-century Sanskrit play Abhijnana-sakuntala, or Sakuntala and the Ring of Recollection.14 While Abraham and Torok’s clinical discoveries about transgenerational haunting are post-Freudian and postSaussurean and thus clearly belong to a late-twentieth-century European psychoanalytic project that seems to have little to do with an ancient Sanskrit play, I find not only in Kalidasa’s play, but also in recent interpretations of it, including Deshpande’s, a similar kind of ‘crypt’ story. In this chapter, I will explore the connections among Kalidasa’s play, the theories of Abraham and Torok, and a gothic poetics. I will then propose a strategy for reading certain pivotal scenes in Deshpande’s novels – perplexing and disturbing moments that disrupt the linear flow of narrative and that otherwise resist interpretation – that may lead to an understanding of her notion of character as the overdetermined site of multiple inter- and transgenerational hauntings. But first I must (re)tell a very old story. 

behind this fear [is] the uneasiness that comes from losing something. No, not losing it, but being unable to find it because I’ve hidden it to keep it safe. Hidden it so well that I can’t find it myself now. — Deshpande, The Dark Holds No Terrors (2)

In Kalidasa’s play, King Dushyanta enters a forest during a hunting expedition. There, in a hermitage, he meets a beautiful young woman, Shakuntala, whose guardian, the risi (ascetic guru) Kanva, is away. Dushyanta straight away falls in love with the young woman, and she with him. He persuades her to marry him immediately, without waiting for Kanva’s permission, by assuring her of the acceptability, for people of their station, of a type of marriage (gandhara) that can be undertaken quotations from texts that reproduce the diacritical markings. However, in my own text, I will refer to “Shakuntala.” 13 While the great epic Mahabharata is often attributed to a writer named Vyasa, there is no evidence pointing to a single creator of the text. 14 Hereinafter referred to as either Sakuntala or Sankutala or The Ring of Recollection. The title has also been translated as The Recognition of Sakuntala.

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without a guardian’s permission. Before Kanva returns, Shakuntala and Dushyanta consummate their marriage, off-stage and entr’acte, and Dushyanta leaves his bride to return to his kingdom. Before parting from Shakuntala, however, he gives her a ring impressed with his royal seal and promises to send for her as soon as possible. After her husband leaves and before her guardian returns, another risi, Durvasas, visits the hermitage. When Shakuntala, obsessively preoccupied with her thoughts of Dushyanta, fails to notice him and offer the appropriate hospitality, Durvasas lays a curse upon her: whosoever occupied her thoughts at that moment should forever forget all about her. In her distraction, Shakuntala remains oblivious to both the visit and the curse; however, one of her maidservants overhears Durvasas’ parting words and manages, again unbeknownst to Shakuntala, to have Durvasas soften the harshness of the curse: the object of Shakuntala’s adoration will remember her, but only if and when she presents to him the token of his love, the ring. When Kanva returns to the hermitage, he is not unhappy about his ward’s love-marriage to a man he recognizes as an appropriate partner for her, but he is anxious that Shakuntala follow her husband to his kingdom, Gajasahvaya, as soon as possible, even though Dushyanta has not yet sent for her. Upon her arrival at the royal court, an obviously pregnant Shakuntala (unaccompanied by her maidservants and therefore ‘unprotected’ this time) is devastated to discover that, mysteriously, Dushyanta has forgotten her and their marriage and does not believe her story, although her presence and her claims disturb him more than he outwardly lets on. Shakuntala then realizes that she has lost the king’s love-token, which, although she does not know it is enchanted, she believes would offer evidence of her claims. Unmoved by Shakuntala’s tears and protestations and under the spell of Durvasas’ curse, Dushyanta cruelly dismisses Shakuntala; however, he is advised to keep her nearby until the baby is born, to see whether there are signs of noble lineage in the child. Devastated by Dushyanta’s rejection, Shakuntala begs to be taken back to the hermitage, but even her companions reject her – she is, according to her own discredited story, Dushyanta’s wife and his responsibility, whether he wants her or not, remembers her or not. In a final act of desperation, Shakuntala, like Ramayana’s Sita, desperately appeals to the earth to engulf her; instead, she vanishes into the sky when her mother, Menaka, the celestial nymph who had abandoned her as a baby, whisks her off to her otherworldly hermitage.

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The next act of the play opens in Gajasahvaya with the curious discovery by local anglers of a ring bearing the royal insignia in the belly of a fish. When the ring is placed in Dushyanta’s hands, he immediately remembers Shakuntala and his love for her, and painfully regrets his rejection of her claims. There is nothing he can do, however, except pine for her and regret (and wonder at) his forgetfulness – while he can remember her, he cannot re-call her; she has gone somewhere beyond a mortal’s reach. Years later, when he is impressed into an important battle on behalf of Lord Indra, he comes across another enchanted forest and meets a young boy playing fearlessly with lion cubs. Strangely drawn to him, he begins to suspect that the boy is his son; of course, the boy is Bharata, the son of Shakuntala, with whom he is soon happily reunited. A brief summary of this seven-act play cannot hope to do justice to the elegance of its form and the beauty of its language. As interesting as the play itself are its deviations from the source-material, its adaptations over time and geographical space, its translations into numerous Indian and non-Indian languages, and the history of its reception both in India and in Europe, where Sir William Jones’ 1789 translation of the play was an immediate sensation, claiming the admiration of poets like Goethe and other European Romanticists. Jones famously pronounced that Kalidasa was the “Shakespeare of India,” inviting later comparisons to Shakespeare, such as that undertaken in 1907 by Rabindrath Tagore. Of his extant plays, Kalidasa’s Sakuntala in particular came to be seen as the paradigm of classical Indian literary culture. However, the choice of a text that had increasingly come to be regarded as representing specifically traditional Brahminical culture and values cannot be viewed as coincidental. In her book Sakuntala: Texts, Readings, Histories, Romila Thapar alerts us to how the play was strategically deployed by both Orientalist scholars to define, and the Hindu middle class to celebrate, an ‘authentic’ Indian high culture: “Orientalism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries influenced many cultural choices of the Indian middle class, among them being a perception of what was regarded as the Indian cultural tradition.”15 By the twentieth century, Sakuntala had thus become a standard text for both Sanskrit and English-medium education in India, approved in its nineteenth-century adaptations (which downplayed the 15

Romila Thapar, Sakuntala: Texts, Readings, Histories (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1999): 7.

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sexuality of the play). Tagore’s 1907 explication of the text, in which he describes Shakuntala’s capitulation to the unconventional marriage as “Sakuntala’s ‘Fall’” and the period of separation of the lovers as a necessary “redemption through penitence”16 – an interpretation which, according to Thapar, reflects “some nineteenth century British Orientalist attitudes coupled with Victorian mores”17 – helped to solidify the play’s suitability for Indian middle-class moral and cultural instruction. Shashi Deshpande read Kalidasa’s play at an early age: she has identified the play as providing one of the most important “metaphors” in her work.18 While the play has important thematic connections with all of Deshpande’s novels and is mentioned in several of them,19 in at least one of her novels, A Matter of Time, the theme is developed more fully in a number of overt allusions to the play. Whatever significance we might attach to these intertextual allusions, however, they may be entirely lost upon a reader who has no familiarity with either the Mahabharata or Kalidasa’s play or their contemporary interpretations. It is important to add here that readerly competence cannot be classified simply according to whether one is Indian or not: recognition of the allusion will vary even within India, depending upon class, level and type of education, age, and perhaps even gender. Western readers, of course, would be even less likely to have this story in their intellectual repertoire. Interestingly, Deshpande has used the example of her allusions to Sakuntala to comment on the difficulty some readers may have with her work:

16

Rabindrath Tagore, cited in Chandra Rajan, “Introduction” to Kalidasa: The Loom of Time, A Selection of His Plays and Poems, tr. Chandra Rajan (New Delhi: Penguin, 1989): 50. 17 Thapar, Sakuntala, 250. 18 Interviews with author, 11 October 2006 and 4 February 2008. 19 While the Kanva / Shakuntala relationship is not developed in the play, it may serve as a model for such relationships in Deshpande’s novels, where mothers are often absent and fathers only benignly protective. In several of Deshpande’s novels, for example, female characters are raised by a single male parent who acts less like a father than a guardian. In Roots and Shadows, Indu thinks reflects: “Perhaps we should make it a rule that children should be brought up, not by their parents, but by strangers”; Roots and Shadows (New Delhi: Orient Longmans, 1983): 164.

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To explain an allusion is […] inelegant and repugnant to me as a writer. In A Matter of Time, I had Gopal, when he is overcome by a rush of memories on seeing his estranged wife Sumi, think, ‘It was as if she had brought me the ring.’ That this is the ring which Shakuntala lost and which, when found, restored Dushyanta’s memory, is something that is a part of the Indian literary heritage. But there was a possibility that many who read my book would not know or understand this. Should I explain?. . . . No, I didn’t explain. Which meant that those who did not know this story would lose out on something. So be it! There will always be some readers who will miss out on something. Have I not often, when reading a novel that comes from another country, another culture, felt this way? And have I not, nevertheless, gone on reading, enjoyed what I was reading and later, perhaps, gone to the dictionary to understand a word. Or accidentally stumbled across what would explain the earlier mystery and retrospectively enjoyed what I missed earlier? The point I am trying to make is that the writer always uses a coded language and the reader is constantly decoding it. The more the two share, the more the reader can get out of it. But this is a matter which concerns the reader, not the writer.20

As a matter which concerns both Deshpande’s readers and her critics, the story of Shakuntala requires significantly more attention than it has previously received in criticism of her work. A Western critic without a knowledge of Sanskrit begins, of course, by reading translations of both Mahabharata and Kalidasa’s play (and as many of its variants as possible);21 however, it is also important to understand traditional and contemporary interpretations of the play and to attempt to re-interpret it from the point of view of Deshpande’s major thematic concerns in her novels: the essentially solitary nature of human existence; the pain that inevitably attends intense human relationships, whether those among men and women, parents and children, members of extended families, or close friends; the conventional, prescribed roles for 20

Deshpande, “The Hornet’s Nest,” in Writing from the Margin, 74–75. In an interview with Aditi De, Deshpande says “I know there’s a story by Vaidehi in Kannada about Sakuntala, in which she does not go back to her husband. […] To me, it’s so true. Why would she, after all that humiliation? In the end, she tells her husband: ‘If you want an heir for the throne, take my son. But I’m not coming.’ Most women would do that” (online). 21

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Brahminical women in Indian society; the mysterious workings of human memory; and finally, and most importantly to my work, the idea that the memories that can determine one’s destiny are often closed off to consciousness, either through one’s repression of traumatic events or because important secrets have been held for (or from) one by an ‘Other’. Several critics have commented on the significance of memory and forgetting in Kalidasa’s play. In his adaptation of Shakuntala and Dushyanta’s story from Vyasa’s Mahabharata, Kalidasa added entirely new material, including the elements of the ‘curse’ of forgetfulness and the ‘magic’ ring. In the original story, if I may use that term for a work that itself has undergone significant transformation over millennia, Dushyanta only pretends to forget Shakuntala when she comes to court, accompanied by their child Bharata, because he fears that members of his court will disapprove of their king’s unconventional and secret marriage. While Vyasa’s Shakuntala fights boldly for recognition of her claims, Dushyanta retaliates viciously, casting aspersions on her morality and that of her parents. As in Kalidasa’s version of the play, Shakuntala is rescued from her ignominy by a miraculous intervention, but in the Mahabharata by the device of a celestial voice informing the court that Shakuntala has been telling the truth and that her child, Bharata, is destined to be Dushyanta’s glorious successor. While some critics have argued that the device of the ring is intended to soften or redeem the king’s character in Kalidasa’s play, both Barbara Stoler Miller and Chandra Rajan suggest that Kalidasa’s invention does not entirely absolve the king of his responsibility to recognize Shakuntala and her (in Kalidasa’s play, unborn) child. Indeed, Rajan argues that the play raises significant issues about the concept of ‘memory’: The curse and the manner in which it operates is related to the problem of recognition. It should therefore not be treated, as is often done, simply as a device to gloss over the unpleasant side of Duhsanta’s [sic] nature – his proneness to philandering, the streak of callousness in him verging on cruelty, his self-indulgence – or to exonerate him from the blame of harshly repudiating Sakuntala and in so doing showing disrespect to a great sage. […] as the curse can be seen and interpreted in more than one way, it ought to be considered as the means which Kalidasa uses to explore different states of consciousness and to probe beneath the surface of Duhsanta’s personality.

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While the loss of the ring, and the loss of memory resulting from the curse, provides the necessary complication in the plot structure, there is something else to which Kalidasa alerts us. He directs us to question the whole idea of furnishing tangible proof for all those things in life we take on trust: love, constancy, fidelity.22

In failing to recognize and remember Shakuntala in court and demanding proof of their affair, Dushyanta’s actions cast into doubt the sincerity of the powerful connection that he felt with her in the forest. Not only has he forgotten Shakuntala, in other words, his rejection of her at court belies the very concept of “love at first sight,” in the conventional sense that this kind of love is believed to be transcendent and enduring, not transient. Thus, viewers are forced to wonder not only about Dushyanta’s sincerity, but also about the enduring nature of romantic attraction and the relationships among presence, memory, and love. According to Barbara Stoler Miller, the concepts of memory and love are intimately connected in Sanskrit literature: “Memory is crucial to the production of romantic sentiment throughout Sanskrit literature.”23 She adds: In what is considered one of the key passages of Sanskrit aesthetics, the tenth century Kashmiri philosopher Abhinavagupta explains what Kalidasa means by “memory.” It is not discursive recollection of past events, but rather an intuitive insight into the past that transcends personal experience, into the imaginative universe that beauty evokes.24

If, in Kalidasa’s play, that principle is explored to its very limit, so too is it tested in Deshpande’s fiction. In fact, the operations of memory there are rarely limited to the conscious, discursive retrieval of personal experience, but, rather, extend to a series of highly mediated and sometimes seemingly irrational associations that produce startling moments of clear insight. Moreover, as Miller points out, the insight produced by memory can have powerful effects: 22

Rajan, “Introduction” to Kalidasa, 95–96. Barbara Stoler Miller, “Kalidasa’s World and His Plays,” in Theatre of Memory: The Plays of Kalidasa, ed. Barbara Stoler Miller (New York: Columbia U P , 1984): 39. 24 Miller, “Kalidasa’s World and His Plays,” 40. 23

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Even as a literary convention of intense love, memory has the power to break through the logic of everyday experience – it makes visible what is invisible, obliterates distances, reverses chronologies, and fuses what is ordinarily separate.25

The recovery of memory, therefore, can produce insight and joy, but in rendering the invisible visible it can also produce extreme pain, as it may bring to consciousness something or someone that has been physically lost and cannot be recovered, producing agony and acute self-doubt such as Dushyanta feels in Kalidasa’s play or Gopal experiences when he sees his estranged wife at a party in Deshpande’s novel. In Kalidasa’s play, the ring, therefore, is a powerful talisman of psychic knowledge or insight, as Rajan argues: The royal signet ring which is the mark of authority and used to stamp documents to validate them (perhaps to stamp objects too, to prove the legitimacy of ownership) has gained an added importance and status: Sakuntala is recognized or not recognized by virtue of its presence or its absence. As the play progresses, this Ring, an inanimate thing – ‘a mindless thing’ as the King describes it, becomes a character in the drama and plays a role. Its fall and loss goes hand in hand with the fall of Sakuntala’s fortunes and the loss of memory of the King and his fall into delusion and ‘deep dejection’; its finding brings awakening and pain. The theme of knowing and re-cognition hinges on the presence or absence of the Ring.26

The recovery of the ring brings into sharp focus the psychological pain that physical separation from the beloved induces: Shakuntala may be restored to the king’s memory by the return of the ring, but her physical being is still beyond his, and the audience’s, grasp, as she remains offstage until the final act of the play. According to Tagore, Shakuntala’s absence from the stage prompts the viewer to imagine her “disciplined by the penance, sedate, and resigned – seated like a recluse rapt in meditation.”27 This seems to me a very curious thing to say about a female character who, in the interval between 25

Miller, “Kalidasa’s World and His Plays,” 39–40. Rajan, “Introduction” to Kalidasa, 96; emphasis in original. 27 Tagore, cited in Thapar, Sakuntala, 247. 26

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her renunciation by and her reunion with her physical lover, bears (for three years, according to the Mahabharata), gives birth to, and raises that man’s child! On the other hand, as seemingly static as Tagore’s description of Shakuntala is, I don’t think that it fully captures the emotional stasis that would inevitably attend her existential dilemma. In that sense, Tagore does not go far enough (or attributes Shakuntala’s stasis to the wrong causes): by the play’s own logic, Shakuntala must exist in a kind of emotional suspension, entirely outside of time and narrative flow. Having no knowledge of the curse that has induced Dushyanta’s amnesia, Shakuntala can only presume that the King was lying about knowing her, in which case he does not and did not ever love her and she was deceived by her own senses in the hermitage; alternatively, the King is telling the truth and she is entirely deluded in her own memory. One way or another, s/he is out of his/her mind. There is no answer to this riddle so long as Shakuntala remains under the curse. Dramatically, Shakuntala lacks the device of the ring to set in motion even the imaginative release that allows Dushyanta to remember his bride, re-create her beauty in art, and mourn her loss. Her silence throughout most of the play is like the silence of a crypt. It is the silence of one who is, in effect, twice buried: once by the curse of the ring that obliterates her from Dushyanta’s memory, and again by her physical removal from Dushyanta’s court and her return to the mother’s womb-like protection. In stark contrast to Shakunatala’s emotional stasis, Dushyanta’s recovery of his memory of Shakuntala takes place within narrative time and is depicted as deeply disturbing and disorienting to him, as he is flooded with memories of the time he spent with Shakunatala in the hermitage. Without knowing about the curse and without fully understanding the relationship between the retrieval of the ring and his re-possession of his memories of Shakuntala, he cannot account for his inability to recognize her when she came to court. After his memory is restored, Dushyanta thinks and speaks of Shakuntala obsessively, neglecting his duties much as Shakuntala had neglected hers after his departure from the hermitage. Dushyanta also paints Shakuntala’s image in such detail that he has difficulty separating the image he has created of her from her actual being, perhaps analogically reflecting not only the stasis to which he has confined her through his denial of her story and also his remorse over the superficial and insincere nature of his initial attraction to a woman whose

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absence, rather than careless possession, has now become the measure of her worth. Dushyanta’s captive audience for these lamentations is a character, conventionally called (in English translations) a “buffoon,” who had accompanied him into the forest where Dushyanta met Shakunala. In an interesting exchange with this buffoon, Dushyanta asks him why he had never reminded him of his love for the girl he met at Kanva’s hermitage, the very circumstance that, as the buffoon well knew, resulted in a dalliance that held the entire royal retinue in the forest much longer than first intended: King: Friend, now that I remember everything, I told you about my first meeting with Sakuntala. You weren’t with me when I rejected her, but why didn’t you say anything about her before? Did you suffer a loss of memory too? Buffoon: I didn’t forget. You did tell me all about it once, but then you said, “It’s all a joke without any truth.” My wit is like a lump of clay, so I took you at your word… or it could be that fate is powerful…28

This exchange, ending with the buffoon’s rather equivocal defence of his own silence, alerts us to another aspect of the play, and of Deshpande’s work: the shared work of creating and honouring memory and the potential complicity of others in withholding information or harbouring a secret that is not their own, or at least a secret whose revelation holds less significance for the one keeping the secret than for the one from whom it is hidden. Romila Thapar comments on this aspect of the play: Dusyanta’s amnesia is also a comment on memory. That it is unreliable is apparent from the effectiveness of the curse, which raises the question of who forgets and why. Did the vidusaka [buffoon] remember the romance of the king with the girl from the asrama [hermitage], but prefer not to remind his companion of it? Memories are personal but also involve a sharing of the vision of the past.29

While the buffoon’s silence can be partly explained by his excuse that the king had earlier solicited his discretion about the affair with Shakuntala, 28 Kalidasa, Sakuntala and the Ring of Recollection, tr. Barbara Stoler Miller, in Theater of Memory: The Plays of Kalidasa (New York: Columbia U P , 1984): 152. 29 Thapar, Sakuntala, 55–56.

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the issue of a witness’s responsibility to the preservation and transmission of memory, particularly in support of a victim’s claim, provides not only a significant thematic thread in the play (and Deshpande’s novels) but also, as we shall see, an important link with the idea of the crypt in the work of Abraham and Torok. This motivated withholding of essential information – a kind of deliberate, strategic, and social forgetting – occurs not only in the court, where it may be politically expedient to hold one’s tongue, but also in the forest, conventionally considered to be the site of natural innocence and transparency. As I have mentioned previously, on two occasions information is withheld from Shakuntala. In the first instance, her maidservant Priyamvada overhears Durvasas’ curse, but acts on her own volition, without telling the distracted Shakuntala of Durvasas’ visit or the curse, to intercede with him to have the curse lifted or modified. In the second instance, Priyamvada and Anasuya, another maid, conspire to keep Shakuntala ignorant of everything relating to Durvasas’ visit, the curse, and the revision of it that elevates the importance of the ring: Priyamvada: [Durvasas] refused to change his word, but he promised that when the king sees the ring of recollection, the curse will end. Then he vanished. Anasuya: Now we can breathe again. When he left, the king himself gave her the ring engraved with his name. Sakuntala will have her own means of ending the curse. [….] Anasuya: Priyamvada, we two must keep all this a secret between us. Our friend is fragile by nature; she needs our protection. Priyamvada: Who would sprinkle a jasmine with scalding water?30

Shakuntala’s ‘carelessness’ in losing the ring must be viewed in terms of her complete ignorance of its instrumental value to her success at court, an ignorance that stems from the misguided attempt of her concerned subordinates to protect the child-like Shakuntala from a nasty, shameful truth about Shakuntala herself: the fact that she had, through neglect of her duties, insulted an important visitor to the hermitage, and that he had laid a curse upon her and her beloved. To Shakuntala, in her ignorance of the slight and the curse, the ring is personally significant as a token of the 30

Kalidasa, Sakuntala and the Ring of Recollection, 122–23.

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king’s love for her; she cannot know, however, that it harbours another function, as the only key to unlocking the king’s memory. I want to re-emphasize here the idea that what intensifies and deepens the tragedy of Sakuntala is precisely this ignorance, on the part of both Shakuntala and Dushyanta, during the entire period of their separation, of the cause of their mutual exile: the effect of the ring. Shakuntala, knowing nothing of the curse or the true value of the ring, knows only that Dushyanta has denied their relationship, denied, in essence, her existence. Dushyanta, even after he has recovered the ring, knows only, and is tortured by this knowledge, that he has, to his mind inexplicably, rejected a woman whom, he now recalls, he loved dearly. It is not until the final act, after the lovers have been reunited, that they learn about the magical role that the ring played in their alienation. During the entire period of their separation, then, Dushyanta and Shakuntala exist in an irremediable and agonizing solitude, what I have referred to as a state of being out of their minds. Of course, Kalidasa’s play, like Sophocles’ Oedipus, relies on such ignorance and withholding of information for the working-out of its plot. Fate must run its course in order that order be restored. However, in relation to Deshpande’s late-twentieth-century interpretation of Kalidasa’s play, in which fate or curses or destiny are also significant concepts, we may take another view of this literary device of alienation and the role that withholding information or keeping secrets plays in such alienation. Informing and enriching the deployment of such classical devices in Deshpande’s fiction is, first of all, a philosophically existential attitude toward human relationships. Believing that human beings are, fundamentally, alone in their unique relationship with the world and their experience of profound emotion, whether that emotion be joy or pain or sorrow, Deshpande repeatedly depicts the difficulty of even (perhaps especially) the most intimate relationships, such as that between parents and children, but also that between husband and wife. The physical separation of married partners is a recurrent feature of Deshpande’s fiction, and this physical separation almost always echoes some mental or emotional alienation. Too often, I believe, critics have viewed these separations from only a feminist point of view – viz. that the husband is insensitive and somehow incapable of meeting the needs of his spouse – rather than from an existentialist perspective. Viewed from an existentially philosophical perspective, these separations, physical and emotional, can be seen as an expression of the funda-

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mental interiority of subjectivity and the near impossibility – in general – of communicating that interiority to an other, but particularly in a society that values conformity to roles and rules and therefore discourages individual expression. Because most of Deshpande’s narrators are highly ratiocinative women, the struggle to communicate deeply repressed or insubordinate feelings is assumed to be primarily a woman’s issue. However, in novels such as That Long Silence, The Binding Vine, A Matter of Time, and Moving On such problems are shown to be part of a human predicament: as a result, individuals – men and women – in Deshpande’s fiction are often sealed off from each other as tightly and irrevocably as the lovers through Acts 2 to 6 in Kalidasa’s play. Deshpande’s work also offers a psychoanalytic understanding of the role that secrets, memory, and forgetting play in the formation of an internally alienated and divided human subjectivity,31 again particularly, if not exclusively, in a deeply conservative society. In such a society, secrecy about the past often serves to perpetuate a ‘fiction’ of the family, its most fundamental unit, as unified, respectable, and imperturbable, in the service of presenting a dignified front to the rest of the society, but perhaps also in an attempt to protect family members, especially children, from harsh or shameful realities. The subtle (re)shaping of the past necessitated by the keeping of secrets thus allows the family to tell itself and others a more or less seamless story of familial harmony and decency. Traumatic and ‘shameful’ events that threaten that picture are sealed in silence and/or patched over by attempts to construct a narrative that minimizes the gaps and incoherences created by omissions or contradictions. Such events are thus conveniently ‘forgotten’, ‘buried’, or ‘repressed’; these events ‘happened’ and they ‘happened’ to ‘someone(s)’, but, since they have not been narrated and incorporated into the family story, they remain unavailable, in a coherent form, to consciousness, just as knowl31

Psychoanalytic theory, of course, already posits a divided subjectivity; Jacques Lacan, in particular, proposes that alienation is the very condition of subjectivity. Theorists like Dominick LaCapra, however, refuse to conflate the notion of “lack” or “absence” with the notion of “loss” (Writing History, Writing Trauma [Baltimore M D : Johns Hopkins U P , 2001]). As Alessia Ricciardi argues, “Absence is situated at the transhistorical level, whereas loss retains a contingent, specific, historical value” (The Ends of Mourning: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Film [Stanford C A : Stanford U P , 2003]: 27).

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edge of the curse attached to the lost ring is unavailable to Dushyanta and Shakuntala, deepening their sense of isolation, abandonment, and pain and dooming them to emotional paralysis, incapable of engaging productively in life. Such family fictions originate with and remain plausible through a kind of unspoken social collusion elicited to maintain smooth interpersonal relationships or to protect the ‘innocent’, as we have seen in the actions of the buffoon and Shakuntala’s maids in the play. Without the ring of recollection (or knowledge of its power), the paralysis cannot be lifted. Many of Deshpande’s novels depict the way in which often, from one generation to the next, and even within a single generation, family members learn and naturalize strategies to compensate for anomalies in the story the family tells itself. This occurs even when certain members of the family are not aware of the precise nature of the hidden content of a secret, but only of the importance and necessity of keeping the secret itself hidden. Accidental glimpses of events that contradict the official narrative (much like Dushyanta’s vague uneasiness upon seeing Shakuntala in court), may, upon further exploration, break through the conspiracy of silence, but more often, particularly in the case of those, such as children, who are vulnerable not only to physical punishment but also, and more significantly, threats to their emotional security, they are quickly rationalized away and kept hidden in the deepest recesses of the psyche. These traumatic encounters seldom remain lost forever, though; moreover, their unacknowledged existence creates “a gap in the unconscious, an unknown, unrecognized knowledge”32 that occupies space in the human subject, just as the hard, cold, and undigested ring is carried and protected in the belly of a “senseless” fish, until, in an act of violence, the ring of recollection comes to light and, belatedly but also instantaneously, irreversibly, and painfully re-writes the past. In the italicized passage above, I am quoting from Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s The Shell and the Kernel, but I am also describing one of the most important structural devices in Deshpande’s fiction and Kalidasa’s play, in which, to paraphrase Miller, memory has the potential “to break through the logic of everyday experience […] [to] make[s] visible what is invisible, obliterate[s] distances, reverse[s] chronologies, and 32

Nicolas Abraham & Maria Torok, “‘The Lost Object – Me’: Notes on Endocryptic Identification,” 140 n1.

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fuse[s] what is ordinarily separate.”33 The intersection of certain thematic and structural elements of Kalidasa’s play, the theories of Abraham and Torok, and a literary approach that one might call, after the critics Rashkin and Castricano, cryptomimesis, provides a powerful interpretative tool for an examination of key features in Deshpande’s novels, including the oft-noted theme of ‘silence’, but also many recognizably gothic literary conventions, including the ‘haunted’ house, various manifestations of narrative ‘excess’, and a structural principle that Eve Sedgwick describes as “the difficulty the story has in getting itself told.”34 

Who would sprinkle a jasmine with scalding water? — Kalidasa, Sakuntala and The Ring of Recollection

Less well known than the work of Jacques Lacan, the theories of the psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok also find their basis in Freudian thought, but deviate in significant ways from both predecessors. Clinical psychologists who worked and wrote separately and together during the latter half of the twentieth century, Abraham and Torok, while retaining faith in the project of psychoanalysis itself, became increasingly dissatisfied with some Freudian orthodoxies, particularly those that predetermined and restricted analyses of their patients, such as the Oedipus complex and the more programmatic and universalist aspects of the interpretation of dreams. Based on their own clinical experiences and on careful reconsideration of some of Freud’s most famous cases, notably the Wolf Man, Abraham and Torok postulated that many of Freud’s clinical disappointments resulted from the founder’s own failure to remain consistent in his beliefs (particularly regarding the aetiology of neurosis and the interpretation of dreams). This investigation led them to develop, along with a more individualistic approach to analysis, a startling new explanation for the aetiology of some patients’ neuroses and new methods of treatment. 33

Miller, “Kalidasa’s World and His Plays,” 39–40. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (diss., 1976; New York: Arno, 1980): 14. 34

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In order to understand their unique contribution to the field of psychoand literary analysis, it is necessary to provide a brief overview of Abraham and Torok’s description of normative human development. Returning to what they believed to be Sándor Ferenczi’s and Freud’s initial understanding of the terms introjection and incorporation, Abraham and Torok describe the process of successful human development as a series of movements, unique to each individual, away from total identification with maternal plenitude. According to this theory, individuation – successful separation from the mother – is accomplished through the process of introjection: an “opening [of the subject] to internal novelty”35: Introjection is the process of psychic nourishment, growth, and assimilation, encompassing our capacity to create through work, play, fantasy, thought, imagination, and language; it is the continual process of self-fashioning through the fructification of change, whether the modification is biological and internal (such as sexual maturation) or external and cultural (such as our children’s gradual detachment from us). At the same time, introjection represents our ability to survive shock, trauma, or loss; it is the psychic process that allows human beings to continue to live harmoniously in spite of instability, devastation, war, and upheaval.36

As Nicholas Rand explains, “Although the reader will not find explicit statements to this effect in The Shell and the Kernel, Abraham and Torok’s view of psychic life through the lens of introjection tends to lessen the importance of childhood complexes (for example castration) and the phases (oral, anal, phallic, genital) of psychosexual development as defined by Freud and refined by some of his followers [including Lacan].”37 But while the emphasis on “the phases” is decreased in Abraham and Torok’s view, the role of language, or orality, is central to their theory. Part of the process of separation from the mother involves the substitution of speech for the breast (similar to the Lacanian transition from demand to

35

Nicholas T. Rand, “Introduction: Renewals of Psychoanalysis,” in The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, ed. Nicolas Abraham & Maria Torok, tr. Nicholas Rand (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1994): 9. 36 Rand, “Introduction: Renewals of Psychoanalysis,” 14. 37 “Introduction: Renewals of Psychoanalysis,” 10.

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desire), as Rand’s expression “psychic nourishment” above suggests. Rather than being authorized by the trauma of phallic prohibition, however, speech, in Abraham and Torok’s theory, is the means by which the child begins to realize itself as separate from its caregivers; to gain control over its external world; and to negotiate successfully, through the process of introjection, the vicissitudes of physical, mental, and emotional change. According to Abraham and Torok, the initial “constancy” of the mother, during the early years of a child’s life, is essential to the latter process: The transition from a mouth filled with the breast to a mouth filled with words occurs by virtue of the intervening experiences of the empty mouth. Learning to fill the emptiness of the mouth with words is the initial model for introjection. However, without the constant assistance of a mother endowed with language, introjection could not take place. Not unlike the permanence of Descartes’s God, the mother’s constancy is the guarantor of the meaning of words. Once this guarantee has been acquired, and only then, can words replace the other’s presence and also give rise to fresh introjections. The absence of objects and the empty mouth are transformed into words; at last, even the experiences related to words are converted into other words. So the wants of the original oral vacancy are remedied by being turned into verbal relationships with the speaking community at large. Introjecting a desire, a pain, a situation means channeling them through language into a communion of empty mouths.38

For introjection to be successful, experience must not only be iterable but also fully capable of being communicated to an other or others in language, and the mother is the first in a series of significant interlocutors who give “figurative shape to presence.”39 On the other hand, failure to introject stimuli, particularly in the aftermath of traumatic loss, results in what Abraham and Torok call “incorporation,” a process that is described as a kind of psychic “magic” act: If accepted and worked through [introjected], the loss would require major readjustment. But the fantasy of incorporation merely simulates profound psychic transformation through magic; it does so by im38 Nicolas Abraham & Maria Torok, “Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation,” in The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, ed. & tr. Nicholas Rand (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1994): 127–28; emphasis added. 39 Abraham & Torok, “Mourning or Melancholia,” 128; emphasis in original.

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plementing literally something that has only figurative meaning. So in order not to have to “swallow” a loss, we fantasize swallowing (or having swallowed) that which has been lost, as if it were some kind of thing.40

Like the ring in Kalidasa’s play, the “thing” hidden from consciousness is borne along by an unwitting host – not, in this instance, a senseless fish, but rather the ‘senseless’ individual who has experienced a loss (or, literally, bears someone else’s loss) that cannot be expressed. Functioning uncannily like the ring, the effects of incorporation are described as “instantaneous and magical”:41 “The ultimate aim of incorporation is to recover, in secret and through magic, an object that, for one reason or another, evaded its own function: mediating the introjection of desires.”42 To gain a more complete understanding of this process, I quote at length from Abraham and Torok: Incorporation results from those losses that for some reason cannot be acknowledged as such. In these special cases the impossibility of introjection is so profound that even our refusal to mourn is prohibited from being given a language, that we are debarred from providing any indication whatsoever that we are inconsolable. Without the escaperoute of somehow conveying our refusal to mourn, we are reduced to a radical denial of the loss, to pretending that we had absolutely nothing to lose. There can be no thought of speaking to someone else about our grief under these circumstances. The words that cannot be uttered, the scenes that cannot be recalled, the tears that cannot be shed – everything will be swallowed along with the trauma that led to the loss. Swallowed and preserved. Inexpressible mourning erects a secret tomb inside the subject. Reconstituted from the memories of words, scenes, and affects, the objectal [sic] correlative of the loss is buried alive in the crypt as a full-fledged person, complete with its own topography. The crypt also includes the actual or supposed traumas that made introjection impracticable. A whole world of unconscious fantasy is created, one that leads its own separate and concealed existence.

40

Abraham & Torok, “Mourning or Melancholia,” 126; emphasis added. Maria Torok, “The Illness of Mourning and the Fantasy of the Exquisite Corpse,” in The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, ed. & tr. Nicholas Rand (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1994): 113. 42 Torok, “The Illness of Mourning,” 114. 41

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Sometimes in the dead of the night, when libidinal fulfillments have their way, the ghost of the crypt comes back to haunt the cemetery guard, giving him strange and incomprehensible signals, making him perform bizarre acts, or subjecting him to unexpected sensations.43

Describing incorporation as a kind of fantasy that arises from a “shared secret”44 involving a prior shameful (but pleasurable) thought or action vis-à-vis the lost object, Abraham and Torok argue that “To have a fantasy of incorporation is to have no other choice but to perpetuate a clandestine pleasure by transforming it, after it has been lost, into an intrapsychic secret”: “every time an incorporation is uncovered, it can be attributed to the undisclosable [sic] grief that befalls an ego already partitioned on account of a previous objectal [sic] experience tainted with shame.”45 At the root of Abraham and Torok’s clinical practice is the alleviation of the patient’s suffering through the revelation of such “shameful” or disturbing secrets and the unblocking of obstacles to introjection. Nicholas Rand explains that this can take place only through painful recollection and, importantly, someone else’s recognition of the analysand’s pain: Suffering that is recognized as such by others facilitates its gradual psychic assimilation or introjection. That, distilled to the extreme, is the foundation of Abraham and Torok’s theory of psychotherapy. Explicit acknowledgment of the full extent and ramifications of the patient’s suffering is one of the analyst’s crucial functions. Whether with our own strength, with the help of loved ones, or with an analyst if need be, we must be able to remember the past, recall what was taken from us, understand and grieve over what we have lost to trauma, and so find and renew ourselves.46

As it is in most psychoanalytic practices, the analyst’s ability not only to listen to but also to interpret the speech of the patient is paramount. But since secrecy and silence have distorted the patient’s access to disturbing memories, his/her ability to describe past events is also distorted and 43

Nicolas Abraham & Maria Torok, “Mourning or Melancholia,” 130; emphasis in original. 44 Abraham & Torok, “Mourning or Melancholia,” 131. 45 “Mourning or Melancholia,” 131. 46 Nicholas Rand, “Introduction: Renewals of Psychoanalysis,” 12–13.

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deranged. While rejecting Freud’s fairly rigid interpretative lexicography, Abraham and Torok nonetheless postulate that each patient possesses – or, more accurately, is possessed by – a personal vocabulary that both obfuscates and reveals circumstances of prior trauma, “obscuring beyond recognition the linguistic elements that might otherwise lead the analyst to the source of their suffering.” It is the analyst’s role, therefore, to “retrieve signification” by “uncover[ing] psychic mechanisms whose aim seems to be to disarray, even to annul the expressive power of language.”47 As Rand points out, “one of these mechanisms, which Abraham and Torok call cryptonymy, inhibits the emergence of meaning by concealing the significant link within a chain of words.”48 Abraham and Torok coin a word for this process – anasemia. Again it must be emphasized that, since each patient’s “crypt” is unique, so is each patient’s cryptic speech. Patients whose lives are disturbed by a psychic crypt, according to Abraham and Torok’s theory, are notoriously resistant to psychoanalysis. However, on the basis of specific clinical analyses, Nicolas Abraham discovered that an even greater resistance will be found in cases where the patient is harbouring not a secret about his/her own past, but one inherited from an ancestor: it may be, in fact, that the patient does not even know what the secret is, only that it exists and that it must be kept from others. In a 1975 article entitled “Notes on the Phantom,” Abraham first begins to speculate on the possibility of transgenerational haunting: The phantom is a formation of the unconscious that has never been conscious – for good reason. It passes – in a way yet to be determined – from the parent’s unconscious into the child’s.49

Abraham goes on to argue (and again I quote at length to capture the idea fully) that The special difficulty of these analyses lies in the patient’s horror at violating a parent’s or a family’s guarded secret, even though the secret’s text and content are inscribed within the patient’s own unconscious. The horror of transgression, in the strict sense of the 47

Rand, “Introduction,” 17. “Introduction,” 17. 49 Nicolas Abraham, “Notes on the Phantom: A Complement to Freud’s Metapsychology,” in The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, ed. & tr. Nicholas Rand (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1994): 173. 48

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term, is compounded by the risk of undermining the fictitious yet necessary integrity of the parental figure in question. […] The phantom counteracts libidinal introjection; that is, it obstructs our perception of words as implicitly referring to their unconscious portion. In point of fact, the words used by the phantom to carry out its return (and which the child sensed in the parent) do not refer to a source of speech in the parent. Instead, they point to a gap, they refer to the unspeakable. In the parent’s topography, these words play the crucial role of having to some extent stripped speech of its libidinal grounding. The phantom is summoned therefore, at the opportune moment, when it is recognized that a gap was transmitted to the subject with the result of barring him or her from the specific introjections he or she would seek at present. The presence of the phantom indicates the effects, on the descendants, of something that had inflicted narcissistic injury or even catastrophe on the parents. […] While incorporation, which behaves like a post-hypnotic suggestion, may recede before appropriate forms of classical analysis, the phantom remains beyond the reach of the tools of classical analysis. The phantom will vanish only when its radically heterogeneous nature with respect to the subject is recognized, a subject to whom it at no time has any direct reference. In no way can the subject relate to the phantom as his or her own repressed experience, not even as an experience by incorporation. The phantom which returns to haunt bears witness to the existence of the dead buried within the other.50

As the literary critic Esther Rashkin explains, the phantom “holds the individual within a group dynamic constituted by a specific familial (and sometimes extrafamilial) topology that prevents the individual from living life as her or his own”; the result is that “The unspeakable secret suspended within the adult is transmitted silently to the child in “undigested” form and lodges within his or her mental topography as an unmarked tomb.”51 Nicolas Abraham’s ‘discovery’ of the phantom prompted him to follow Freud and Lacan into the realm of literary analysis and, specifically, to contribute to the debate over the ‘problem’ of/with Hamlet. In “The Phantom of Hamlet, or the Sixth Act,” Abraham proceeds from T.S. 50

Abraham, “Notes on the Phantom,” 174–75; emphasis in original. Esther Rashkin, Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1992): 27. 51

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Eliot’s observation that Hamlet’s distress lacks an objective correlative to offer a multi-lingual cryptonymic re-reading of the play’s language that reveals both a parental secret and the conspiracy to keep that secret hidden from the young prince. Abraham departs significantly from previous theories about Hamlet’s indecision by suggesting that the prince’s paralysis is symptomatic of a nescience [unknown knowledge] arising from a specific familial history, rather than of a generalized Oedipal complex. The most ingenious (and audacious) aspect of Abraham’s intervention in this debate, however, is his creation of a Sixth Act for the play, in which Shakespeare’s most enigmatic protagonist is revived and the secret, criminal past of the Ghost revealed. Without subscribing entirely to either Abraham’s methodology or his conclusions in the case of Hamlet, Esther Rashkin succinctly describes the potential for Abraham and Torok’s theories of the phantom and transgenerational haunting to open up new areas of literary analysis: Within the literary and psychoanalytic domains, the phantom provides a new vantage point from which to consider the effect Freud called “the uncanny” [das Unheimliche]. In saying that the person haunted by a phantom is inhabited by a nescience, by an “unknown knowledge” that can be transmitted or passed down through an entire family line or community, Abraham offers a definition of the uncanny different from Freud’s. He suggests that the psychological effect of something seeming familiar and strange at the same time can be explained through the specific configuration in which something is unknown (unheimlich) to the subject in one generation and secretly “known” or “within the family or house” (literally heimlich) in the preceding one.52

Rashkin, taking as her basic principle the “idea that an individual’s behavior might be traced to a secret kept by a family member in another generation,”53 applies Abraham and Torok’s psychoanalytic approach to several “uncanny” and, I would argue, gothic works of literature, including Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer,” Henry James’ “The Jolly Corner,” and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.” But whereas Abraham, the therapist, reconstructs and boldly reveals, through the supplement of the sixth act, the secret ‘truth’ of Shakespeare’s 52 53

Esther Rashkin, Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative, 30. Rashkin, Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative, 22.

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play, thereby attempting to lay to rest not only Hamlet’s ghost but also the agonies of the play’s critics, Rashkin, the literary critic, takes a nuanced, non-clinical approach to the analysis of cryptic texts. Working from the assumption that certain kinds of literature “exist in what may be called a ‘textual dual unity’” and that such texts “function as their own ‘secret sharers,’ as partners in a pact of collective concealment they form with themselves,” Rashkin argues that the critic’s task is not to heal the characters in the text, but to “demonstrate how the[ir] incongruous speech and behavior […] can be traced in each instance to the disturbing yet unrecognized workings of a secret they carry within them.”54 Rashkin’s diagnostic and analytical, rather than therapeutic and restorative,55 approach, claims to inaugurate a “new view of subjectivity in fiction, a view that construes a subject’s sense of alienation, ex-centricity, or otherness not as an ontological given but as potentially the result of being ‘possessed’ by a phantom”:56 an effect that is decidedly uncanny and gothic. In exploring the textual “relationship among psychic history, family history, and character analysis,” Rashkin suggests an application of Abraham’s and Torok’s theories that can provide “a new perspective on the potential connection between hidden family sagas and the genesis of narrative, between the textual manifestations of a concealed ‘metapsychological reality’ propelling a character.”57 Taking my cue from Abraham and Torok’s theories and aspects of my critical methodology from Esther Rashkin, I propose a reading of Shashi Deshpande’s novels that fully recognizes the role that specific family secrets play not only in the determination of character but also in the generation of narrative itself. I hasten to add that one need not adopt, in toto, either Abraham and Torok’s psychoanalytic framework or Rashkin’s multi-lingual strategies for revealing secrets in literature in order to investigate the operations of recollection and mourning that haunt Deshpande’s narratives. What is essential to a cryptomimetic reading of her 54

Rashkin, Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative, 45. For a thorough critique of the “curative” goal of Abraham’s (and to a lesser extent Torok’s) clinical practice, see Christopher Lane, “Review: Testament of the Other: Abraham and Torok’s Failed Expiation of Ghosts,” Diacritics 27.4 (Winter 1997): 3–29. 56 Rashkin, Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative, 44. 57 Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative, 45. 55

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work, however, is an appreciation of the mechanism of transgenerational haunting, as theorized by Abraham and Torok (but perhaps even more fully formulated in Deshpande’s novels), and an understanding of the way that this approach to reading Deshpande’s work allows us to focus on, if not resolve, the cryptic qualities that have heretofore been either ignored or depreciated in her fiction. In order to accomplish such a reading, however, it is necessary to perform one more operation: the suturing of Kalidasa’s Sanskrit play, Abraham and Torok’s psychoanalytic theory of transgenerational haunting, and a gothic poetics. 

If the appearance of Gothic suggests anything, it is some historical factor in this literary development, something which made the family a cultural pressure point.58

I have used the terms ‘gothic’ and ‘gothic poetics’ rather freely in this chapter and would now like to move toward some clarification, particularly of the latter term. For a preliminary yet, I believe, elegant definition of a gothic poetics, I turn to one of the most prominent analysts of the genre, Anne Williams, who suggests that gothic is “a ‘something’ that goes beyond the merely literary” to denote an aesthetic that she describes as “an intersection of grammar, architecture and psychoanalysis.”59 If I may be so bold as to offer a crude unpacking of this still somewhat enigmatic definition, I would argue that the “grammar” of the gothic consists in its recognizable tropes and symbols; the “architecture” of the gothic consists both in its narrative structure and in the haunted structures that it depicts; and the psychoanalytic aspect of the gothic consists in its exploration of the depths of subjectivity, or the unconscious. What troubles this tidy delineation, however, is the word “intersection,” which implies that the gothic does not inhere in each or even all of these elements but, rather, in their particular convergence in a text that can be said not just to possess these characteristics, but to be possessed by them. The 58

Anne Williams, Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (Chicago: U of Chicago P ,

1995): 90–91. 59

Williams, Art of Darkness, 23–24.

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three threads in this labyrinthine definition may thus be seen to converge in a rebus-like structure, in which surface (conventional tropes and/or plot mechanisms or structurations) and depth (the unconscious) are inseparable or, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick puts it, “are contagious metonymically.”60 Sedgwick’s and Williams’ emphasis on the grammatical, spatial, and psychoanalytic aspects of gothic holds out the promise of mobilizing a gothic poetics for the examination of texts that originate outside the literary period (eighteenth century) and nationality (British) with which gothic is traditionally associated. While more recent critical interventions in gothic theory, such as those of David Punter and Andrew Hock Soon Ng, have built on the ground-breaking theories of Williams and Sedgwick to extend the purview of a gothic poetics to include postcolonial literature, my decision to return to Williams’ Art of Darkness and to Sedgwick’s earlier text, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, is motivated by a need to account for a gothic poetics that is not also tied to a project of imperial protest or national self-definition. As previously discussed, Deshpande’s work does not fit comfortably within received notions of the ‘postcolonial’, even though Deshpande lives in and writes about an India that has undoubtedly been shaped by the British colonial experience. The fact that her work does not address directly or overtly the tensions among imperial subjects and colonial dependents, however, is not the same as saying that it does not engage politically or meaningfully with societal issues. In fact, it does so in ways that are remarkably similar to what we would now call classical or conventional Gothic texts of the eighteenth and nineteenth century: in other words, from a microcosmic or parochial perspective that has inherent nationalist and even internationalist implications. I would add here, although it would take another book to elaborate this idea fully, that the affiliation of the terms ‘gothic’ and ‘nation’, as they have been delineated in recent studies of the genre that distinguish American, Irish, Scottish, Canadian, Indian gothic(s), etc., is in fact highly suspect. There is no such thing, for example, as an American gothic literature: there have been eruptions – or shall we say epidemics – of the genre in New England, the southern states, and the Midwest, each with its own distinctive cultural memes. Gothic is, rather, a regional or parochial response to specific his60

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “The Character in the Veil: Imagery of the Surface in the Gothic Novel,” P M L A 96.2 (March 1981): 256.

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tory and circumstances. Just as texts that have traditionally been termed gothic are now read in the light of the social disturbances that they register in uncanny and horrifying ways – a dark and distorted psychological mirroring of the world in which they are set – so do Deshpande’s novels register the effects of enormous social change occurring in late-twentiethcentury south India on specific members of that society. But why use the term gothic at all to describe the work of a contemporary Indian woman writer? Like many of her critics, Deshpande repeatedly uses terms like horror, ghosts, and haunting, but rarely the term gothic itself,61 in spite of her claims to be an avid reader of the Brontës and of crime fiction. Indeed, the term seems to be used infrequently in published criticism of Indian writing, and then only in relation to writers such as Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Amitav Ghosh, and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. In Frederick S. Frank’s 2006 Guide to the Gothic I I I , an exhaustive bibliography of criticism relating to the gothic, there are only five entries for Indian texts – two each for Jhabvala and Rushdie and one for Roy. Several of these entries, moreover, were published in a single collection, Empire and the Gothic, edited by Andrew Smith and William Hughes and published in 2003. It is, in fact, difficult to account for the apparent aversion to applying the term ‘gothic’ to Indian literature in an age otherwise characterized by gothic revivalism, except to note that this revival has occurred primarily in Euro-American criticism of postcolonial works of international repute and has seemed not to have found expression in the native Indian criticism of non-diasporic Indian fiction.62 While applying the term ‘gothic’ to Deshpande’s fiction may seem to be an imperialistic gesture on my part – attempting to force the work of an Indian writer into a Euro-American paradigm – it is important to note, first of all, that Indian writers and critics have appropriated other nonindigenous labels, including ‘realism’ and the term ‘novel’ itself, for use in describing literature written in India by Indians. If Deshpande’s own 61 In The Binding Vine, Urmi recalls the story of her great-grandfather’s marriage as having “a touch of the Gothic about it” (96). 62 The one reference I can find to the gothic in Deshpande’s work is Pier Paolo Piciucco’s statement that “[A Matter of Time] ends in a Gothic scene with a sweeping view over the ancestral home”; “Houses and Homecoming in the Fiction of Shashi Deshpande,” Journal of Indian Writing in English 29.2 (July 2001): 35.

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reading habits are insufficient grounds to assume that gothic sensibilities are assimilated into her literary aesthetic, the fact that aspects of her writing that exhibit gothic qualities are either overlooked or disparaged by critics provides me with considerable impetus and motivation to explore the gothic tendencies in her work, if only to claim legitimacy and provide context for these aspects of the writing. It is, for example, premature to claim, as does Meenakshi Mukherjee, that “no paradigm exists in English”63 for a novel such as A Matter of Time until all possibilities have been exhausted: unless critics consider gothic literature as a potential influence on Deshpande’s work – or having affinities with it – such a position is premature, at best. In other words, if I did not believe that a consideration of gothic tendencies in Deshpande’s work would prove to be not just appropriate but also useful and valuable, I would not venture to suggest such an approach to her work. Moreover, a certain theoretical re-framing of the mechanisms that drive character in gothic literature – that suggested by Sedgwick in The Coherence of Gothic Conventions – allows us to see very clearly the links among Kalidasa’s play and the theories of Abraham and Torok, and, as we shall see, many of Deshpande’s novels. I quote at length from Sedgwick, who argues that the “self [in gothic literature] is spatialized in the following way”:64 It is the position of the self to be massively blocked off from something to which it ought normally to have access. This something can be its own past, the details of its family history; it can be the free air, when the self has been literally buried alive; it can be a lover; it can be just all the circumambient life, when the self is pinned in a death-like sleep. Typically, however, there is both something going on inside the isolation (the present, the continuous consciousness, the dream, the sensation itself) and something intensely relevant going on impossibly out of reach. While the three main elements (what’s inside, what’s outside, and what separates them) take on the most varied guises, the terms of the relationship are immutable. The self and whatever it is that is outside have a proper, natural, necessary connection to each other, but one that the self is suddenly incapable of making. The inside life and the outside life have to continue separately, becoming counter-

63 64

Mukherjee, “Sounds of Silence,” 31. Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, 12.

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parts rather than partners, the relationship between them one of parallels and correspondences rather than communication. This, though it may happen in an instant, is a fundamental reorganization, creating a doubleness where singleness should be. And the lengths there are to go to reintegrate the sundered elements – finally, the impossibility of restoring them to their original oneness – are the most characteristic energies of the Gothic novel. The worst violence, the most potent magic, and the most paralyzing instances of the uncanny in these novels do not occur in, for example, the catacombs of the Inquisition or the stultification of nightmares. Instead, they are evoked in the very breach of the imprisoning wall. […] no nightmare is ever as terrifying as is waking up from some innocuous dream to find it true. The barrier between the self and what should belong to it can be caused by anything and nothing; but only violence or magic, and both of a singularly threatening kind, can ever succeed in joining them again.65

I have highlighted those aspects of the quotation that relate most closely – one might almost suggest: uncannily – to the alienation and force of magical reparation portrayed in Kalidasa’s play. Moreover, Sedgwick’s description of the spatialized self in the gothic is also an excellent account of the mental condition of most of the protagonists in Deshpande’s fiction, characters who quite often find themselves “massively blocked off” from something in their past “to which it ought normally to have access.” Just as in Kalidasa’s (gothic) play, in Deshpande’s fiction “only [a threatening kind of] violence or magic” can restore that access. Sedgwick also hints in the above passage at the mutual inflection of surface and depth in gothic; one of the significant ways in which this happens is through the tropes of the gothic, most of which are well known to most readers: the haunted or decaying house whose rooms and secret passages inspire the structural metaphor that Sedgwick employs above; the dysfunctional family; dreams and nightmares; etc. These “trappings” comprise what some critics consider the “formulaic” or hackneyed aspects of the genre that lend themselves so readily to parody, perhaps precisely because their symbols are drawn from the most familiar and comforting – in Freud’s terminology, heimlich – aspects of our lives: houses and the

65

Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, 13–14; emphases added.

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families that occupy them; the thresholds to those houses and the liminal spaces that they demarcate; the irrational dreams that visit us in our sleep. Numerous critics have pointed to the importance of houses and the charged and uncanny nature of the domestic spaces in Deshpande’s work. Ritu Menon comments: The essentially familiar scope of Deshpande’s novels imbues the domestic space with a greater charge than may otherwise be the case. The playing out of family tensions, rivalries and hostilities, and even happiness, takes place against a backdrop of earlier joy and sorrow, so that nothing that the houses witness now is without its echo from the past.66

Nilufer Bharucha notes that “woman after woman in Deshpande’s novels” “returns to her ancestral home in a journey that can be compared to a return to the womb.” Like the womb, with its “sticky walls,”67 the ancestral home in these novels is an ambiguous space, “a space that restricts as much as it protects”;68 it is also an essentially saturated and haunted space, the site of a contemporary conflict or dilemma that hints not just at earlier joy and sorrow, but also at past horrors that continue to disturb the present. As Tabish Khair argues, The Gothic narrative had a point. Wonders take place “elsewhere”; terror comes from “elsewhere”. But terror, contrary to what some might claim “here”, is not born “elsewhere”. Terror takes place when that which has been disowned, exorcized, banished, exiled, prevented entry, nevertheless crashes the barriers.69

It is precisely this idea of domestic terror that I will explore in the next chapter. Other characteristic aspects of the gothic genre intersect with these tropes but operate at a different level. While there is no shortage of haun66

Ritu Menon, “Afterword” to Shashi Deshpande, A Matter of Time (1996; New York: Feminist Press at C U N Y , 1999): 260. 67 Nilufer E. Bharucha, “Shashi Deshpande,” in South Asian Writers in English, ed. Fakrul Alam (Detroit M I : Thomas Gale, 2006): 107. 68 Bharucha, “Shashi Deshpande,” 109. 69 Tabish Khair, “ ‘ Let Me In – Let Me In!’: Why does terror come from elsewhere?” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 42.2 (2006): 161.

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ted houses in Deshpande’s work, other, less concrete characteristics of the gothic genre are just as germane to my study. These aspects, what one might term affective characteristics of the gothic, include an inexplicable but overriding sense of terror or suffocation; eruptions of the irrational; uncanny repetitions and doublings; and various forms of excess or overdetermination, including melodrama and linguistic excess. It is these affective qualities of a text that most clearly signal a gothic aesthetic: to answer an Indian friend’s objection that everyone has to live in a house, so why is the House of Vishwas in A Matter of Time a gothic trope, I would counter that not everyone lives in a house that, after the sudden, tragic deaths of two of its inhabitants, is said to be crying ‘biko, biko’.”70 There is, in fact, no mistaking, from the opening of the novel until this very point, the gothic and haunted nature of the Big House in Deshpande’s novel. By way of explaining such eruptions of the irrational in gothic literature, Jean–Paul Riquelme argues that gothic is an “essentially anti-realistic” genre: “Stylistically, the Gothic has always been excessive in its responses to conventions that foster the order and clarity of realistic representations, conventions that embody a cultural insistence on containment.”71 The excesses in gothic fiction manifest themselves in a tendency toward melodrama, the staged scene, lush language, descriptions of bizarre and outré events, coincidences and strings of occurrences that stretch a reader’s credulity. Gothic texts present scenes that are imbued with a heightened sense of danger or gloom that cannot be explained rationally but that prefigure some catastrophe. Deshpande’s elaborate depiction, in the first pages of A Matter of Time, of the ‘schizophrenic’ House of Vishwas, much like Poe’s famous opening description of the House of Usher, provides a good example of the latter tendency in gothic fiction, as do those moments of unexplicated horror or transcendent vision in her novels. Susanne Becker, in her book on gothic and the feminine, draws an interesting connection between the “excesses” of gothic fiction and the marginalization of the genre:

70 71

Deshpande, A Matter of Time, 240. Riquelme, “Toward a History of Gothic and Modernism,” 585.

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My term for this gothic feature [what Angela Carter calls hyperbole], excess, is one of the terms of gothic criticism that has been used pejoratively to marginalise the gothic as a ‘feminine form.’ I hope to show that it indicates a potential liberation from constraining – both cultural and narrative – structures. The idea of a secret plot from the past that structures a contemporary narrative, for example, suggests an excess in narrative, a level of narration that doubles or contests – and thus problematises – the conventions of a surface narrative pattern: for example, the pattern of the traditional ‘heroine’s text’ – the text that ends in marriage or death.72

The excess in narrative (as well as the feminist impulse behind it) that Becker imputes to the gothic is also a distinctive feature of Deshpande’s novels, which are characterized by the working-through of past events, through memory and through encounters with figures from the past – living and dead – in relation to a present narrative that parallels and often repeats certain features of those events, creating a palimpsestic, haunted narrative. Like many modernist and gothic writers (William Faulkner comes immediately to mind), Deshpande creates an untidy world in which there are more pieces to the puzzle than can be contained within the frame of realist fiction, leading to what Meenakshi Mukherjee might call “red herrings,” but which is a narrative strategy I see in terms of both excess and indeterminacy. It is this combination of excess and indeterminacy – what I call overdetermination – that results in an economy of narrative in which, in Shashi Deshpande’s words, “Nothing is lost.” In choosing the term ‘overdetermination’ rather than ‘excess’ to describe this feature of gothic texts, I am conscious of the particular way in which the accumulation of psychological detail about a character in Deshpande’s fiction leads us deeper into the language and structure of the unconscious: behind or beneath virtually every action, every thought, of her characters, is some other ‘text’ through which we must interpret the present action. Sometimes this overdetermination results in an excessive and often conflicted ratiocination on the part of a character, one in which various pre-texts battle for interpretative salience. We find in Deshpande’s texts more than ambiguity or ambivalence when it comes to motivation of character: as 72

Susanne Becker, Gothic Forms of Feminine Fictions (Manchester: Manchester

U P , 1999): 11.

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readers, we are sometimes faced with a stream-of-consciousness narrative in which operations similar to the psychoanalytic operations of condensation and displacement force characters to re-interpret, overturn, and second-guess motivation, and we as readers can never trace just one reason, one cause, for present action. Indeed, such mysterious operations and structures of disclosure in Deshpande’s narratives invite precisely the kind of approach that is suggested by Abraham and Torok’s theories of transgenerational haunting and the parental crypt. The thing that is “massively blocked off” from a character in a Deshpande novel is quite often a traumatic event that occurs in a character’s childhood, and that, most often, is intensified by a parent’s inability to deal with the trauma. As we have seen above, trauma arises not from the event itself, but from the context surrounding that event and the way that the affected individual is supported in dealing with it. Nicholas Rand and Maria Torok argue that, “when the presence of a secret disturbs the very ability to deal with a family trauma,”73 such as when the secret belongs to a child’s parent, or when the parent blocks or preempts access to the traumatic event through his or her own response (or lack of it), a new trauma arises, what they call “a trauma of inaccessibility”:74 “Children raised with family secrets lack the knowledge that they are trapped by the silence of their elders.”75 Disturbances such as these are registered in the labyrinthine and haunted architecture of Deshpande’s novels, in a narrative circling and deferral that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes as the “difficulty the story has in getting itself told.”76 Echoing the labyrinthine and byzantine structure of the gothic house, gothic fiction is full of narrative paths and hallways that lead only indirectly to some truth, or revelation, or recognition. Virtually all of Deshpande’s novels begin in medias res and radiate out from that point, backward and forward in time, hinting at a past which is only agonizingly and slowly excavated through the rest of the novel, and a future that has to be won at the cost of painful revelation and recollection. 73

Nicholas Rand & Maria Torok, Questions for Freud: The Secret History of Psychoanalysis (Cambridge: Harvard U P , 1997): 171. 74 Rand & Torok, Questions for Freud, 222. 75 Questions for Freud, 169. 76 Eve Kosofsky Segwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, 14.

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In this sense, Deshpande is the mystery writer she says she has always wanted to be. Her works explore difficult truths and ask even more difficult questions about what happens when secrets are revealed. Ultimately, they ask a very cryptic, a very old question: What is the status of a secret that its bearer does not even know is being harboured within it? And what is the price of revealing it?

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2

Haunted Beginnings — The Roots of Domestic Terror in Deshpande’s Early Fiction

between your grace and me is but this, that I shall die today, and you tomorrow1 But they don’t really go anywhere, our dead.2

R

E M A R K A B L Y , within the space of only four years, Shashi Deshpande published her first four novels: The Dark Holds No Terrors (1980), If I Die Today (1982), Roots and Shadows 1983), and Come Up and Be Dead (1983). One might be forgiven for assuming, on the basis of the titles alone, that a new horror writer had suddenly burst upon the Indian scene. Indeed, two of the novels – If I Die Today and Come Up and Be Dead – belong to a category of writing genealogically related to gothic horror, the detective or mystery novel. The other two novels, whose titles are similarly foreboding, have not been so classified, and, perhaps not surprisingly, have also received much more serious critical attention than have the mystery novels. The third of her novels to be published, but the first written by Deshpande, Roots and Shadows, betrays the novelist’s ingénue status and journalistic background, reading at times like a sociological essay on the disintegration of the Brahminical extended family: the first-person narrator of the novel is, in fact, a writer, as many of Deshpande’s subsequent narrators/central

1

Sir Thomas More, cited in Deshpande, If I Die Today (Sahibabad, India: Vikas,

1982): 137. 2

Deshpande, Roots and Shadows, 58.

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characters will be.3 However, there are already hints in Roots and Shadows of the uncanny elements and structures that will more and more frequently disturb the realist surface of Deshpande’s later novels. The Dark Holds No Terrors, Deshpande’s first published novel, but written after Roots and Shadows, more clearly evinces the haunted sensibility and gothic poetic structures that I argue characterize Deshpande’s narrative style, and I will discuss it in a separate chapter. While the roots of Deshpande’s experiments in at least one form of gothic literature can be found in her two mystery novels, these works are also the least successful (by almost any standard, including popularity) of the four debutante novels published between 1980 and 1983. This, in spite of Deshpande’s self-confessed love of the mystery genre, having received “a taste of blood” from her father.4 Both novels were published initially in serial form in a women’s magazine, Eve’s Weekly; both feature female first-person narrators; and both draw heavily on European gothic and mystery conventions. Come Up and Be Dead, which takes its title from a line in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, is set in a women’s boarding school; one of its firstperson narrators, the new headmistress of the school, faces extraordinary challenges almost immediately upon assuming her position, including the death, apparently by suicide, of one of the students. As other violent deaths follow and the brittle headmistress finds herself increasingly incapable of coping with events, the point of view shifts to that of a more sympathetic first-person narrator, the headmistress’s young cousin, Devayani. An avid reader of detective fiction, Devayani is drawn into the murder investigation and herself almost falls victim to a murderous psychologist who is attempting to hide his role in abetting a schoolgirl sex-ring, run by one of the school’s administrators. Deshpande’s homage in Come Up and Be Dead to nineteenth-century literature, including gothic literature of that period, is overt and pervasive. The novel opens with an atmospheric description of a gloomy, secluded school that reminds the headmistress of Hamlet’s advice to Ophelia – “Get thee to a nunnery” – but that also evokes images from Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Devayani at one point compares her situation to that 3 Jaya in That Long Silence, Urmi in The Binding Vine, Sumi in A Matter of Time, and Madhu in Small Remedies. 4 Deshpande, “The Last Frontier,” in Writing from the Margin, 218.

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of Jane Eyre. Other cultural references to everything from a film by Satyajit Ray to Sherlock Holmes, Harper Lee, and Chekhov give the novel a ‘bookish’ or scholarly air, something of which even one of its narrators, Devayani, seems self-consciously aware when she can’t quite believe the danger she is facing as a result of her investigations: We are, both of us [she and the murderous psychologist], a pair of amateurs at this business. I thought of all those bookshops with revolving stands full of books that laid crime explicitly open; of movies that made it even more clear and simple. But, here we were, novices at this game. As a victim I should have screamed, struggled, tried to escape; but that role seemed so unrelated to me, and all these things so exaggerated and melodramatic that I felt ashamed even of harbouring such thoughts.5

The fact that Devayani proves a better detective than her less literary- and more literal-minded cousin, the headmistress, may redeem the value of reading crime literature, but the self-consciousness about such texts often impedes and undermines, rather than enhances, the suspense in the novel. It is telling, perhaps, that the first-person narration reverts to the literalminded headmistress at the end of the novel, as if to consign the more outré and bizarre events at the school to the realm of an over-stimulated literary imagination. Deshpande’s other detective novel, If I Die Today, is set in a similarly cloistered setting, this time on a small medical-school campus, upon whose grounds faculty and their families reside. Its first-person narrator, Manju, is married to one of the faculty’s pathologists and is pregnant with their second child. The superficially conventional and placid surface of her life and the lives of those around her is disturbed when a terminally ill patient, Guru, takes up residence on campus. Guru’s charm and his unflinching directness in facing his own imminent death draw others toward him, until his quiet determination to root out and expose the lies and secrets of the faculty and their families begins to incite fear, suspicion, confessions, revelations, and conflict among this small group. By the time Guru’s sudden death by lethal injection is declared to be a murder, almost everyone except the narrator, it seems, has a motive for killing him. The 5

Shashi Deshpande, Come Up and Be Dead (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House,

1982): 247–48. Further page references are in the main text.

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tightly-knit and isolated community, already shaken, is then rocked by another suspicious death. Like the headmistress in Come Up and Be Dead, the narrator in If I Die Today begins to suspect that someone very close to her is responsible for the murders: her husband, who is clearly keeping a secret from her. If one were to apply conventional generic terms to these novels, both female narrators (Devayani in Come Up and Be Dead and Manju in If I Die Today) could be classified as ‘amateur’ detectives, but they are drawn into that role more by necessity than by nature, since the murders occur so threateningly close to home. As detectives, they are ratiocinative and scholarly, rather than active, forensically oriented investigators, but in neither novel does the narrator ‘solve’ the crime through superior reasoning skills: rather, one murderer is revealed in the act of attempting murder and the other is captured by a ‘real’ detective. While multiple suspects and as many motives for the murders accumulate in both novels, no logical set of clues pursued by the narrator/amateur detective narrows the field to a single suspect, although the list of possibilities does gradually shorten as some suspects fall victim to the murderer. In other words, not a single one of the narrators proves to be a very perceptive or adept sleuth. In fact, the reserved, business-like headmistress in Come Up and Be Dead actually impedes the investigation by refusing to believe that the first two deaths are either suspicious or connected with one another. Her self-confidence, in fact, is so seriously eroded at times that she considers giving up her position at the school. And, while If I Die Today ends on a positive, lifeaffirming note – order is restored on campus and Manju gives birth to a baby girl – even in this novel, a number of unresolved and perplexing issues remain. If I Die Today, in some ways the more philosophically interesting of the two novels, is also perhaps the more seriously flawed from a generic point of view. First serialized in Eve’s Weekly, it contains, in both its subplots and in the solution to the crime, a pointed feminist message. The narrator, Manju, is pregnant, but she is not enjoying her pregnancy, whose complications have interfered with her career as a teacher, nor is she looking forward to the birth of her second child: Manju senses that her marriage is disintegrating, as her husband, Vijay, has become increasingly unresponsive and remote from her. During the course of the novel, she befriends the principal’s only child, a young girl, who is also deeply unhappy: Mriga feels ignored and unloved by a father who clearly would

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have preferred a male child, and unsupported by a mother who is weak and submissive. Finally, when the murderer is revealed to be the Dean’s “spinster” sister Vidya, an otherwise minor character, it is suggested that Vidya’s motivation for the murders was a selfless desire to protect her brother from exposure of his role in authorizing a falsified pathology report, a secret that Guru had uncovered and was encouraging the Dean to confess. The surviving characters further speculate that Vidya, a successful doctor in her own right, acted out of a deep attachment to and investment in the career of her brother, a slavish devotion that had stunted her own self-fulfilment. The possibility of something like an ‘unnatural’ attraction between the siblings is just barely raised, when a character in the novel warns, “let’s […] not get too Freudian” (135). The fact that characters in the novel can only tentatively speculate on Vidya’s motivations for committing two murders is just one of the ways in which this mystery novel thwarts generic conventions, such as the “Fair Play” rule established by Julian Symons in his analysis of Golden Age detective fiction – the rule that the reader must be in possession of all of the clues to the mystery. Since there is virtually no development of Vidya’s character or any earlier hint about her intense relationship with her brother, and since she is never once considered a suspect, there are insufficient clues upon which one might have based a theory regarding the murderer’s identity or deduced her motivation, leaving the reader feeling slightly cheated when Vidya is finally caught in the act of attempting to murder Manju’s husband. In another strange deviation from the genre, once Vidya is exposed as the murderer (having killed two people in cold blood and having attempted to kill a third), she is neither interrogated nor turned over to the police to be tried for her crimes; rather, she is taken quietly away, now in a near catatonic state, by her brother (the same brother for whom, it is speculated, she had sacrificed all) and his wife, to live with them in another city. Neither formal law enforcement nor the justice system, in fact, plays a role in the novel. One of the most significant crimes alluded to in the novel – the botched medical treatment of an important union leader that ends in his death, and the conspiracy to conceal this incompetence, which involves not only the dean but also Manju’s husband – is never fully explored, nor are the perpetrators of that crime, which is at the root of Vidya’s murderous rampage, brought to justice.

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Perhaps it is specious to talk about deviations from a genre that is by no means universal or monolithic; the Golden Age laws need to be viewed in terms of their own culturally specific allegiances to Euro-American mystery literature.6 Given that Deshpande’s models for this kind of writing – from Ann Radcliffe to P.D. James – come from the Euro-American tradition, and that both novels contain references to works within that tradition, such deviations on her part cannot be viewed simply as unmotivated or naive, but, rather, potentially, as adaptations that reflect different legal systems, cultural values, or mores. For example, Vidya’s ‘punishment’ – her removal from wider society into the family home, rather than incarceration in prison – may tell us something about middleclass Indian attitudes toward involving outsiders in what could be described as internal affairs and maybe even something about a lack of faith in the justice system in India. Nonetheless, the depiction of crime – particularly murder – and punishment in this novel is not only at odds with generic conventions, it also raises questions of verisimilitude, given that the murders occur in a country with an established penal code, however unwieldy and bureaucratic its implementation may be and however much the faculty at the medical school dislikes airing its dirty laundry in public. Where are the police in If I Die Today? How is it possible that Vidya escapes the criminal-justice system? In a novel that thematizes issues of the potentially oppressive forces of domestic relationships and the importance of revealing secrets, moreover, the fact that Vidya is ‘secreted’ away to the domestic sphere where, presumably, she will languish in isolated, regretful, and traumatized silence, lends an ominous and discordant note to the conclusion of the novel. What will happen, ultimately, to Vidya: will she become the family’s ghostly secret, its ‘madwoman in the attic’? Vidya’s plight at the end of this novel would, in fact, be an excellent starting-place for a gothic mystery! It is an odd detective novel, indeed, that begins with a mystery and ends with a “conspiracy of silence” (133). In other words, if If I Die Today is an attempt at a detective novel, it is certainly not one that conforms to the Golden Age or Agatha Christie mould, in spite of Deshpande’s explicit reference to Christie’s work in the novel, or A.K. Singh’s pronouncement that “the novel seems to be a script of a popular thriller film with mystery, suspense and horror in it in the 6

Cultural bias is revealed most flagrantly in rule 5: “No Chinaman must figure in the story.”

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manner of Agatha Christie.”7 While crimes have indeed been committed in both of Deshpande’s mystery novels, while there is considerable suspense regarding who the murderer might be, and while the perpetrators are unveiled by the novels’ conclusions, the investigative and procedural aspects of the genre are clearly subordinated to personal, domestic, and social issues, such as marital strife and the high value placed on having children, especially male children in If I Die Today, and on male predatory behaviour and female victimization in Come Up and Be Dead. Not that mystery fiction eschews engagement with such issues, but it does so rarely – or at least, only at its own peril – at the expense of a believable, tightly woven plot. Obviously, Come Up and Be Dead and If I Die Today do claim some affinity with the genre of mystery fiction to which they have been officially assigned – and unofficially consigned – by Deshpande’s publishers and most of her critics.8 Indeed, in at least one sense, they are paradigmatic of the mystery genre, in that their narrative is premissed on the desire to solve a mystery. As in the classical detective novel, the mystery in each case is a series of crimes – violent and fatal – that must be solved, in this case by an amateur sleuth. Clues regarding the solution of the crime or mystery are disclosed gradually, various suspects are identified and their potential motivations are adduced, and there is a resolution of the central murder mystery by the novel’s end. Of course, some clues and suspects encountered along the way turn out to be dead ends or ‘red herrings’, leading both character(s) and reader astray. It is precisely at this point, however, that Deshpande’s novels falter: in failing to provide sufficient clues and eliminate red herrings, thus narrowing the range of suspects, Deshpande breaks faith with the genre’s conventional narrative, whose pattern of disclosure and revelation should enable the reader to trace, if only retrospectively, the logical means by which the mystery was solved.

7 Awadhesh K. Singh, “Reading into If I Die Today,” in The Fiction of Shashi Deshpande, ed. R.S. Pathak (New Delhi: Creative Books, 1998): 60. 8 Both novels were out of print for a number of years. In 2007, Come Up and Be Dead was reissued by Penguin. There are only a few published essays on both novels: the mystery novels have received far less attention than the ‘non-genre’ fiction. Having said that, virtually no attention has been paid to Deshpande’s novels for children.

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The uncertain closure of both novels and the irregularities in the way that the crimes are solved are all the more curious in light of Deshpande’s own comments about the mystery novels she loves to read: Are the women crime and horror writers of today following on the tradition of Ann Radcliff [sic] and her ilk, doing, in another way, the kind of writing which Jane Austen poked such delicious fun at in her Northanger Abbey? Or, on a more mundane level, does the trend have anything to do with what is stereotypically supposed to be women’s innate sense of putting things in order? Doesn’t P.D. James speak of the detective story as being a small celebration of order and reason in an increasingly unreasonable and disordered world?9

If neither Come Up and Be Dead or If I Die Today can be said to offer narratives that lead to this kind of closure, let alone “a celebration of order and reason,” what are we to make of their allegiance to the mystery genre so described? Apart, then, from the murders and the ostensible, but really rather spurious, role of the detective narrator in attempting to solve them, what attributes do Deshpande’s ‘crime’ novels share with those of writers such as Christie and P.D. James? Distilling these characteristics may allow us to decant those aspects of the genre that most appeal to the writer, but also to test a theory about the two other novels that Deshpande published within the same four years, and, indeed, about the path that her literary career was to take. In this context, I find it noteworthy that, after these two attempts at genre writing, and in spite of her clear regard for the mystery genre, Deshpande has never again attempted to publish a novel that might be marketed as or labelled detective or mystery fiction; in fact, she says that one of her greatest regrets is that she has “not yet written the ‘firstclass mystery10 novel’ [she] had always hoped to write.”11 Could it be that Deshpande, rather than completely abandoning this genre, has subsumed some of its characteristics into her other novels? Could it be that Deshpande remains, at heart, and to this day, a type of mystery writer, and

9

Shashi Deshpande, “The Last Frontier,” in Writing from the Margin, 225. The terms ‘mystery’ and ‘detective’ are often used interchangeable to describe this type of fiction. 11 Deshpande, “In First Person,” in Writing from the Margin, 28. 10

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could it be that, with each new publication, she is still attempting to write that “first-class mystery” novel that has thus far eluded her? Such an approach to Deshpande’s ‘marginal’ work has already been suggested in A.K. Singh’s short essay on the novel. Singh perceptively suggests that “the main authorial current may at times be seen deceptively flowing through the marginal works which turn out to be the most pregnant sites for critical transaction, deconstruction and reconstruction, for often it is in such works rather than in the acclaimed ones that the authorial intentions, fumblings and failures find their expression.”12 He lists some of these currents in Deshpande’s later fiction: Deshpande’s preoccupation with death, murder, nightmarish suspense in the novel […] is discernible also in her novels like Come Up and Be Dead (1983) and The Binding Vine (1983) [sic]. It attains dimension of existential dilemma in The Dark Holds No Terrors (1980) through Sarita, in Roots and Shadows (1983) through Indu, and in That Long Silence through Jaya.13

As Singh implies, Deshpande has never really lost her “taste [for] blood”: the body count in some of her (non-genre) novels rivals that of many mystery writers, and not a few of these deaths are mysterious, violent, and/or described graphically. Like Singh, Jasbir Jain notes the preoccupation with death and relationships in If I Die Today that continues to be central to Deshpande’s work: In […] If I Die Today, it is murder that interests her but this fascination for the act of murder and the detective novel has developed in several different and unexpected ways in her other writings. The act of murder has led to an analysis of death and the sense of deprivation caused by death, to a full-fledged poetics of loss as she studies the impact of bereavement on the bereaved.14

Deshpande’s gothic “poetics of loss” will be most finely honed in her later novels, especially A Matter of Time, Small Remedies, and Moving On, which are also among the most deeply and disturbingly haunted of her novels; what neither Jain nor Singh notes, however, are the themes of 12

Awadhesh K. Singh, “Reading into If I Die Today,” 58. Singh, “Reading into If I Die Today,” 60. 14 Jain, Gendered Realities, 32. 13

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existential isolation and secrecy that link these early mystery novels with her later non-genre fiction. Investigating the links between Deshpande’s mystery fiction and her other novels of this period, I would like to start at the earliest point in any forensic investigation: the scene(s) of the crime. Jasbir Jain suggests that “the ordering of space” in these novels is important to Deshpande’s later work: “Both [novels] locate themselves in a single institution and build an intricate pattern of human jealousy and distrust, of fears of the unknown future and unknown emotions as lives act upon each other.”15 This is, of course, also familiar mystery territory, familiar at least to readers of domestic or manor-house mystery, which has its own set of conventions. One of these is the huis-clos or cloistered setting. In such a setting, whether or not the action is located in an actual convent or monastery, the major characters – both victims and suspects – have been thrown together and are somewhat isolated from the rest of the world, whether by choice or by necessity. The more respectable and controlled the setting and the characters who inhabit it (there is a reason that convents, monasteries, and schools have been favourite settings for these types of mysteries), the greater the potential for a sudden eruption of violence to inspire terror and dread in the characters involved. The characters in such a mystery novel typically possess some kind of prior knowledge about each other, and they may even have had long past associations. The crime that disturbs the surface of their relationships provides an occasion to explore and reveal hidden connections and currents beneath what has been, superficially, respectful intercourse. Subjected to closer scrutiny as a result of an investigation into the ‘disturbance’, new knowledge about characters and their relationships emerges, and skeletons start tumbling, if not literally (though sometimes that happens, too), then metaphorically, from closets. The very familiarity that these characters often appear to have, initially, with each other, places in sharp relief the significant gaps in their knowledge and reveals the superficiality and disingenuousness of the relationships. One is reminded that in Freud’s essay “The Uncanny,” the concept of the ‘heimlich’ etymologically bears the trace of its opposite. Freud cites a demonstrative conversation in Daniel Sanders’ Wörterbuch der Deutschen Sprache (1860, 1, 729):

15

Jain, Gendered Realities, 129.

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“The Zecks [a family name] are all ‘heimlich’.” (in sense I I ) “‘Heimlich’? … What do you understand by ‘heimlich’?” “Well, … they are like a buried spring or a dried-up pond. One cannot walk over it without always having the feeling that water might come up there again.” “Oh, we call it ‘unheimlich’; you call it ‘heimlich’. Well, what makes you think that there is something secret and untrustworthy about this family?”’ (Gutzkow).16

Like the Zeck family in this passage, most characters in a manor-house mystery are ultimately revealed to be harbouring some kind of shameful secret, the nature of the secret providing potential motivation for perpetrating or being victimized by the crime(s) that has been committed. One might argue, in fact, that a fundamental element of the mystery genre, in either its more genteel or its hard-boiled form, is the element of secrecy – not just that somebody (usually the perpetrator, his/her accomplices, and reluctant witnesses) knows and isn’t telling ‘who done it’ but also that all suspects potentially have secret motivations that need to be revealed, and many victims take secrets with them to the grave. The narrative operation by which the premise of secrecy is explored manifests itself in a peristaltic rhythm – controlled by narrative devices such as point of view and mise-en-scène – of withholding information and releasing it in such a way as to build suspense and lead to closure, or the solving of the crime. In fact, what is extraordinary about If I Die Today as a mystery novel is that it is precisely a single, dying character’s seemingly neutral and motiveless quest to root out and reveal the secrets of outwardly respectable characters that initiates the killing spree, of which he is the first victim. In the character of Guru, Deshpande constructs an ingenious device or, as Singh describes him, “a potent text”17 to test theories regarding the importance, value, and effects of telling the truth and revealing secrets. As Jasbir Jain argues, Guru “is a strange mixture of good and evil [...] [whose] presence is like a force that reshuffles all relationships until they begin to fall into place in different alignments.”18 Acting as catalyst,

16

Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~amtower/uncanny .html 17 Singh, “Reading into If I Die Today,” 59. 18 Jain, Gendered Realities, 239.

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trickster figure, or charlatan, Guru’s presence sets the plot of the novel in motion. Before meeting Guru, Manju expresses dread at the prospect of visiting with a stranger who is dying. She wonders what she can possibly say in the face of such grim and intensely personal circumstances until she discovers that Guru does not seek sympathy from his visitors; rather, he sets them at ease by being frank about his own condition, and this, in turn, disarms his visitors and compels candour about their own lives. This quality in Guru immediately appeals to Manju, whose husband has accused her, when she once confessed to loving another man before marrying Vijay, of making a “fetish of the truth.”19 True to the promise of his name, Guru elicits from Manju the repressed emotions that have been building in her with regard to her marriage, and she finds this release both surprising and cathartic. Other characters who succumb to Guru’s amateur therapy are less sure about the value of his interventions. Vimala, for example, who has kept an important secret from her colleagues at the medical school, tells Manju that Guru has offered her the following advice: “Once it ceases to be a secret, you’re free” (65). But Vimala is not so sure: in fact, she is terrified that her own secret will be revealed and that, as a result, her respectability and career will be destroyed. In other words, existential “freedom,” or freedom in and of itself, is, for Vimala, far less valuable than the security of belonging to the community. Other characters in the novel seem to share Vimala’s view, one of them – Vidya – apparently so vehemently that Guru’s passion for revealing secrets and telling the truth turns out to be lethal for him and devastating for her. It is as though the real crime in the novel is not murder per se but, rather, secrecy itself, or at least a particular kind of secrecy that we might term lack of candour (hiding something about oneself from others). After all, as Guru tells Manju, “to waste this one life you have in pretences, in fake emotions – it’s a crime” (40). Or is the real crime, punishable by death (in the case of Guru’s death, but also that of Tony, who claims he is very close to discovering the identity of Guru’s murderer), the insistence on complete candour and the revelation of secrets? It seems to me that the novel is interestingly equivocal on this point, as it remains equivocal about whether Guru’s insistence on absolute honesty, at any cost, makes 19

Shashi Deshpande, If I Die Today (Sahibabad, India: Vikas, 1982): 31. Further page references are in the main text.

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him either a saint or a devil. A dying man with no investment in the future and no real personal connections to those whose lives he enters, Guru, after all, has much less to lose in this experiment than do the others, for whom there is a great deal at stake. Guru possesses an attitude that Jain terms “indifference,” but an indifference that cannot be read simply in Indian spiritual terms, as it is “qualitatively different from the one advocated by Sri Krishna in The Bhagavad Gita.” Jain explains: “Guru’s saintliness is different. At times, he appears to be an ‘interfering meddler’ ([If I Die Today] 9), like a man who, aware that he is going to die, is bent on resurrecting past ghosts and uncovering hidden truths.”20 But to what end, and at what cost? As I have indicated above, the ‘hidden truth’ in the novel that has the most potential to disrupt the future of the faculty and their families is the botched medical treatment (a kind of murder) of an important union leader and the ensuing conspiracy to cover it up, in which both the dean of the medical school and Manju’s husband are implicated. The ghost who truly haunts the novel is the figure of the union leader, whose death occurs some time before the narrative present. Yet the truth about this death, like the identity of the murderer, is revealed only to the reader: it is never revealed to the proper authorities, and the perpetrators of the crime go unpunished (although the dean, who had played a role in covering up the botched operation, resigns his position). The moral ground here is ambiguous, as it will be in a later novel, That Long Silence, in which Mohan’s probable involvement in shady business dealings is apparently informally resolved by the end of the novel, without any revelation of what those dealings were or any exploration of their ethical/legal implications. In spite of this element of moral ambiguity – or perhaps, rather, enriched by it – the relationships among truth (or candour), revelation, secrets, and death that are the overarching philosophical preoccupations of If I Die Today continue to be the major theme of subsequent Deshpande novels, as they are of the mystery genre in general. In the case of most mystery fiction, truth-telling and the revelation of secrets are the logical means to a definitive end – identifying the perpetrator of some crime. In Deshpande’s fiction – and we get our first real glimpse of this in the generic anomalies in If I Die Today – telling the truth (in the specific sense of being honest and transparent about oneself with others) is explored for its 20

Jain, Gendered Realities, 240.

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potential value in and for itself as against its instrumental or social value. While Jasbir Jain argues that the “moral questioning, and debates upon the nature of the difference between the ‘real’ and the ‘true’” reflect[s] an “‘Indianness’” 21 in the novel, I would suggest that the questions raised take on, in addition, an existential – specifically Camusian – dimension. Vijay’s observation, rendered more like an accusation, that Manju “makes a fetish of the truth” can be read in this light: as Camus’ The Outsider demonstrates, candour for its own sake, irrespective of its potential for damaging human relationships, tests the very boundaries or limits of human freedom within the social order. In a cloistered setting, such as that of Deshpande’s two mystery novels, in which relationships are so intense and fraught, the issue becomes one, literally, of life and death, as it does in The Outsider. Deshpande quotes Camus in one of her essays: “We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes, our revenges. But our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and others.”22 But what if the task of fighting our own demons necessitates an effort to break out of the genteel silence that oils the machinery of human relationships? Is the cost of doing so always too high? Deshpande asks this question repeatedly, in one form or another, in her novels, and she does so within a particular cultural context in which, as Vrinda Nabar argues, “supra-individual categories such as family, caste, and religious and linguistic identities co-exist with the search for individual freedom. More importantly, they often become the dominant aspects in outlining the trajectory of such a search.”23 Many critics have commented on the theme of silence – particularly women’s silence – in Deshpande’s novels. The way this theme has been constructed within the criticism has been entirely along feminist/women’s protest lines: women’s subordination in Indian society renders many of them powerless to express their needs and desires. Once the female characters in Deshpande’s novels reach a point at which they can speak and (sometimes, but not always) be heard, an event that usually occurs near the end of the novel, they are empowered to make changes in their lives and to move forward to a better future. In other words, according to the 21

Jain, Gendered Realities, 238–39. Deshpande, “The Enemy Within: Censorship and Self-Censorship,” in Writing from the Margin, 241. 23 Vrinda Nabar, Caste as Woman (New Delhi: Penguin, 1995): 32. 22

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critics, the breaking of silence has always a positive and liberating outcome – it leads to empowerment and fulfilment. Moreover, the difficulty of breaking such silence is also read as a problem confronted exclusively by female characters, not male. While there is considerable substance and theoretical grounding in such claims about women’s silence in Deshpande’s novels, these readings rarely account for the way in which the breaking of silence – in particular, the revelation of secrets, one’s own and/or others’ – can also lead to severe social disruption, as well as anguish, despair, and even death for both male and female characters, as it so clearly and directly does in If I Die Today. Paying attention to Deshpande’s focus on the effects of secrecy and revelation helps us not only to understand why she breaks faith with some basic tenets of the mystery genre, but also to re-frame, from a psychoanalytic perspective, the notion of silence in her novels. Rather than thinking about the breaking of silence as a therapeutic outcome or step along the way toward mental healing, we are compelled to think about how the breaking of silence has the potential to open new fissures in the self and in the self’s relationship to others. Nicholas Royle argues that “Exploring the tacit or unspoken elements of a text […] can alter our understanding of its structure, transform its meaning and effects. But Derrida has also remarked, ‘silence is not exterior to language.’ In other words, it cannot simply be a matter of talking things out […] and get everything out into the open.”24 Ultimately, this perspective leads us to a reconsideration of Deshpande as a kind of mystery writer, the kind who is much less interested in logically narrowing the list of suspects and solving the mystery of ‘who done it’ than she is in exploring the dramatic, life-altering, and haunting effects of concealment and revelation on characters and their relationships with others. As Deshpande says at the end of her essay on women mystery novelists: “It is the mystery of ‘who’ and ‘why’ that we are pursuing in the crime novel, it is the mystery of people and ‘their pleasant, queer and sinister possibilities’.”25 If the “rationality” and rage for order of the crime fiction Deshpande reads is precisely what is missing in Deshpande’s own mystery fiction, then what we are left with in the novels that she writes is,

24 25

Cited in Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (New York: Routledge, 2003): 86. Deshpande, “The Last Frontier,” in Writing from the Margin, 227.

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precisely, “the mystery of people” and their “possibilities”: “pleasant, queer and sinister.” Increasingly in Deshpande’s fiction, what is most uncanny – or queer – about these mysteries is that their source is sometimes so deeply sealed away in a family crypt that even the individual carrying the secret cannot fully know its effects. As Esther Rashkin has suggested, a narrative analysis that derives its impetus from the theories of Abraham and Torok allows us to “construe[s] characters in certain texts as emissaries of unspoken sagas, emissaries whose words and actions can be heard to tell the secret history generating their existence – and the existence of their narratives themselves.”26 Such an approach inscribes new spaces in the texts, secret histories which have not been heretofore explored in Deshpande’s fiction. In the rest of this chapter and in the next, I will consider the manifestations of Deshpande’s obsession with such mysteries in the non-mystery fiction of this period (1980-83). But just one important caveat before I continue: in calling Deshpande a mystery writer, I am not suggesting a reghettoization of her work, moving it simply from the women’s section of the bookstore to the mystery/horror/gothic aisle. I believe that Deshpande’s work does belong in the ‘mainstream’ of literature, whatever that can be said to mean these days. I am suggesting, though, a radical shift in the contexts in which we place that writing and from which we read it, as well as a refocusing of the emphases placed on certain aspects of the novels. Sometimes you just have to give the tree a good hard shaking if you want a bite of the apple. 

It’s this kind of a living, I thought. Living too close, too entangled with one another. So that if you move, you’re bound to hurt someone else. And if they move, they hurt you. So many diverse pulls, so many conflicting feelings. And yet, surprisingly, it was still a family. — Roots and Shadows (131)

26

Rashkin, Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative, 48.

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Convents, monasteries, and schools provide an ideal setting for mystery novels (and other gothic texts) precisely because the conditions that they offer their inhabitants – parochial isolation, a veneer of respectability and unity, and rigid internal codes of conduct – are those that appear to be the least susceptible, but in fact are the most vulnerable, to disruptive forces that reside within or that are allowed to enter their sanctified space. As an example of such a cloistered space, Shakuntala’s hermitage paradoxically both protects her from the outside world and leaves her entirely vulnerable to it. Kalidasa’s heroine is ill-prepared to deal with Dushyanta’s uxorious charms and ardent attention, having lived her entire life in the company of ascetics, sheltered from the outside world. It is the presumption of her fragility, in fact, that leads her maidservants to protect her from the knowledge of both the curse and its antidote, thus exposing her to the terrible consequences brought about by the loss of the ring. The family home, in its nuclear or extended form, is a cloistered setting even more susceptible to terror than are the other institutional settings listed above, if only because the relationships are more intimate and the stakes in maintaining those relationships much higher. The two most significant differences between Deshpande’s mystery novels and the other two that she published between 1980 and 1983 are the relocation of terror from a semi-public to a domestic space, and the stylistic movement from the logical unfolding of a strictly chronological toward an associative, non-linear narrative, characterized at times by extreme chronological disruption. Consistent with what I have described as the grammar and architecture of gothic literature, in both of these novels repressed family trauma plays a role in the unfolding of the narrative, ancestral homes figure prominently in establishing atmosphere and concretizing the theme of thwarted dynastic aspirations, and the narrative of one of these novels, The Dark Holds No Terrors, is structured around a secret: the kernel of childhood trauma, the confession of which is deferred until near the end of the novel. Shalmalee Palekar points out another important distinction between Deshpande’s mystery novels, particularly If I Die Today, and her later work: By the time she writes Roots and Shadows, Deshpande has already begun to qualify what she sees as the simplistic desire to be free of all restraints, duties and obligations. Her protagonist in the novel learns

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that the world is made up of interdependent parts; so being a completely free agent is not realistic or achievable.27

While I would agree with Palekar that the ambivalent exploration of the possibility of existential freedom in If I Die Today reveals serious flaws in the project, I would argue that Deshpande has never completely turned her back on existentialist ideas. In fact, although Roots and Shadows was published in 1983, it was written before any of the other novels published to that point. Deshpande has said that, when she first conceived the work, she thought it would be an “[Agatha] Christie-like” mystery novel, “Instead Indu entered the story. And her house along with her – a house which came to me out of my mother’s old family home. […] Night after night I dreamt of that house, seeing it as it had been, populated with people, alive.” 28 Elsewhere, the author has described, in tones that are characteristically gothic, the vision for the novel that haunted her: I saw Indu, looking down at the dead old woman. Thinking “Power … where does it come from? How do you get it? [. . . .] And then the dreams began. Dreams that came to me over and over again. Each time I was back in that house I’d known and loved in childhood. Strange that it should haunt me, for it was not my home. Only a grandparental home, visited religiously every summer. I’d heard that it was to be demolished. Too old, impossible to maintain, to repair, only old people left in it with the family dispersed.29

Surprisingly, in the light of its ‘haunted’ roots, of the four novels published during this time, Roots and Shadows bears the least resemblance to a mystery or gothic novel, although it does contain at least two mysteries, neither of which is resolved or, perhaps, resolvable: why does the family matriarch Akka bequeath her wealth to her great-niece, Indu, who had turned her back on the family, and is Indu’s cousin Naren’s death by drowning an accident or a suicide? In its detailed portrayal of the extended Brahminical family at a point of crisis, the novel exhibits, rather, many of the hallmarks of social realism. Manjari Shukla has productively compared Roots and Shadows 27

Palekar, “Gender, Feminism and Postcoloniality,” 64. Deshpande, “In First Person,” in Writing from the Margin, 12. 29 Deshpande, “On the Writing of a Novel,” in Indian Women Novelists Set I, vol. 5, ed. R.K. Dhawan (New Delhi: Prestige, 1991): 32–33. 28

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to John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga, a work to which Deshpande’s characters openly allude in the novel. According to Shukla, Deshpande’s novel also tells “the story of the triumph and tragedy of a house and a family. It tells the story not of an individual but of an institution which is threatened by the forces of change and faces dissolution.”30 As Shukla points out, Deshpande, like Galsworthy, offers an excoriating critique of an institution, the “Indian Brahamanical [sic] family”31 that is so rigid and conservative that it cannot see past its own narrow interests. In describing the plot of The Forsyte Saga, Shukla captures much of the essence of Deshpande’s book: […] Galsworthy sets out to attack a society founded on money-power, a society in which the sense of property is so strong that it undermines and erases finer human emotions and moral considerations. The attack is on a whole class of society whose self-proclaimed discipline represses the independent powers of human nature such as art, love, dreams, youth and change. Galsworthy takes the side of moral truth in its battle against material power.32

However, Deshpande’s detailed depiction of the institution of the Brahminical extended family is not entirely negative (nor is Galsworthy’s), as the very title of her novel suggests. Family “roots” are shown to have considerable value in terms of their ability to protect and provide a sense of identity, in spite of their limiting and repressive qualities, which cast a “shadow” on dissident family members like Indu and her “outcaste” and “misfit”33 cousin Naren, and, to a lesser extent, Indu’s footloose and artistic father, Govind. Much of the interest in the novel lies in the way that Deshpande negotiates a nostalgic affection and regard for some members of an older, dying generation and the exigencies of modernity that

30

Manjari Shukla, “Roots and Shadows: A Small-Scale Forsyte Saga,” in The Fiction of Shashi Deshpande, ed. R.S. Pathak (New Delhi: Creative Books, 1998): 97. 31 Parag Moni Sarma, “The Self as Contestation in Roots and Shadows, in Writing Difference: The Novels of Shashi Deshpande, ed. Chanchala K. Naik (Delhi: Pencraft International, 2005): 126. 32 Shukla, “Roots and Shadows: A Small-Scale Forsyte Saga,” 101. 33 Shashi Deshpande, Roots and Shadows (New Delhi: Orient Longmans, 1983): 108, 85. Further page references are in the main text.

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challenge the rigidity and oppressiveness of the traditional way of life they have come to represent. In a scene that exquisitely captures a sense of fond nostalgia for centuries-old traditions that are fast disappearing, Deshpande describes a family meal held after the death of the family’s (childless) matriarch, Akka, at which most of the extended family is present: The men and children sitting down to lunch. Rows of plates, made of dried leaves woven together, laid from end to end in the large hall, interspersed with supporting pillars of wood. Sunlight could not enter this hall which had no windows, but the somber dimness inside was brightened by the scintillating play of light on the tarnished silverware and the shining stainless steel ware. The children, their faces decorously subdued, were eagerly waiting to be served. The men were, most of them, without their shirts, as was the custom at meals. The sacred thread seemed like a marker between the generations. None of the younger men had it. A commonplace picture; but I felt as if I was looking at something that did not exist, something that was on the brink of dissolution. And it became a thing of beauty, like anything ephemeral. (59)

While nostalgia is the overriding sentiment in this description, the language of some of the sentences above betrays the cracks and fissures – the shadows – always already contained in the old way of life – such as the strict segregation of the sexes – as much as it reveals the encroachments of a modern secular sensibility – such as the abandonment of the sacred thread by young Brahminical men. In this scene, moreover, the present and the past are seen to be in a relationship of mutual haunting, coexisting in a dream-like and liminal space: “something that did [and did] not exist, something that was on the brink of dissolution.” In other words, the novel does offer some balance in its portrayal of the extended Brahminical family and, for this reason, it provides a useful starting-point for examining Deshpande’s attitudes toward the extended family and her view of the role that it plays in shaping the psychology of the human subject – in particular, but not exclusively, the female subject. Indu, the novel’s first-person narrator, adopts an air of objectivity that carries with it a whiff of her profession as a journalist – in fact, there are self-reflexive suggestions in the text that the retrospective work we are reading signals a shift in Indu’s writing career from ‘fluff’ journalism to something more serious. An independent-minded, self-exiled member of

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the extended family that raised her after the death of her mother, Indu bolted from home at an early age, chafing at the restraints placed upon her by the elders of the generation, particularly her domineering great-aunt Akka. Indu then compounded her alienation from the family by marrying a man outside her community and caste. When, after ten years’ absence, she returns home upon being summoned by the very woman whose control she fled, Indu, at least initially, observes the family from a certain critical and emotional distance. Indu’s earlier flight from the family is described as a youthful rejection of the older generation’s rigid restraints and prejudices. Refusing Akka’s demand that she cease talking to boys in the school library, the eighteenyear-old Indu also bristles at Akka’s disparagement of Indu’s parents’ intercaste marriage (74–75), a marriage that Indu had idealized as a child and emulated as an adult. Having left home for college shortly after these conflicts with Akka, Indu has not returned until the dying Akka’s summons ten years later. But Indu’s alienation from her family and disapproval of their way of life is mitigated in the novel by several things. First, Indu realizes that, in spite of her marriage to Jayant, she has never really shed the religious and caste prejudices of her family; as Seshadri argues, she “knows that she cannot totally shed the values she has imbibed in this household.”34 For example, she recognizes that there is little difference between her obsessive love for a husband who she feels is essential to her emotional survival and the Brahmin wife’s fervent desire to avoid the stigma of widowhood. Likewise, Indu’s personal habit of bathing before meals betrays an atavistic religious impulse, in spite of the fact that she has always resented taboos associated with female cleanliness, such as the Brahminical proscriptions facing widows and women who are menstruating. Secondly, Indu recognizes that she is still emotionally connected to her family, despite her protracted absence and their disapproval of her marriage. This sense of connection is both intensified and complicated by the fact that the domineering and disapproving Akka has, surprisingly, willed all of her money to Indu, thrusting her, at first unwillingly and then with increasing commitment, into the family’s affairs, both petty and grand. The device of the will and Indu’s role in its execution provides Deshpande with considerable scope for exploring the 34

Vijayalakshmi Seshadri, The New Woman in Indian-English Women Writers Since the 1970s (Delhi: B.R. Publishing Corporation, 1995): 100.

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ambitions, vanities, and desires of the various members of the extended family, as well as Indu’s conflicted attitudes toward them. These are some of the basic plot details of Deshpande’s first novel, a novel that I have described as owing some allegiance to the social-realist category of writing. Indeed, Deshpande’s chronicle of the lives of members of the Brahminical family in southern India also shares qualities with the work of someone like Edith Wharton, whose depictions of the lives of American ‘Brahmins’ illuminate a class and an era in American history. Deshpande’s reputation as a novelist who does not ‘explain’ or describe Indian culture is, I believe, completely belied by the socially realist aspects of at least this early novel. Descriptions of Brahminical rituals around deaths, engagements, and marriages are detailed almost to the point of being instructive. While specific terminology relating to family relationships and cultural rituals is never explained, there is sufficient context for the reader to construe their meaning and significance. The biggest obstacle for the reader (and I would guess it might be as much of an obstacle for non-Kannadingan Indian readers as it is for Westerners) is the number of characters and the frequent interchanging of their given names with the Kannada words for family relationships (akka, anna, atya, kaka, kaki, etc.). To compensate for these difficulties, the reader is aided, somewhat, by context, as well as by the welcome apparatus of a family tree, a device that conventionally adds an air of verisimilitude to a work of art. However, the realist ‘surface’ of this novel is disturbed from the very beginning by the presence of ghosts. The novel begins not with Indu’s first homecoming but, in the form of a Prologue, with her second. Although we will not know this until later, Indu has returned again to the family fold for a happier event – the wedding of her cousin Mini – than that which brought her home for the first time. Yet death, along with a sense of impending loss, haunts these opening scenes. As we come to learn later in the novel, Indu has had to make a choice with regard to Mini’s wedding, which Akka had promised, before her death, to finance. With Akka’s money, Indu can either pay for (and thus make possible) Mini’s marriage, of which Indu disapproves, or she can buy and thus preserve the family home, a decaying mansion that has become too expensive for the family to maintain, but that is a vital part of the family history and provides the only home that some of the senior members of the family have ever known.

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Although we as readers do not know it yet, the fact that the novel begins with a wedding has already predetermined the demolition of the house – shown, poignantly, in all its vanishing, “ephemeral,” glory as the family bustles to get ready for the marriage celebrations – to make way for a hotel. In other words, the reader is, unwittingly, witnessing the last major family event to take place in the ancestral home. The Prologue ends, moreover, with the calling into presence not only of the dead matriarch, Akka, but also that of two other members of the family who will die before the novel’s end: Indu’s beloved cousin/lover Naren and Naren’s grandfather, Old Uncle, who has served as a substitute parent for Indu, motherless since birth and consigned by her itinerant father to be cared for by the extended family. The presence of both ghosts – that of Old Uncle and Naren – is summoned in the form of a trace: a tape recorder that initially belonged to Naren but that was given to his grandfather after Naren’s death, and, in it, a recording of Naren’s voice, singing a devotional song. These disembodied revenants cast a pall over the day, and they also prompt a confession that betrays and thus foreshadows an event that occurs chronologically earlier, but that will be narrated later in the novel: Indu’s adulterous relationship with Naren. Prompted by Indu’s anguished response to hearing Naren’s voice on the tape, Mini tells Indu that she, Mini, knows that Indu and Naren had had a “secret” affair during Indu’s previous visit. Thus, love, death, secrecy, and, above all, absence, proleptically establish their claim on the narrative. As if to emphasize the importance of these elements, the first chapter that follows begins with Indu’s nightmare, a recurring dream that begins “after the demolition of the old house” and that she says she does not need a “psychoanalyst to tell [her] the significance of” (10). The reader, on the other hand, might require such a service. Indu’s interpretation of the dream is deeply contradictory: I had rejected the family, tried to draw a magic circle around Jayant [Indu’s husband] and myself. I had pulled in my boundaries and found myself the poorer for it. Alienation, I know now, is not the answer. On the contrary, too much of it and we can die of a terrible loneliness of the spirit. ‘I am alone’… they seem to me to be the most poignant words in any language. Yet, there is no craving in me to go back. Even if the family were intact now, I would not want to be part of it. The end of an era… we

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journalists (and it is hard to remember that I am no longer one) have used that phrase threadbare. (10)

Indu’s confusion about her loyalties is unresolved here, as it is in a chronologically earlier conversation with Old Uncle: ‘The family… it’s all right to sneer at it. But tell me, what have you got to put in its place? What will you have in its stead? It gives us a background, an anchor, something to hold on to….’ His whole body shook in agitation. ‘Old Uncle,’ I spoke soothingly. ‘I don’t deny the family. But this… this large amorphous group of people with conflicting interests… a family like ours now… it has no meaning. Didn’t you see them today? Didn’t you hear them today?’ (104)

Against the unity and collectivity of the extended family, Old Uncle pits the social vulnerability of the nuclear family of “husband, wife and children” (104), whose bonds can be easily dissolved: “‘So, what’s left? [he asks Indu] An individual? Is that what we should live for… one’s own self?’” Indu answers immediately, “‘Isn’t that the ultimate truth? That’s what really matters… one’s own self?” (105). But later she wonders: what is the self, especially if one cannot “believe in the other [mystical or religious] world”? Is it “‘Nothingness in the midst of nothingness’” (106)? Indu’s inability to resolve this existential dilemma troubles and disrupts the entire narrative: it is no wonder that the confusion surfaces in a nightmare described early in the text. K. Suneetha Rani comments on the ambivalences of the novel, although she frames and adjudicates the question entirely within a feminist context: what exactly does Shashi Deshpande want to say through the novel? Is she expressing her grief over the contemporary condition of women? Or does she want to show the confused women a right path? If her intention was to pioneer women’s cause in literature, what is her solution to the problem? Is she advising Indian women to merely surrender to the existing, never changing conditions, and still with a chaotic mind and boiling blood act according to impulse? If the writer feels that the revolt is unconventional and unjustified, why should the protagonist enter into physical relationship with Naren? If it is justified and the novelist believes in it as the right step, why the secrecy? If Indu has no courage to talk about her relations and thoughts, is it because she feels that she cannot stand up against the

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society or she herself feels that what she has done is criminal and sinful? These questions remain unanswered since the issues are left unresolved in the novel. […] The novelist’s delineation of the protagonist’s character presents the anguish-ridden condition of women in a male-dominated society. But what about the writer’s responsibility of suggesting a solution to the problem? The novelist succeeds in provoking thoughts about right and wrong but the novel fails to suggest the right.35

While I would argue that Deshpande’s very refusal to “suggest the right” is one of her great strengths as a novelist, Rani is perceptive in noting the ambivalences and paradoxes that characterize Roots and Shadows. One of these paradoxes is the portrayal of Indu’s relationship with her husband, Jayant, a relationship characterized by an excessively passionate love for her husband that frightens her and distresses him. In another interesting proleptic sleight of hand, Jayant appears as an ‘on-stage’ character only in the novel’s Prologue; while Jayant ‘haunts’ the rest of the novel, in which he is spoken of and thought about frequently, by Indu and other characters, his absence during most of the novel is palpable. Prior to Mini’s wedding, the family has not met him, and Indu’s choice not to bring him home with her the first time she returns is consistent with her initial resolve not to be drawn back fully into the family’s embrace. Jayant’s embodiment as a speaking character in the Prologue – like the spectral appearances of Akka, Old Uncle, and Jayant – signals not only the way that Indu’s relationship with her family has changed, but also the fact that her relationship to Jayant itself has changed as a result of what she has learned about herself during the period of her first homecoming. Significantly, upon first returning to her ancestral home, what Indu realizes is that she was wrong in her belief that, in running away from the family at the age of eighteen, she had escaped its control over her life, an escape symbolized by the marriage – seven years later – that they never would have approved. While she has trouble understanding Mini’s sanguine acceptance of her arranged marriage to a somewhat dull man, Indu has to admit to herself that her own “love”-match with Jayant has not 35

K. Suneetha Rani, “Shashi Deshpande’s Roots and Shadows as Modern Indian Woman’s Dilemma,” in Native Responses to Contemporary Indian English Novel, ed. Rangrao Bhongle (New Delhi: Atlantic, 2003): 56–57.

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offered her the freedom or unmitigated joy she had initially anticipated. Shaped by social forces similar to those that Indu thought she had left behind, Jayant’s expectations that she, as a woman, be submissive, rather than passionate and active, during their love-making, have resulted in her gradual, and deeply unhappy, acceptance of that passivity – in their bed, in their marriage, and in a journalistic career that she feels has forced her to falsify her own beliefs. She has accepted this state of being not just because she passionately loves and fears losing her husband but also, she realizes after returning home, because having a husband and having a career and having money prove that she has been successful, in spite of – and to spite – her extended family: I had clung tenaciously to Jayant, to my marriage, not for love alone, but because I was afraid of failure. I had to show them that my marriage, that I, was a success. Show whom? The world. The family, of course. And so I went on lying, even to myself, compromising, shedding bits of myself along the way. (159)

Indu’s brief and passionate affair with her cousin Naren, rather than undermining her love for her husband, re-awakens her to the potential for passion and helps her to understand that she needs to engage more honestly in her relationship with Jayant: where once she had dreamed that “detachment” was the only solution to the pain caused by intense human attachments, she now realizes that such detachment is impossible for her, even if its opposite, “engagement” (89), carries with it the inevitably of conflict and pain. This realization is brought home to her in full force in the “detachment” that she sees in her drowned cousin’s eyes. In a passage that contains some of the ambiguity of Indu’s dream-interpretation, she contemplates the fate of the house and Naren’s death – both seen here as clean breaks with the past – in terms of her decision to return to, and attempt to resolve the issues with, Jayant: I felt neither mournful, nor desolate [about the fate of the house], but, in a peculiar way, both light and free. Yes, the house had been a trap too, binding me to a past I had to move away from. Now, I felt clean, as if I had cut away all the unnecessary, uneven edges off myself. And free. But not detached. I would, I knew, never hanker after detachment any more. The very word brought back Naren’s eyes as he lay on the grass near the tank. Detachment… it was for the dead, not the living.

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But what of my love for Jayant, that had been a restricting bond, tormenting me, which I had so futilely struggled against? Restricting bond? Was it not I who had made it so? Torment? Had I not created my own torment? Perhaps it was true. But all these were theories and I wanted no more of them. There was only one thing I wanted now… that was to go home. (186)

Jayant’s very “presence” in the Prologue of the text, then, can be said to be produced or compelled by a complex experiential and existential negotiation with issues of memory, loss, death, pain, and relinquishment. This negotiation, as it will in almost all of Deshpande’s novels, leads her protagonist to discover that the solutions to her problems reside in her own attitudes, thoughts, and actions – change must come from within before it can be effected in any relationship. In a final ironic twist in a novel that remains equivocal about so many things, including the issue of personal candour raised in If I Die Today, Indu confesses to the reader that she will not “tell Jayant about [the affair between] Naren and me. For that was not important. That had nothing to do with the two of us and our life together” (187). Thus, Indu’s trajectory in the novel is not one that takes her from silence to disclosure, but the exact opposite; as the critic Seshadri notes, “The contradictory claims [Indu] makes on herself as a woman and as an individual widen the distance between her ‘inner identity’ and the ‘real world’. But this alienation will not lead the protagonist to protest or escape a second time. Instead she develops ‘the gift of silence’ and an ‘immense capacity for deception’.”36 Viney Kirpal notes that “Naren’s death by accident soon after” his affair with Indu provides Deshpande with an excuse for not exploring “the possible social consequences of adultery for her protagonist.”37 But, as I have pointed out earlier, Naren does not take this secret with him to the grave: we learn in the Prologue that Mini knows about the affair as well. This detail – this loose end – mocks Indu’s earlier, confident pronouncement of personal freedom: “I felt clean, as if I had cut away all the unnecessary, uneven edges off myself” (186). Those edges, as Indu’s an36

Seshadri, The New Woman in Indian-English Women Writers Since the 1970s, 99. Viney Kirpal, “An Overview of Indian English Fiction: 1920–1990s,” in Mapping Cultural Spaces: Postcolonial Indian Literature in English: Essays in Honour of Nissim Ezekiel, ed. Nilufer E. Bharucha & Vrinda Nabar (Delhi: Vision, 1998): 73. 37

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guished response to hearing Naren’s voice and Mini’s admission that she knew about the affair indicate, are never clean. If, as Jasbir Jain suggests, Indu’s “adulterous relationship does not lead to a sense of guilt, [but, rather,] liberates the psyche from false restrictions,”38 it still has an explosive potential to damage Indu’s relationship with her husband. Rather than escaping an exploration of the consequences of adultery, I would argue, Deshpande leaves us with one more tantalizing mystery that haunts us after we put down the book. I would suggest that such a mystery may have lingered in Deshpande’s mind as well: seventeen years later, in Small Remedies, she will explore the devastating effects on a marriage of the belated opening of such a crypt. Jayant’s absence from the present action through much of this novel, an absence that allows his wife to explore her relationship with the past and to experiment with aspects of her identity, also initiates a pattern that will continue throughout the rest of Deshpande’s fiction. The necessary physical exile or alienation from a spouse or partner is perhaps one of the legacies of Kalidasa’s Sakuntala. Without exception in Deshpande’s subsequent novels, married couples experience some kind of prolonged separation.39 Whatever the circumstances of this separation, one or both of the marriage partners, usually, but not always, the woman, endures a similar trial to what I have described above. Like Dushyanta in Kalidasa’s play, these protagonists, separated from their spouses, obsessively paint a picture, from memory, of a relationship or an aspect of a relationship that is lost to them; during this time, the absent spouse appears to be suspended in the narrative time created by the protagonist/ narrator. But even while the protagonists may be actors in the narrative present, they are also, like Shakuntala, often emotionally traumatized and suspended in time themselves, engaged in a heated argument with the gods – in whom, like Indu and her cousin Naren, they can no longer believe – about the unfairness of life, the pain of human connection and

38 Jasbir Jain, “Towards the 21st Century: The Writing of the 1990s,” in Indian Writing in English: The Last Decade, ed. Rajul Bhargava (Jaipur & New Delhi: Rawat, 2002): 15–16. 39 In Moving On, the circumstances differ considerably from those in other novels: Jiji is separated from her husband through his death early in their marriage.

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separation, and the bitter-sweet torment of unbidden memory.40 During that time, they consciously or unconsciously weigh (and test) the value of re-engagement with life against a desire to step outside the chakkar, the circle or wheel of life. Like Dushyanta and Shakuntala, in other words, many of Deshpande’s central characters go through the motions of living until, if they are lucky, they stumble upon some clue, or sequence of clues, that possesses the power to end the curse entrapping them outside of the progression of time, even if possession of the ring of recollection is also an induction into the pain and suffering required by the mourning process. In calling Shakuntala’s ring a clue, I don’t seek to reduce either Kalidasa’s story or Deshpande’s texts to ciphers, the solutions to which can be readily deduced and handed over in the form of an answer to a riddle – or the discovery of a talisman. However, there are in Deshpande’s novels crucial narrative ‘recoveries’ that, like the recovery of Shakuntala’s ring, have the power to “make[s] visible what is invisible, obliterate[s] distances, reverse[s] chronologies, and fuse[s] what is ordinarily separate.”41 One of these moments occurs in Roots and Shadows, when Indu sees the glazed, detached eyes of her drowned cousin. But there is also an earlier ‘recovery’, one that forces Indu to revise her assessment of Akka, the family tyrant whose influence Indu had most wanted to escape when she fled the family home. Indu is not certain whether Akka’s surprising decision to leave her wealth to a dissident niece was a malicious or benevolent act, but when Indu learns, for the first time, about Akka’s own past, she perhaps gains a glimmer of insight into the inheritance. The indomitable old woman that Indu had known as a child, Indu learns from her aunt, Narmada, was a child-bride herself, married at thirteen to a coarse and much older man, from whom she tried to escape several times. Submitting, finally, to her fate, Akka eventually faced the task of caring for a bed-ridden and slowly dying husband. But while she dutifully tended him, she steadfastly refused to grant him a dying wish to see the lover upon whom he had lavished both affection and wealth, while attempting to deny his wife both.

40 Of course, this suspended narrative structure is also found in the Bhagavad Gita, another text that is extremely important to the understanding of Deshpande’s fiction. 41 Miller, “Kalidasa’s World and His Plays,” 39–40.

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Learning of Indu’s inheritance, Atya speculates that Akka’s decision to leave Indu her wealth resulted from her belief that Indu possesses the same kind of inner strength and resolve as her great aunt. And, certainly, Indu responds to her great aunt’s legacy, at least initially, by adopting and identifying with the hard-nosed spirit that allowed Akka to resist complete capitulation to her fate. In doing so, Indu often acts like someone who is possessed (or cursed), whose spirit is fused with Akka’s. For example, she tells Naren: […] I can almost understand Akka now. I mean, when they cringe and fawn and talk like they do. I feel I could rub their noses in the dust. And it’s a wonderful feeling, holding all the answers in my hand. (86)

Later, she thinks to herself: Here, in this house, in this family, was a role waiting for me. A role that I could, perhaps, act out more successfully than the one I had tried until now. For, had I not, so very often, felt myself just a mouthing, grimacing puppet, dully saying the lines I had to, feeling, actually, nothing? […] Whereas here, I would stand out, sharp and clear. I would be most emphatically myself. Indu. I played with the idea and it filled me with as much delight as any beloved toy had during childhood: I would buy the house and make Kaka and Atya happy. But Kaki? And all the others? I would persuade Mini to forget this man, this marriage, and soon arrange for a much better match for her. But Mini…? I would live here in this place which was my home, and do the kind of writing I wanted to do. […] I would dominate, as much as Akka had, but more discriminately, more judiciously. It would not be my likes and dislikes, but merit that would count. And by doing this, I would (maybe, why not?) free myself of all doubts, all pressures. (143–44)

In the light of these comments, it is little wonder that some critics of the novel find Indu to be ruthless and egotistical. Shukla’s comments are representative of such a response: […] Indu is a deeply schizophrenic character, and since she represents a whole generation the schizophrenia extends to that generation as

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well […]. With all her freedom, fastidiousness and power Indu has a nagging sense of loneliness and futility. But this is no existential angst; this is the pain which follows when one abandons one’s roots.42 the conclusion is inescapable, i.e. Indu has failed Akka. While Akka’s arrogance was mitigated by her sacrifice for the family, Indu wallows in her ego and thinks that she has avenged herself on Akka for all her privations and humiliations.43 Indu, who had declared an all-out war against Akka’s authoritarianism, ends up becoming a new but more authoritarian Akka.44

Indeed, if we were to take into consideration only Indu’s grandiose and admittedly egotistical pronouncements, quoted above, we might grant Shukla the point. However, what Shukla fails to see is the irony and selfdoubt in those passages and the fact that Indu would be, “emphatically,” acting least like the self she wishes to be if she pursued the plans she triumphantly outlines. Indu, ultimately, does precisely the opposite of what, under the sway of her strong identification with Akka, she claims she will do. Indu sells the house, rather than keeps it, allowing the entire family to split the proceeds and leaving Indu enough money to pay for Mini’s wedding, which, in spite of Indu’s own disapproval of the arranged marriage, is clearly what Mini wants. Indu also refuses to keep any of the money for herself, although she knows that Jayant would like her to, as the money would assist them in starting their own family. And, finally, she returns to the home she shares with her husband, where she does fulfil one of her pledges: to engage in a more honest kind of writing than she had allowed herself before. In other words, Indu completely rejects Akka’s authoritarianism as a model for her own behaviour, just as she rejects Akka’s attitude that everything must be kept in the family: against both Naren’s advice and what members of the family believe would have been Akka’s wishes, Indu gives some of her great-aunt’s money to someone outside the family, a poor and scholarly Brahmin youth who lives, on sufferance, on the fringes of her extended family’s lives. Contrary to Shukla’s claim that Indu is a schizophrenic character (which clearly she is not; not, at any rate, in any clinical sense), I would 42

Manjari Shukla, “Roots and Shadows: A Small-Scale Forsyte Saga,” 105. Shukla, “Roots and Shadows: A Small-Scale Forsyte Saga,” 106. 44 “Roots and Shadows: A Small-Scale Forsyte Saga,” 106. 43

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argue that Indu is ambivalent about what she should do with her inheritance, and that she is, for a time, possessed by the spirit of a great-aunt for whom control of the people closest to her represented the only power left to her as a rich, but deeply unhappy widow. It is precisely this power over her relatives that Indu, in the end, relinquishes. Of course, when I say that Indu is “possessed” by the spirit of Akka, I am using a metaphor for what is actually a mostly conscious and purposeful, if emotionally driven, adoption on Indu’s part of the attributes of a person for whom she has considerably mixed feelings, in response to an extraordinary situation: inheriting this woman’s wealth and, along with it, many of the extended family’s problems, for which this wealth represents some kind of a solution. Neither exorcist nor psychoanalyst is required to dispossess Indu and lay the ghost of Akka. While the novel is haunted in a number of ways, including in the somewhat mysterious drowning death of Naren, whose own parents had suffered the same fate – of Naren’s going to the well to bathe every day, Indu’s father muses that “It seems he’s decided to let the dead go where they belong… to lay the ghosts of his dead parents” (173) – these hauntings are, for the most part, subordinated to issues of the conscious, material world and actions of the extended family and registered within, rather than pulsating beneath, the main narrative. However, haunting questions raised and left unanswered in this novel will continue to surface in much more disturbing ways in Deshpande’s later novels, including the one that she published first, and that I shall discuss next, The Dark Holds No Terrors.

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3

“I am like a house full of unclean things, never cleaned, never opened”

— The Maternal Crypt in The Dark Holds No Terrors

And so the two of them tiptoed past the body. Or maybe, after so many years, there was no body at all. Just a chalked outline showing where the body had once been.1 I am a dark, damp, smelly hole […] I am like a house full of unclean things, never cleaned, never opened. Sometimes I don’t know how I can bear myself.2 Mothers…! Dead or alive they don’t leave you alone. Or maybe, it’s we who can’t leave them alone.3

A

Deshpande’s first published novel, The Dark Holds No Terrors, is both a mystery novel and a horror novel, a fact that has been almost entirely overshadowed by its reception as a feminist work. Without denying or attempting to “tiptoe past” its feminist elements and its focus on the psychological damage inflicted on women by a patriarchal society that values sons far more than it does daughters – indeed, these are important elements of this horror story – I want to trace the “chalked outlines” that hint at unspeakable, unsolved crimes and to explore the abject, uncanny, and haunted elements of the novel – its style as well as its substance – that have too often been subordinated to a message. After all, this is a novel that not only features several ‘skeletons in the cupboard’ but also uses the actual cliché on more than one occasion to describe the keeping of family secrets 1 2 3

S ITS TITLE PROMISES,

Deshpande, The Dark Holds No Terrors (1980; New Delhi: Penguin, 1990): 34. The Dark Holds No Terrors, 29. Deshpande, Come Up and Be Dead, 208.

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(pp. 21 and 59). Where The Dark Holds No Terrors differs most significantly from the novels discussed in the previous chapter is in its linguistic and structural mimesis of the effects of unresolved trauma and its exploration of the idea that the secrets that have the most potential to haunt and hurt us are those that we keep from ourselves. Like all of Deshpande’s subsequent novels, The Dark Holds No Terrors asks us to think about important philosophical and psychological questions: What is the nature of an ‘event’? How does memory work? How do the stories we are told about the past influence our own memories and our understanding of self? How does experiencing or witnessing a deeply traumatizing ‘event’ interfere with our ability to interact with others, to experience joy, and to understand ourselves? What kind of a shell do we create around ourselves to guard the undigested kernel of our own or someone else’s trauma? In other words, The Dark Holds No Terrors tells the story of a crypt. The novel’s protagonist, Sarita (Saru), is both its first-person narrator and the third-person centre of consciousness, as the novel’s chapters alternate between first and third person, a somewhat mechanical device that nonetheless signals Saru’s mental or emotional instability, as well as shifts in narrative time and location. The novel opens with an italicized Prologue that presents a startling, first-person or eye-witness description of abject terror: The beginning was abrupt. There had been no preparation for it. There were no preliminaries, either. At first it was a nightmare of hands. Questing hands that left a trail of pain. Hurting hands that brought me out of a cocoon of a blessed unreality… I’m-dreamingthis-is-not-real… into the savage reality of a monstrous onslaught. And then, the nightmare was compounded of lips and teeth as well. Hands and teeth? No, hammers and pincers. I could taste blood on my 4 lips.

In the remainder of the passage, the narrator continues to vacillate between calling the events she describes a nightmare and acknowledging their status as a ‘real’ or ‘recalled’ event. What helps to establish the distinction between nightmare and reality is, in fact, a mis-en-abîme, the description of the narrator’s recurring nightmare, in which she recalls “the 4

Shashi Deshpande, The Dark Holds No Terrors, 11. Further page references are in the main text.

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stranger in a brown scarf” who enters her bedroom and attempts to strangle her. The “relief” (11) that this recollection affords her, however, is quickly replaced by the narrator’s realization that she is being brutally raped, not by a stranger, but by the stranger that her own husband of many years has suddenly become. Nothing could come closer to the idea of domestic terror than this description of a sudden, violent, and nightmarish sexual assault of a woman by her husband in her own home, her own bed. This passage sets the tone for the rest of the novel, in which we learn that Saru, a successful doctor, has been suffering such abuse for some time, unable to stop it because, it seems, she can find neither the words to describe it nor the courage to confront her husband Manu, who, during the day, acts as though these violent episodes never happened. As the first chapter following the Prologue opens, “I” has become “she,” now standing in daylight at the door of her family home, suitcase in hand, lost in thought about the story of Krishna and Sudama,5 waiting for her father to let her in, an auto-rickshaw and its driver idling nearby in case he does not. Uncertainties, choices, contrasts, thresholds multiply in these opening pages: there is, of course, the literal threshold upon which Saru stands, uneasily, poised for flight in either direction: there are also the ambiguous spaces between sleeping and waking, pleasure and pain, nightmare and reality, stranger and husband, darkness and light, she and I. I repeat: this is a novel about abject terror, and the response to terror, and the reader is drawn into that knowledge immediately and experientially, with a beginning that announces itself as “too abrupt,” a beginning for which neither the protagonist nor the reader has had sufficient “preparation.” Such disorientation is arguably even more disturbing than any of the events that are described within these opening pages. In this novel, Deshpande is not content merely to describe the terror that her protagonist feels; she mimics its effects through narrative and linguistic strategies – such as stream-ofconsciousness narrative, ambiguous reference, alternations in point of view, withholding of information, and both analeptic and proleptic disturbances – that disorient the reader and compel her to share the experience 5

This story, from the Bhagvat Purana, tells of the reunion of Krishna and his friend, Sudama, who comes to Krishna to seek assistance in feeding his family. So happy to see his old friend again, Sudama forgets to ask his favour. However, when he returns home, he finds his material circumstances miraculously improved.

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of being molested by memory and of being haunted by a past that has been swallowed whole and therefore remains stuck in the throat. One of the mildly disorienting aspects of the first chapter is the chiasmus between the scene in the Prologue and the events of the first chapter: what is their narrative relationship? While we may provisionally assume that the “I” of the Prologue is the “she,” Saru, in Chapter One of the novel, we learn that Saru’s return to her family home is not just a flight from the abuse described in the Prologue (of course, we have no way of knowing yet how to fit this description into the narrative time of the novel), but, ostensibly, a visit prompted by duty. Saru tells her father that she has just recently learned about her mother’s death, and that “‘When I heard of Ai’s [Saru’s mother’s] death’… ‘I thought I’d like to see you once’” (19). The tension of this reunion with her father is signalled in a number of ways in the first few chapters: Saru’s uncertainty about what her reception will be and her sense of intruding upon her father; the fact that she has heard about her own mother’s death from someone other than her father; and the fact that she has to tell her father the names of her two children. Obviously, there has been a deep and prolonged estrangement in the family. As we have seen in Roots and Shadows, while a return to the ancestral home can be one way for a woman to escape from difficulties in her own marriage, such a return is also fraught with its own history of conflict and misunderstanding. Indeed, rather than claiming that either a cure for or an escape from the deep pain of living is possible for her characters, Deshpande argues – and her novels show – that “the problem lies in thinking that walking out is a liberating process”: Whereas, to me, it is always clear that an understanding of oneself is what really liberates, it is this that opens out a number of possibilities. To walk out, or away, is to carry the old self with oneself.6

Considered in this light, it is not surprising that Indu and Saru find themselves “walking out” out of a difficult relationship into an even more difficult web of relationships in what is essentially a haunted space – an ancestral home that is inhabited by past connections, past traumas. These past connections, however, are rarely disconnected from the current mental state of the protagonist, as the idea of carrying the “old self with 6

Deshpande, “Writing From the Margin,” in Writing from the Margin, 159.

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oneself” implies. Moreover, Deshpande’s characters often bear burdens that belong to others, and these are often the most difficult for them to divest. The difficulty that Saru has in navigating the important connections between past and present manifests itself in the narrative as both a collapsing of time and event and a deferral of disclosure about the multiple factors that have contributed to her current mental state, a state that is best exemplified early in the novel in a passage that describes her, in the time between meeting patients in her medical practice, “cutting a piece of paper, telling myself… these are bits of my mind falling on the ground” (22). If the Prologue gives us a glimpse of one of the traumas Saru has experienced in her marital life, the first chapter makes it clear that her relationship with her parents, particularly her mother, is also a source of pain. We come to learn gradually that one of the most significant and traumatic events in Saru’s early life is the drowning death of her younger brother when Saru herself was only ten, a death for which her mother blamed Saru. Saru’s inability to narrate to herself or anyone else the ‘story’ of how Dhruva died provides the structuring principle of the novel’s narrative, in which forgetting is a frequent trope for the difficulty of mourning an unfathomable loss. However, despite Saru’s inability to mourn for her brother, Dhruva’s absence from the family home and the fact of his death, if not its circumstances, are painfully close to the surface of Saru’s mind even in the early pages of the novel. When Saru meets Madhav, her father’s young boarder, who not only occupies her former bedroom but also seems to occupy a special place in her father’s regard, memories of her younger brother are triggered, to the point where Saru begins almost immediately to cast Madhav in a relationship of substitution for her dead brother, initially as a threat to and rival for her father’s affections. She discovers in conversation, for example, that Madhav feels free to pursue his own career, as he comes from a large family; in contrast, Saru thinks. “There were only the two of us. And when Dhruva died, there was only me” (31). Later, Saru notes to herself, when she senses her father’s pride in Madhav’s intellectual abilities, that her father “never took any interest in my school or college. He left it all to her [Saru’s mother]. And she never really cared. Not after Dhruva’s death. I just didn’t exist for her. I died long before I left home” (32). Madhav’s presence in her father’s life clearly stirs feelings in Saru of jealousy and of being “disinherited” (31), feelings, we

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learn later, that echo the unresolved jealousy that she felt toward her little brother, whom she believed both parents favoured over herself. While the details of Dhruva’s death and Saru’s role in it appear to be closed off to her initially, Dhruva’s accusing ghost clearly awaits Saru in her father’s home. When Saru pulls out pictures of her children to show her father, for example, she quickly cuts off her father’s comment on the appearance of Saru’s son Abhijit: “‘He looks like…’” (34). Ever compliant, her father does not finish the sentence, leading Saru to think to herself, And so the two of them tiptoed past the body. Or maybe, after so many years, there was no body at all. Just a chalked outline showing where the body had once been. Resentment rose in her again. Why can’t you accept my children as themselves? Why do you have to link them to the past, to others I have nothing to do with? (34)

Saru’s startling proclamation that she has “nothing to do with” her dead brother is only the first of her many disavowals, in the classical Freudian sense. Saru is quite aware that her brother is dead, but she is insistent, throughout the novel, that neither his life nor his death was of significance to her, an insistence that is belied by her obsession with what happened on the day of Dhruva’s death and the horrific consequences that event had for her, the only remaining child in the family. The use of the term “chalked outline” above, drawn as it is from the law-enforcement practice of outlining in chalk the physical position of a murder (or accident) victim, is our first clue to the nature of Dhruva’s death and the role that Saru feels she may have played in it.7 As Saru and her father continue to discuss the former’s two children, Saru recalls, again only to herself, accidentally calling her son Abhi by Dhruva’s name, and refusing to answer her daughter Renu’s question “Who is Dhruva, mummy?” Instead, Saru formulates in her mind the only answer she feels she could give, if she were able to speak of it at all, to Renu’s question: “Dhruva was my kid brother who died when he was seven. He was drowned. I watched him drown.

7

There is a reference to “chalked lines” in Come Up and Be Dead (63). In that novel, the phrase refers to the chalked lines of the children’s game called hopscotch in North America; the tenor of that metaphor is the dread of stepping outside the lines drawn and of suffering a terrible fate.

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And my mother said… Why didn’t you die? Why are you alive and he dead?” (34–35). The memories that her brother’s name invoke in Saru are obviously too painful to be discussed openly, and they are also clearly linked to her estrangement from her mother, who, it seems, at the very least resented Saru’s survival in the aftermath of Dhruva’s death. What are we to make, however, of Saru’s simple admission, “I watched him drown”? Whether these words implicate her as anything more than a witness to his death or in something more sinister is withheld at this point, although Saru does describe herself as being an older sister who was not only jealous of her brother but who also had little patience for him: ‘Sarutai,’ he used to call her. She had hated it. ‘Don’t call me Sarutai,’ she would say angrily. ‘All right,’ he would reply equably. And call out the next minute, whether out of stupidity, forgetfulness or wicked perversity, even now she could not guess… ‘Sarutai, wait for me. I’m coming.’ ‘Hurry up then. And don’t call me Sarutai.’ Just three years between them. But what immense advantage those three years gave her. She had ruled over him completely. No dictatorship could have been more absolute. And yet he had had his revenges. Moments of triumph. Of cruel gloating. Of the knowledge that he could do anything he wanted with their mother. That even Baba would come out of his shell for him. (35)

Seeming to build a brief against herself, Saru incrementally adds elements that depict her as an uncaring sister who, for example, experienced feelings of “disgust” (85) and “distaste” (84) at the touch of his skin and lips when Dhruva’s fear of the dark impelled him into her bed. Further intensifying the reader’s sense of Saru’s unjust treatment of her own little brother is her insistence that Dhruva “had been loyal [to her]. Completely loyal. He had never given her away to their parents. Not once. Their bond, their pact, had been secure against treachery,” and Saru’s confession, “It was she, on the contrary, who had so often been treacherous” (35). After Saru is married, she attends a movie whose depiction of a tender moment between a sister and younger brother causes her to flee the theatre. In response to Manu’s concern, she tells him only that she is experiencing “‘some pain’”: “Thinking… oh my god, some pain? All the pains, every pain. Not just his death but what I did to him when he was alive” (85).

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As Saru builds the case against herself for her brother’s death, she adds further compelling evidence. Seeing a photograph of Dhruva and herself taken on Dhruva’s birthday, she notes her hand upon his shoulder and, rather than reading this as an affectionate gesture, she projects onto the solemn look he is wearing another sisterly betrayal: “Perhaps she had pinched Dhruva, or squeezed his shoulder or something… but she must have done something which accounted for the hurt look on his face” (58; emphasis added). Later, recalling her older daughter Renu’s jealousy when her younger brother was born, Saru thinks to herself: “Dhruva and I… Dhruva and I… Did I push him? The question sprang at her out of nothing, again and again… Did I? Did I?” (72). The idea of pushing Dhruva to his death is closely linked to another event in the past that haunts Saru – an event narrated quite late in the novel, but one that takes her back to one of her earliest ‘memories’ of her younger brother: He must have been a year, or perhaps two, when my mother had told me the story of the mythological Dhruva, the child who was pushed off his father’s lap by his step-brother, and full of sorrow and anger, gave himself up to a steadfast meditation, so that he became the constant North Star. Just a day or two later, I had, with a cold and calculated determination, pushed Dhruva off Baba’s lap. He had fallen down, his head making a sickening thud as it hit the ground, and there was a stunned silence. He must be dead. Is he dead? Even as I stood in a terrified immobility, there was a loud outraged howl and a tumult that diverted attention from me for a while. But soon, with Dhruva quietened and lying peacefully on Ai’s lap, the question had come. ‘Why did you do it?’ When I knew I wasn’t getting anywhere with prevarications, I had replied with what had seemed to me irrefutable logic. ‘Because you named him Dhruva.’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘I wanted to see if he would become the North Star if I pushed him off Baba’s lap.’ (168)

This episode has been discussed a number of times by critics, who point to its significance in terms of expressing the sibling rivalry and the guilt that Saru feels over her brother’s death. I want to shift the focus a few lines ahead to consider the episode’s status as “story,” rather than as something we might call Saru’s memory of the ‘event’ itself:

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The story had been later retailed to friends, relations and acquaintances, but without the vestige of a smile, making a major crime of my childish misdemeanour. Or that was how it had seemed to me then. (168)

Up to this point in the novel, in the absence of any account of what happened on the day that Dhruva died, we have only Saru’s confessions about her ill-treatment of her loyal little brother and this story, one that has gained the status almost of a family legend, of a jealous older sister’s unprovoked attack on her baby brother: “[a] major crime,” not a “childish misdemeanour.” An overdetermined story, moreover, that bears within it the intertextual traces of an ur-story, the story of the child-star Dhruva, found in the Vishnu Purana.8 It is because of its overdetermined and reified status as legend and as family story and as a foreshadowing of Dhruva’s death that I hesitate to describe it as Saru’s memory of the event. While no ‘memory’ is ever unmediated, this one is so heavily mediated and so deeply implicated in the pattern of subsequent events that perhaps all we can believe is its emotional content or register – that Saru’s action had seemed always, to her, a naive and childish, if not uncalculated, act, not a “major crime.” However, given the content and language of this story, combined with Saru’s relentless self-accusation, is it any wonder, as Arindam Chatterji notes, that some critics have been “beguile[d]” “into believing the seeming truth of [Saru’s mother’s] accusation of her daughter’s hand in the death of her brother”?9 While Chatterji’s own psychoanalytic reading of The Dark Holds No Terrors, to which I will turn soon, is sensitive and nuanced, I hesitate to dismiss or condemn too readily those “beguile[d]” critics. For, after all, who has beguiled them? Saru herself, in the very process of telling her story. The Dark Holds No Terrors is that rarest of mystery novels: one in which the murder suspect does the work of the detective, building a case, 8 Although the connection is not drawn overtly, the story also contains traces of the Biblical Cain and Abel myth. Madhav’s ambivalence about helping his family deal with a wayward brother also reminds us of Cain’s reply to God, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” 9 Arindam Chatterji, “Psychoanalytic Regression and the Finding of the True Self in The Dark Holds No Terrors: A Winnicottian Study,” in Writing Difference: The Novels of Shashi Deshpande, ed. Chanchala K. Naik (Delhi: Pencraft International, 2005): 105.

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step by step, against herself. Repeatedly, and virtually until the end of the novel, she emphasizes mostly evidence that implicates her in Dhruva’s death, including a recalled argument with her mother about Saru’s going to medical school: ‘As long as you can have your way, you aren’t bothered about anything at all. Your own brother…’ ‘No,’ [her father] said loudly. ‘…she let him drown…’ ‘I said no!’ ‘She killed him.’ I had won, but the victory was hers. She had managed to draw blood after all. (145)

In assigning her mother the “victory,” is Saru admitting to her own guilt, as the words “She had managed to draw blood after all” might imply? A scene immediately following this argument uncannily captures Saru’s confusion about Dhruva’s death and her internalization of her mother’s accusation. Saru describes recurring nightmares in which she tries to save Dhruva from drowning. She wakes to the following conversation racing through her mind: You killed your brother I didn’t. Truly I didn’t. It was an accident. I loved him, my little brother. I tried to save him. Truly I tried. But I couldn’t. And I ran away. Yes, I ran away. I admit that. But I didn’t kill him. How do you know you didn’t kill him? How do you know? (146)

The bone-chilling question, posed by the narrator to herself – “How do you know you didn’t kill him?” – is at the crux of the novel, and at the root of Saru’s abject nature. How do we know anything? In particular, in the case of a traumatic event that we either witness or experience, how do we begin to re-assemble the shattered evidence of our senses into something coherent, something that will allow us to let go of the confusion and uncertainty of not knowing – perhaps even of not wanting to know – what happened? In the absence of our own blocked memories, we have only others’ stories, and the story that Saru has been told by her mother is that she killed her little brother, an act foreshadowed by her pushing him off their father’s lap. When Saru finally reaches the point when she can no longer live with the doubt about what happened on the day of Dhruva’s

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death, she confronts her father with an important question: “Did you ask me once, just once .… What happened Saru?” (182). Abraham and Torok insist that the process of introjection, the very process that ensures a child’s successful adaptation to disturbing events, requires a “community of empty mouths”: a community of listeners. Faced with her mother’s hysterical grief and loud accusations and her father’s refusal to ask the questions that might lead her to an understanding of what happened on the day of Dhruva’s death, Saru has swallowed the loss of her brother whole, erecting a silent tomb that paradoxically produces both pleasure and pain, and, as we shall see, is effectively sealed by the inability to distinguish these two emotions. Before taking this line of enquiry any further, I want to add another layer of complexity to the investigation. There is more than one alleged murder in The Dark Holds No Terrors. The “chalked lines” in this novel surround two bodies: the body of Saru’s brother Dhruva, but also that of Saru’s husband, who is still, we are led to believe, very much alive. So why is it that, in debating whether to tell her father about Manu’s assaults on her, Saru thinks: It was impossible. Worse, it seemed indecent. Like removing your clothes in public. And there was something more. The fear that by speaking she would be unlocking the door of a dark room in which someone had been murdered. That by opening that door, she would be revealing to the world the pathetic, lifeless body of the victim, grotesque in an enforced death. And, her greatest fear was that they would all know the dead body to be his, her husband’s. They would know too what she herself did… that it was she who was the murderer. (44)

Why does Saru imagine that, in revealing the truth about her husband’s attacks on her, she is implicating herself, confessing to the fact that she killed him? What do these two “murders” – the murders of Dhruva and Manohar of which Saru accuses herself – have to do with each other? Saru links Dhruva and Manohar in one significant passage, in which she wonders about the female power to destroy a male: Does the sword of domination become lethal only when a woman holds it over a man? Dhruva had been dominated by two females, making him a creature full of terrors. And Baba… even then a cipher, a man who didn’t count, because she [Saru’s mother] so emphatically

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did. Even his mistakes and omissions were unimportant because they could never affect anyone else. When she got married she had sworn… I will never dominate. I will never make my husband nothing as she did. And yet it happened to them. It puzzled, sometimes it frightened her, giving her a feeling that there was something outside herself, driving her on; that her own will counted for nothing. Can one never control one’s life? Do we walk on chalked lines drawn by others? (86)

Just as Saru narrates her brief against herself in the case of Dhruva’s death, she meticulously outlines the case against herself in her marriage. She has, first of all, married a man without her parents’ permission; she has pursued a successful career as a medical specialist; she accepted generous financial help in setting up her practice from someone with a (false) reputation as a ladies’ man; she strongly encouraged her artistically inclined husband to take up a “respectable” career teaching college, rather than taking the risk of starting a journal; she “trapped” him into giving up his dreams by holding over him the need to support a growing family. The list of accusations sounds endless. In short, Saru confesses to having emasculated – in effect, murdered – her husband by becoming more successful professionally than he and by standing in the way of his own ambitions. In Saru’s mind, these are provocations that have turned Manu into a Jekyll and Hyde stranger whose assaults on her during the night dissipate into a benign contentment with their comfortable lives during the day. And, as Saru tells us herself, this transformation is all her fault. If Saru blames herself for her own victimization at the hands of her husband, what does this tell us about the basis of her feelings of guilt over her brother Dhruva’s death? While Arindam Chatterji does not offer an answer to this question, he opens up an interesting psychoanalytic line of enquiry into Saru’s character. Applying D.W. Winnicott’s theory of the formation of the False Self in cases where an individual faces deep privation in early life, Chatterji describes the origins of the False Self: horrifying things can happen to the baby in the tender beginning of its life, if the mother substitutes the baby’s spontaneity with her own

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gesture, thereby breaking the baby’s continuity of being and creating with in it an “unthinkable anxiety.”10

While Saru is not a baby when Dhruva is born, his birth, and her perceived displacement from her parents’ (especially her mother’s, but also her father’s) affections, constitute, according to Winnicott’s theory, a rupture from her True Self and a break in her “being” that creates “unthinkable anxiety.” According to Winnicott, “the False Self protects the True Self from annihilation but in the process ends up with a feeling of unreality and futility.”11 Chatterji argues that Saru exhibits textbook symptoms of the False Self: In the opening scene of Sarita’s working, medical life, we have all the ingredients that Winnicott spells out […] for the False Self which has to desperately keep up pretences because there is nothing else apart from these in its vacuous life. There is only disintegration, depersonalisation, unreality and unimaginable terror behind the pretences – the bits of Sarita’s mind falling slowly on the ground below. I do not know where the author of this novel read D.W. Winnicott’s theory, but it seems to me that Sarita the protagonist reads straight out of the numerous case histories of this psychoanalyst.12

Chatterji points out the numerous occasions on which Saru “comments on the staged quality of her present life, a staginess which has haunted and pursued her since her childhood”:13 […] I would say the defining feature of Sarita’s life since she leaves her parental home is its illusory, fictional quality. There’s no denying that Sarita makes a conscious decision to chalk out her own life […] all of which can be read as an emphatic rejection of the time-honoured patriarchal codes of middle-class Hindu society, but the fact of the matter is that she is jut not there in all these experiences.14

10

Arindam Chatterji, “Psychoanalytic Regression and the Finding of the True Self,”

95. 11

Chatterji, “Psychoanalytic Regression and the Finding of the True Self,” 95. “Psychoanalytic Regression and the Finding of the True Self,” 96. 13 “Psychoanalytic Regression and the Finding of the True Self,” 97. 14 Chatterji, “Psychoanalytic Regression and the Finding of the True Self,” 98. 12

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I find it interesting that Chatterji here uses the term “chalk out her own life.” In this instance, I believe that the metaphoric reference is to lines that are chalked on a stage for actors to mark their position, and they may also be an unconscious echo of Saru’s question, “Do we walk on chalked lines drawn by others?” (86). Either way, Chatterji’s use of the expression is apt, and it captures some of the ambiguity that I will point to shortly. It is precisely the theatrical aspects of Saru’s character that Chatterji adduces in his application of Winnicott’s theories: those occasions on which Saru describes a feeling that she is acting out a role and ventriloquizing a part, rather than living her own life. Early in the novel, she confesses: There is this strange new fear of disintegration. A terrified consciousness of not existing. No, worse. Of being just a ventriloquist’s dummy, that smiles, laughs, and talks only because of the ventriloquist. The fear that without the ventriloquist, I will regress, go back to being a lifeless puppet, a smirk pasted on to its face. (22)

She muses that maybe her “ventriloquist” is her “profession,” because, “as long as there is a patient before me, I feel real” (22). There are a number of scenes in which Saru imagines herself to be two people, one observing and one being observed, or performing two actions at the same time, such as when we, as readers, first hear a different speech from the one that Saru is actually giving to graduating female students at her former college,15 or when she is walking down the street and sees a modern-looking, confident woman on a motorcycle, whom she recognizes as the outward manifestation of a self that others see. After she has been at her father’s home for some time, she imagines that she is becoming “a normal, sane person, not that two-in-one woman who, in the daytime wore a white coat and an air of confidence and knowing, and at night became a terrified, trapped animal” (134). The idea of a “two-in-one” Saru is also intimated in the fluctuating point of view of the novel from first to third person and in the recollection of the woman at the temple who terrifies Saru when she is overtaken by the spirit of the Devi. However, following the “chalked outline” of this novel in the criminal sense described earlier, I would depart from Chatterji’s interpretation at 15

There is a reference to the story of Shakuntala in the lecture that Saru imagines giving.

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the point where the critic argues that Saru “is just not there in all these experiences.” In fact, I would argue the opposite: there is always already too much of Saru in all of the experiences she relates. I have described Saru as someone who has built a case against herself and has confessed to two murders. Based on Winnicott’s theories, of course, one might hypothesize that the False Saru is accusing the True Saru of these murders. Once the True Saru emerges at the end of the novel, and tells the ‘real’ story of what happened the day her brother died, the False Saru will fall away. But I am, first of all, sceptical of any claims to discover a “True” self, as in a self that we can discover prior to its entry into family history, and equally skeptical about the possibility of learning the ‘truth’ about Dhruva’s death. Secondly, I believe Deshpande’s murder story to be even more cryptic than Winnicott’s theory might suggest. I look, rather, to Abraham and Torok’s notion of the “dual unity” to assist me in understanding Saru’s overdeveloped feelings of responsibility and guilt. As discussed earlier, Abraham and Torok place considerable emphasis on the role that the mother plays in a child’s individuation. Esther Rashkin describes the way that the “dual unity” functions to support the child’s psychic growth: [The dual unity] is a dyadic structure that allows the individual to “give birth to itself” psychically by gradually differentiating itself from the mother and becoming “not mother.” At the same time, it is a vehicle of transmission through which the emerging individual receives as its own its family history. The mother is not necessarily an obstacle to development, nor the object of incestuous desire. Neither is she a lack to be filled by the child as phallus. By virtue of a separation that is never quite completed, the mother provides the child with the possibility of gradually becoming an individual. [….] [Abraham and Torok] explain the child’s conflict in terms of the desire to remain faithful to the mother in an (obsolete) state of indifferentiation and the desire for detachment from the mother in a forward-looking quest for individuality.16

The mother’s role in communicating with the child and thereby facilitating and authorizing the child’s relationship with external objects, according to Abraham and Torok, is essential to positive individuation. Where

16

Rashkin, Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative, 21.

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the mother’s speech fails, introjection fails, and, through the process of incorporation, a phantom is created. A “pathological corollary to the dual unity,”17 the phantom continues to disturb the subject’s speech and actions until its hold on the subject is released through a conscious and verbalized recognition, not just of its existence, but of the fact that its secret shame (and pleasure) belongs not to the suffering subject, but to someone else. The theory of the phantom assists us in understanding some of the more cryptic passages in The Dark Holds No Terrors. Saru’s difficult relationship with her mother – exacerbated by her mother’s hysteria and her father’s silence following the death of Dhruva – results in her conscious denial of any identification with her mother. However, this denial is frequently undermined by contradictory assertions of identification with her mother that are most often rendered in hallucinatory passages. Such confusion can be located early in the novel, when Saru, at Madhav’s bidding, cleans out her mother’s room, a task which neither Madhav nor her father can face. After cleaning out her dead mother’s room, Saru feels an enormous sense of “relief”: She had done it. She closed the almirah with a loud clang, with a feeling that she was locking in the skeleton in the cupboard. But I was the skeleton in her cupboard. And now she’s dead and I’m outside. No more the skeleton in the cupboard. Or maybe, she thought confusedly, I’m now the skeleton in my own cupboard. (59–60)

The free direct and indirect discourse in this passage, located in one of the chapters narrated in third person, echoes the lexical confusion we find there. But first, the words “She had done it” clang rather loudly in this alleged murder mystery. The point of view shifts, in the next sentence. If “she” refers to Saru, then who is “I”? Saru, apparently, because her mother is “dead.” But the two sentences stand in contradiction: if I (Saru) is the skeleton in the cupboard, how can it be that “I’m outside”? Is the cupboard now empty: “No more [the] skeleton in the cupboard”? The passage ends on a confused admission: “I’m now the skeleton in my own cupboard.” Saru’s house is, indeed, uncannily “unclean” and multiply haunted, as is indicated by the frequent repetitions of the words “skeleton” and “cupboard.”

17

Rashkin, Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative, 21.

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I do not see True Self, False Self in these passages and the few paragraphs that follow. I do see a confusion in Saru with regard to her own being relative to that of her mother: Saru is, obviously, physically living and, to external observation, self-determining, but in describing herself as dead (skeletal) and trapped inside her mother’s cupboard, she confesses to a sense that her dead mother (also locked inside the cupboard?) continues to dominate her daughter’s psychic life in the form of a phantom or a locked crypt. Significantly, Saru later describes the process of cleaning her mother’s room as leading to her first full realization that “her mother was dead,” a “realisation [that] brought not grief but anger. A childish rage” (60). Saru says, at that point, that she feels “foolish and ridiculous” to be “making gestures of defiance at a person who wasn’t there at all” (60). Of course, as the beginning of the very next chapter announces, her mother is still there (in Saru’s mind) and she continues to speak from the grave, or the cupboard: “I was an ugly girl. At least, my mother told me so” (61). In confusing herself with her mother in the passage quoted above, and soon after affirming her mother’s negative judgment of Saru’s appearance as a young girl, Saru’s irrational and confused thoughts belie her adamant refusal of a conscious identification with the mother who has rejected her, and lead us to believe that she has, instead, internalized not only her mother’s rejection and disappointment but also her judgmentalism and feelings of unworthiness. Doreen D’Cruz notes the way in which Saru’s mother instils a sense of corporeal shame in Saru: As her body becomes more womanly, her mother reads there a distasteful text: “You’re growing up,” she would say. And there was something unpleasant in the way she looked at me, so that I longed to run away, to hide whatever part of me she was staring at. (54–55) The degenerate text the mother reads in the daughter’s body comes presumably from her own sense of having been debased and betrayed by her body. Thus their similitude in inhabiting the female body is

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precisely what divides mother and daughter as each sees in the other a legacy of shame and negation.18

The “similitude” between mother and daughter is uncannily registered in a passage later in the novel, when the third-person narrator, in one of the rare moments of distancing from Saru as centre of consciousness, describes the way Saru settles into her role of hosting women visitors in her father’s house: After a few minutes she would make the customary offer of a cup of tea. Polite refusals, which were a part of the game, were ignored, and with an odd feeling of ‘I’ve done this before’ she would go into the kitchen, the woman following her, still demurring at the trouble. She would pump up the Primus into life, setting on it the long-handled brass vessel always used for making tea, water being measured out first with the cup that had lost an ear. The gestures, the actions, the very words that accompanied them were, though she did not realize it, her mother’s. As if she was unconsciously, unknown to herself, mimicking the mother she had never admired, never endeavoured to imitate. But there was in her, as she made the tea, curious confusion. I’ve done this before. No, not I, but my mother. This is what she did when there were visitors. And she went on jumbling herself with the dead woman, sometimes feeling she was acting out a role, sometimes feeling she was her mother herself. And somewhere was that unloved, resentful, neglected child Saru. (106, emphasis added)

I’ve highlighted aspects of this passage that compel me to suggest that Saru contains within her what Abraham and Torok call a nescience, an “unknown knowledge”19 that appears to one as an uncanny sense of something that seems familiar and strange at the same time. This uncanny or unheimlich moment is further intensified by the abject mirroring of mother/daughter, in which each is described, in different terms, as “unloved,” or “never admired.” This passage, in fact, needs to be linked to another passage that certainly has not escaped the notice of other critics, but that perhaps bears more scrutiny in this context. Saru’s father, in 18 Doreen D’Cruz, “Feminism in the Postcolonial Context: Shashi Deshpande’s Fiction,” S P A N : Journal of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies 36 (1993), online. 19 Abraham & Torok, “‘The Lost Object – Me’,” 140 n1.

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telling her about her mother’s death, also describes her increasing silence as she approached death in terms of a characteristic withholding of speech: ‘You know she never was a very talkative person. It was the way they were brought up, she and her sister, in their grandfather’s house. “We always had to remember we didn’t really belong,” she told me once. “We were only tolerated”.’ (194)

Chatterji’s observation that “The mother had directly transmitted her legacy of dispossession to her daughter”20 can best be accounted for through an understanding of Abraham and Torok’s idea of the nescience, an important mechanism in transgenerational haunting. Saru’s silences with regard to her own defence against (self-)accusations of two murders, and her sense of not being valued, either before or after Dhruva’s death, can thus be viewed as maternal characteristics that Saru has internalized without being aware that she has done so. In the absence of her mother’s refusal or perhaps inability to demonstrate verbal or physical affection totowards her daughter, Saru can only respond to the words her mother, sparingly, even grudgingly, gives her, and these words, as far as Saru can ever remember, are always negative, always critical, always accusing. Saru’s outward defiance of and hatred for a mother who completely rejected her – to the point of refusing a deathbed reconciliation – are consciously and repeatedly expressed, almost from the opening pages of the novel. In response to Manu’s concern early in their marriage that Saru will feel the pain of being cut off from her parents, Saru describes the way in which, when a baby is born, the umbilical cord is severed: “for me,” she tells him, “there will be no trauma, no bleeding” (39). But beneath her denial and conscious rage lies Saru’s desperate need for some expression of her mother’s affection, regard, and forgiveness, as Jyoti Singh points out: “[Deshpande] succeeds in showing the undercurrent of love that binds the mother–daughter duo.”21 Almost in spite of herself, as she knows what answer she will receive, Saru vainly asks both her mother’s best friend and her father, at different points in the novel, if there was any sign of forgiveness in her mother in the days before she died. Learning 20

Chatterji, “Psychoanalytic Regression and the Finding of the True Self,” 97. Jyoti Singh, Indian Women Novelists: A Feminist Psychoanalytical Study (Jaipur: Rawat, 2007): 70. 21

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that her mother died “peacefully,” but without wanting to resolve the horrible rift with her daughter, produces in Saru unbearable agony. At a conscious level, though, what Saru seems to be seeking is the lifting of her mother’s curse, a curse conveyed to her by Manu’s professor, Dr Kulkarni, who had sought vainly to intercede on her behalf with Saru’s family after Manu’s and Saru’s marriage. Significantly, Saru claims early in the narrative to have forgotten what the content of that curse was, only the fact that she has been cursed by her mother. It is also Dr Kulkarni who later delivers to Saru the news of her mother’s death. Disingenuously, when he does so, Kulkarni asks Saru whether her mother had sent for her before she died. Saru answers him calmly, “‘Why should she?’” and it is then that she recalls that Dr Kulkarni “brought [Saru her] mother’s last message. What was it she had said? The words should be etched in my mind, but oddly enough I have forgotten them. I can only remember that she cursed me as no mother should” (25). Saru’s “forgetfulness” here needs to be placed in the context of a series of unconscious repressions, large and small – indeed, a pattern of such repressions that has become her only mechanism of survival. Saru eventually remembers the curse – “‘I will pray for her unhappiness. Let her know more sorrow than she has given me’” (197). But where – and why – has the memory of her mother’s curse gone? Why is it so overwhelming to her that it needs to be swallowed whole, undigested, so that it sits, like a cold horrifying thing, in the pit of her stomach? As curses go, Ai’s is an odd one. Unlike the curse laid upon Shakuntala, it lacks a certain specificity. It is boundless; it encompasses Saru’s whole being, not just a single relationship. And, unlike Shakuntala, Saru has no one to intercede for her, to soften her mother’s curse, although, when Kulkarni repeats it, Manu’s sympathy for her is palpable: “Manu’s face looked like that of a loyal little boy [Dhruva?], shocked and outraged” (197). The curse is also narcissistic, self-reflexive: “Let her know more sorrow than she has given me.” If, as I have described above, Saru has already internalized and integrated her mother’s sorrow for Dhruva’s death in the form of self-accusation and self-hatred, leaving no room for any expression of sorrow she – Saru – may have felt upon the loss of her brother, the curse can only be seen as doubling, a compounding, an overdetermination of an abject self-loathing. Mother and daughter are caught within this curse in a ceaseless mirroring of “unhappiness,” of “sorrow.” Where can Saru put this curse, when her crypt is

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already fully occupied by the sorrow and self-loathing of the (m)other? Moreover, how can such a curse be lifted when the one who uttered it is dead and incapable of taking it back? Most critics would argue that Saru’s recollection and narration (if only to herself) of what happened on the day of Dhruva’s death is one of the most significant steps that Saru takes toward healing her shattered spirit. In particular, they would point, as does Arindam Chatterji, to Saru’s reassurance to herself that she was not responsible for Dhruva’s death, that she had not pushed him, was in fact nowhere near him when he slipped into the water, that she had not “watched” him drown but, rather, tried, in vain, and at the risk of her own life, to save him. Then, traumatized and frightened, she had deluded herself into believing that none of this had happened: if she returned home, Dhruva would be there, mocking her for being late and taking delight in her getting into trouble. With the powerful imagination of a ten-year-old child, one who at the time has an imaginary playmate, Hemant, so real that she feels he has chosen his own gender and name, Saru constructs a story that can seal over the traumatic details of watching the bubbles disappear from the water’s surface as her brother finally succumbs to his death by drowning. So this is why, in this story that Saru tells herself about the events of that day, she had not told her parents of the accident, an omission on Saru’s part that may have led to her mother’s – and even some critics’ – suspicions about the role that Saru had played in her brother’s death. I would agree that the narration of this story – the long-awaited revelation of the ‘truth’ about the day that Dhruva drowned – is one of the most important steps that Saru takes toward facing her own life, and, ultimately, facing the husband she has also accused herself of murdering. But I would like to shift the ground here a little, too, and to suggest two things: first, that Saru’s reconstruction of that day, her memory, is another story that she tells herself. I do not grant it the status of a ‘truth’ but, rather, of a coherent narrative. In saying this, I am not implying in any way that I think Saru is lying, or that her story is an attempt to cover up some more sinister truth that we can somehow derive or divine from more careful analysis of the story (indeed, I have already suggested how Saru herself obsessively builds the case against herself for us). I believe, in fact, that the story, as it is told, is probably the closest Saru can come, may ever come, to reconstructing the events of that horrible day. As such, I will grant it only this status: it is the story that can lay her ghosts to rest so

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that she can begin to learn to live with them. In that light, I would suggest that the most important revelation in Saru’s confession about the events of this day is not how Dhruva died but, rather, what Saru recalls of the hours leading up to his disappearance, particularly the way she begins to recast the relationship between herself and her brother in terms that have seemed to be unavailable to her up to that point. Before coming back to this idea, though, I need to look at one other passage in the novel. In this passage, located at almost the mid-point of the novel, Saru recalls a vacation at the seaside with her husband and children. The holiday itself is associated with Manu’s growing violence toward her: just prior to the vacation, friends who encounter Manu and Saru buying luggage for a relatively expensive family excursion imply that it is Saru’s money, not Manu’s, that allows them such luxuries. So the holiday, for Saru, is tainted from the start by her own feelings of guilt and shame about being the breadwinner of the family and thus provoking Manu’s second violent night-time assault on her. When Saru finds herself alone in the hotel lobby while her family goes to the beach, a memory comes to her, unbidden: How old was I? Four or five? Or perhaps a little older. I was sitting cross-legged in front of my mother who was combing my hair. She did it as precisely as she did anything else, making two neat partings, the point of the comb hurting my scalp as it ran over, marking the lines. And now I had to sit sideways so that she could plait the left half of my hair which she held in one determined fist. I would have turned when I saw through the window, in the open space of land that lay on one side of our house then, a pony. The pony was jumping, running, with all the awkward energy of over-enthusiasm. Clumsy and awkward though it seemed to be, its movements and the gently sloping green ground harmonized into a beautiful whole that somehow enchanted me. ‘Turn this side.’ ‘Wait, mother.’ With an angry jerk at my hair that pulled my whole head painfully with it, she said again, ‘Come on, hurry up. Turn round.’ ‘Oh, wait mother.’ Now the pony was galloping, the four legs flashing together, then moving apart in an effortlessly beautiful flow of joy and energy that somehow came across to me through the window.

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‘Turn.’ Another angry jerk that sent a sharp pain through my head. ‘I have other work to do. I have no time to waste like you have. “Wait, mother”! What should I wait for?’ [sic] And with her hand she turned my whole body away from the window. I neither protested nor cried. I knew I was powerless. (113)

The description of this event ends with words of resignation, “And there was the end of that grief!” – a sentiment immediately belied by the flood of tears that overwhelms and embarrasses the adult Saru as she sits recalling this scene in the narrative present, looking out of the window of the hotel. What has been locked away in Saru’s crypt, more deeply even than her (mother’s) self-hatred, is Saru’s ability to feel joy without the fear of punishment. In this passage, her mother’s violent physical act of turning her daughter’s eyes away from the exuberant scene outside, coupled with Saru’s resigned capitulation to that violent denial and the swallowing of her pain – “And there was the end of that grief!” – signal the unconscious, unspoken conspiracy between Saru and her mother that will begin to link pain and joy in Saru’s life. The painful “lines,” or “part,” that her mother rakes into the top of her skull are the chalked lines of a self-hatred and abnegation that pass through the mother’s hands and voice to the child’s inner being. Even before Dhruva’s birth (Saru would have been about six when Dhruva was born and she recalls this scene as taking place when she was four or five), let alone after his death, the painful division in Saru’s psyche has prepared the way for his crypt. What drives Saru to blame herself for her brother’s death, to blame herself for her husband’s anger, is this nescience, this uncanny, unconscious knowledge that is her mother’s real curse and legacy: that Saru feels that any effort to achieve happiness will result not only in self (m/other)-inflicted pain but also in the suffering of those closest to her, that, in seeking happiness and self-fulfilment (in being a willful rather than obedient daughter), she is capable of murdering those who get in her way. In her mother’s accusing words: “‘As long as you can have your way, you aren’t bothered about anything at all. Your own brother….’” (145). In the light of Saru’s confession to having murdered Manu, we can now add to this accusation, “Your own husband….” In The Shell and the Kernel, Abraham and Torok define the secret of the phantom who haunts the most resistant analysand (and analyst):

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The image [of the phantom] points to an occasion of torment […] – a memory […] buried without legal burial place. The memory is of an idyll, experienced with a valued object and yet for some reason unspeakable. It is memory entombed in a fast and secure place, awaiting resurrection. Between the idyllic moment and its subsequent forgetting […] there was the metapsychological traumatism of a loss or, more precisely, the “loss” that resulted from a traumatism. This segment of an ever so painfully lived Reality – untellable and therefore inaccessible to the gradual, assimilative work of mourning – causes a genuinely covert shift in the entire psyche. The shift itself is covert, since both the fact that the idyll was real and that it was later lost must be disguised and denied. This leads to the establishment of a sealed-off psychic place, a crypt in the ego. Created by a self-governing mechanism we call inclusion, the crypt is comparable to the formation of a cocoon around the chrysalis. Inclusion or crypt is a form of antiintrojection, a mechanism whereby the assimilation of both the illegitimate idyll and its loss is precluded.22

Keeping in mind my preliminary analysis of the novel and Abraham and Torok’s description of the phantom, let us turn to Saru’s reconstruction of the events that occurred leading up to Dhruva’s death, a reconstruction in which Saru can finally articulate not her guilt or innocence in the manner of her brother’s death, but the only thing that she has so far neither confessed nor demonstrated: the sisterly affection she had for him and the joy she took in his company on that idyllic day, something that has only been associated, until her conscious recollection of it, with shame, to the point where she had begun to believe that any contact with her brother, such as that displayed in the family photograph, must have been violent or cruel. As Saru begins to relate the story of that day, we can immediately see continuity between this story and previous descriptions of the relationships among Saru, Dhruva, and their mother. In an act of defiance of her mother, who has refused to let Saru attend a movie with friends, Saru decides to explore a “forbidden” but beautiful place, the site of an abandoned brick factory, which she had discovered once while taking a shortcut home. She sneaks out of the house while Dhruva is napping with their mother. Characteristically, Dhruva follows her and insists that she take him along. Fearing to wake her mother and thus anger her, Saru 22

Abraham & Torok, “‘The Lost Object – Me’,” 140–41; emphasis in original.

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reluctantly agrees. She is resentful, and the repetition, several times, of Saru’s admonishment, “don’t call me Sarutai,” reminds us of Saru’s resentment of her brother and reinforces the continuity between this episode and the familiar pattern of behaviour between them that Saru has described. But this pattern is somewhat disrupted by Saru’s thinking “Perhaps it would be nice to have Dhruva with me instead of Hemant [her imaginary friend]. Someone who could talk and play as well as listen” (187). It is significant that Saru describes a dawning awareness of her brother’s objective existence as something other than her mother’s pet at the same time as she confesses a desire to let go of a childish fantasy – having a perfect relationship with an approving, but imaginary, companion. Representing herself as being on the magical threshold of adulthood, teetering uncertainly between the worlds of fantasy and reality, on the edge of adolescence and sexual awakening, Saru prepares the reader for an understanding of the reversion that will happen to her after experiencing a traumatic loss. Once they reach the orchard, part of which has been turned into a lake after recent monsoon rains, Saru is overwhelmed again by its natural beauty. When Dhruva seems not to share that response, she is angry at first, but soon sheds her “anger and disappointment” (187). She describes how they begin to play together in this magical, secret place, and while there are still traces of Saru’s jealousy and need to diminish her younger brother, there is also, for the first time, something beyond sibling rivalry in the description of their play: The water was muddy and had the peculiar unpleasant odour stagnant water always has; but for us it was an unforeseen find, an unexpected treasure house of umpteem games. We made faces at our own reflections, we played ducks and drakes… and how it annoyed me to find Dhruva’s stone skimming effortlessly across the water, while mine sank in hopelessly… we sailed twigs and dried leaves, we played, we frolicked with such joy that it does not seem possible now that I was one of those two joyous children. Never again… I never had that pure joy of childhood ever again. I became all at once a somber girl, frightened of many things, most of all of joy. (187–88; emphasis added)

The “dark, damp smelly hole” that Dhruva drowns in, that Saru tells us earlier she feels she has become, is here clearly and openly linked to both

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joy and its denial, an overdetermined and encrypted maternal proscription that has crippled Saru’s emotional life, that has led her to draw clear “chalk-lines” suturing pleasure and punishment. It is this connection that has led her to feel guilt not only for Dhruva’s death, but also for the joy of the children’s escape – the word “frolic[king]” a clear echo of the pony’s “over-enthusias[tic]” “jumping, running” – that quickly turns into the tragedy of Dhruva’s drowning. Moreover (and I will return to this point later), the gendered and sexual overtones of this passage – the game of ducks and drakes and the exuberant jouissance – suggest that the pure joy of childhood is not uncontaminated, for Saru, by a dawning awareness of her own maturing physicality and desire. More than anything, though, it is Saru’s recollection of the pleasure of that day, a recollection that yet needs to be linked to Saru’s mother’s curse in a later conversation with her father, that yields an emotional truth: there was joy in her relationship with Dhruva; she was not the hateful, murderous sister that she had convinced herself (and very nearly convinces the reader) she was. Dhruva was her little brother; he may have been a pest and her mother’s favourite child, but he was also her playmate, her beloved companion, and she did not want him to die. Like any older sister, Saru had a range of conflicting emotions about her younger brother, but that did not mean that she wanted to lose him. It is this knowledge that Saru has “hidden […] to keep it safe. Hidden it so well that I can’t find it myself now” (23). It is essential to make this point and to understand its relationship to Saru’s reaction to Dhruva’s death and her mother’s response to her after it. In constructing a story in which Dhruva does not accompany her to the orchard, let alone drown, the child Saru attempts not only to hide her feelings of guilt, but also to preserve a sense of the rapture that preceded the trauma of her brother’s disappearance. Because that is what Dhruva does – he disappears from her sight into the dark water. This is how Saru describes the time after Dhruva’s disappearance: The water became placid and unruffled once more. Even the bubbles vanished. I was quiet too, not sobbing any more, knowing with a complete certainty that this was not real, only a nightmare out of which I would eventually wake up to have Dhruva calling out…. Sarutai, wait for me, I’m coming. Finally I walked away from there. Steadily I climbed up the slope, and for some reason it was easy this time. I went into the deserted mango grove, and sat there under the trees. It began to rain. I had no

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thought of sheltering myself. Nor did the trees give me any protection. The large drops fell through heavily, with a menacing drumming sound and I was soon drenched. I let myself get wet and sat there thinking of nothing. Some time later, I suppose, it stopped raining. I sat on, still blank, not wanting to move, to get up, to do anything that would lead me away from this peaceful, almost comatose state into something dreadful. After a while I got up. I had to go home. They would be searching for me by now, wouldn’t they? They would be frantic – wasn’t that what I had planned? When was that? Some time earlier, a time so far distant that it could almost have been someone else who had had the thought. And Dhruva would, of course, be at home. He would put his tongue at me and say with glee…You’re late, you’re very late. Ai is waiting for you. She’s going to give it to you. He would be virtuously triumphant because he had done nothing wrong himself. Hadn’t he been sleeping in Ai’s room when I went out? (190; final emphasis added)

Saru’s repeated denials to her parents about knowing where her brother is, her magical transposition of Dhruva’s disappearance beneath the opaque surface of the water into his re-absorption into the comforting shelter of home, are as much a protective truth or shell that she constructs to shield herself from knowledge of a beloved brother’s death as they are an alibi for any role that she played in it. Her response to her mother’s hysterical accusation – “You did it. You did this. You killed him” – registers the truth that she has constructed around his disappearance, albeit a truth that can only be construed as a lie by a literal-minded parent: “I didn’t. I didn’t know. I never saw him” (191): And then it began. The hysteria, the screaming, the words that followed me for days, months, years, all my life. You killed him. Why didn’t you die? Why are you alive, when he’s dead? (191)

Ai’s reaction to Dhruva’s death not only reinforces the link that Saru has already drawn between joy and suffering (for, after all, how can she describe to her parents the joyful moments leading up to Dhruva’s disappearance?), it also forces Saru to disavow any connection to her brother – “I never saw him.” In other words, Ai’s reaction robs Saru of her ability to express the sorrow she feels for the loss of her only sibling, a sorrow that, she confesses, is Ai’s and Ai’s alone. After her argument with her

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parents about going to medical school – the argument alluded to earlier in which Saru gets her way but her mother draws blood by accusing her of killing her brother – Saru describes a nightmare, in which she first feels “small hard knees and elbows prodding [her], a small voice saying, Sarutai, Sarutai”: Oh, go away. I’m sleeping. Sarutai Go away.Don’t trouble me. And don’t call me Sarutai. But Sarutai, I’m scared. It’s so dark. Can I stay here? No, you can’t. Go away. All right then. And turning large reproachful eyes on me, he turned away. No, he swam away from me, for we were, for some reason, in the water. Water that was a bright green in colour with the viscosity of oil. And now it was I who was scared. I turned round but the viscous water would not let me move. I was fighting against the cloying sticky heaviness that was pulling me down, choking me, drowning me. And Dhruva was swiftly, silently going away from me. Wait for me, wait for me, I screamed in panic. I’m coming. And I woke up. You killed your brother. I didn’t. Truly I didn’t. It was an accident. I loved him, my little brother. I tried to save him. Truly I tried. But I couldn’t. And I ran away. Yes, I ran away. I admit that. But I didn’t kill him. How do you know you didn’t kill him? How do you know? I was wide awake now and full of sorrow. Sorrow so great that I could not hold the whole of it within me. So immense that it wearied me to bear the burden of it. It flowed over me like the water that had almost drowned me in my dream. And I could do nothing with the sorrow but bear it. It was mine and mine alone. I could share it with no one. (145–46)

Saru’s description of herself drowning in, being choked by, a sorrow that is too great to bear, that is hers and hers alone, is a description that not only reminds us of her mother’s later curse – “Let her know more sorrow than she has given me” (197) – but is also redolent with abject maternal imagery: the water is described as viscous and bright green, there are images of holding within and bearing. The maternal imagery reminds us that the very thing that should bind mother and daughter (and father as

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well) is their shared sorrow for the loss of a child: a son but also a brother. Instead, mother and daughter bear their overwhelming sorrow separately and silently, the daughter, Saru, overburdened by this grief because she must not only entomb her own sorrow, but bear responsibility for the sorrow she has caused her mother as well. Saru’s conscious disavowal of the love she bore toward her brother is an effect of the crypt, as Abraham and Torok explain: Without the escape-route of somehow conveying our refusal to mourn, we are reduced to a radical denial of the loss, to pretending that we had absolutely nothing to lose. There can be no thought of speaking to someone else about our grief under these circumstances. The words that cannot be uttered, the scenes that cannot be recalled, the tears that cannot be shed – everything will be swallowed along with the trauma that led to the loss. Swallowed and preserved. Inexpressible mourning erects a secret tomb inside the subject.23

Doubly victimized by the tragedy of her brother’s death, Saru must bear all: the guilt, as well as the sorrow, of two people. Is it any wonder that she cannot recall the curse, that she cannot believe the curse: a curse that dooms her to suffer that which is already unbearable, a sorrow so great, so inexpressible, and entombed so deeply that she literally cannot be delivered of it? It is only in the final pages of the novel that Saru is able to break through her silence about Dhruva’s death. Significantly, the timing of this breakthrough, which is also a mental breakdown, is Dhruva’s birthday. Saru’s fragility just before this point is signalled in her irritation at Madhav’s innocuous reference to his own mother: My mother… somehow the words angered her. They were like pinpricks threatening the bubble that surrounded the three of them and their life together. She now had the watchful, fearful look of a person guarding something precious. She was wary of anything that changed their routine, of any reference that threatened the jewel of security she was guarding. (166; emphasis added)

Such a threat follows immediately: Saru’s father tells her and Madhav that he will be fasting the next day; he does not, however, tell Saru the reason, 23

Abraham & Torok, “Mourning or Melancholia,” 130.

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and she does not press any further when he says that the reason for the fast is “something special” (166). Madhav takes it upon himself to tell Saru that the reason for the fast is Dhruva’s birthday, a day upon which both her parents had fasted since Dhruva’s death: At night as she was unrolling her mattress, Madhav came to her. ‘Sarutai,’ he said, and she knew he was troubled. ‘I thought you ought to know.’ ‘Know what?’ She prompted him as he hesitated. ‘Why Kaka is fasting tomorrow.’ ‘No, I don’t. How should I? She felt unreasonably irritated as if she was being accused of wrongs she knew nothing of. ‘It’s your… it’s his… it’s Dhruva’s birthday tomorrow, isn’t it?’ ‘Is it?’ She did not know that she sounded like a resentful, sullen child. Or that her face had taken on a little girl’s, ‘I know I’m bad but I don’t care’ look. The boy stared at her curiously, before he realized that her words were truly a question. ‘Yes,’ he answered her. And then she smiled at him. ‘I had forgotten,’ she said simply. ‘Honestly, I had forgotten all about it.’ And there was a joyful lift to her smile as if she was congratulating herself on something. (166–67; emphasis added)

In this passage, forgetting Dhruva’s birthday appears to evoke a strangely joyful reaction from Saru, as though, finally, she has been able to lay his ghost to rest. But it is precisely at the moment of consciously “forgetting” her brother and “forgetting” her role in a crime (“wrongs”) “she knew nothing of” that Dhruva’s ghost arises to accuse her. As Abraham and Torok’s theories teach us, the only crime that can threaten her “jewel of security” is the recollection not of how much she hated her brother, but of how much she loved him. The following chapter of the novel, in which the pushing incident is described and in which Saru recalls her fearful reaction to her own children’s sibling jealousy, begins with the words: “They had named him Dhruva. I can remember even now, vaguely, faintly, a state of joyous excitement that had been his naming day. The smell of flowers, the black grinding stone that I held in my hands… these are the only tangible memories that remain” (168; ellipses in original). These are the painful recollections: the recollections of joy, excitement,

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and affection that remind Saru that she loved her little brother and that she, like her mother, had something to lose. Just as the recovery of the ring of recollection intensifies Dushyanta’s suffering but allows him to acknowledge his loss, Saru’s recovery of these joyful memories has the potential to release her from the cycle of disavowal, but only through a painful process of understanding the value, to her, of what she has lost. In a novel where memory is so important, it is significant that Saru not only claims to have “forgotten” her brother’s birthday, but that she continues to forget it when the novel returns to the narrative present. But this forgetting is linked to unwanted memories of Saru’s mother. When a telegram arrives for Madhav on the day of her father’s fast, Saru’s reaction is strange: rather than being concerned for Madhav, she wonders whether its news will be so upsetting that he will fail to eat his lunch, and that the food will be wasted: The thought brought back something, some memory, someone asking… What’s the matter? I’m not feeling well. What is it? Fever? No. I have a terrible headache. Oh! Aren’t you going to eat anything then? No. I don’t feel like it. I wish you had told me earlier. Before I started my cooking. It would have saved me some trouble. Even if I’m dying, you’ll want to know whether I’ll eat my food and then die, or die first so that you needn’t cook. She brushed away the memory as if it was an irritating fly hovering around her face, a nuisance she could effectively deal with. (177)24

Along with the memory of this conversation with her mother, Saru seems to have brushed away the memory of Dhruva’s birthday. Twice on this day of fasting that Madhav has taken pains to remind her of, she calls her father to a meal: first at lunch, when she asks him if she should serve, and he responds that she may serve Madhav, who has been called home to

24

The fly hovering around Saru’s face reminds us of the scene in the hermitage, endlessly re-created in Dushyanta’s painting, of the bee hovering around Shakuntala’s face.

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deal with a family emergency, and then again, when she calls her father to dinner: ‘Baba,’ she called him at night, thankful that there was something to say, ‘dinner is ready.’ He seemed to be, a rare thing for him, annoyed. ‘You know I’m not having anything today.’ He removed his glasses and rubbed at his eyes. Without those protective shutters, his face looked frightfully blank. ‘Fasting? But I thought it was only in the morning.’ Fasting usually meant missing one meal, not both. ‘You know I’ve always observed a total fast on this day. Both of us did… your mother and I.’ What was it? Suddenly she remembered that Madhav had told her about it. Was that what he had tried to say to her when leaving? It was Dhruva’s birthday. (179–80)

Saru appears to have remembered that her father was fasting, but to have forgotten, entirely, having been told only the evening before, the reason for his fast. How can she have forgotten? What are the mechanisms at work in such a leaky memory? The passage continues: Your mother and I… Yes, they had fasted on the day. But she had not. She had eaten her food defiantly, aggressively, knowing that her mother was looking at her in astonishment, thinking perhaps… How can she? And then, serving her with a vengeance, saying… Are you sure you don’t want any more? Sure you’ve had enough? ‘I had forgotten about it,’ she said now as she had said to the boy last night. Sullen again as she had been with him. ‘You have your dinner, anyway. No reason why you should not.’ ‘Yes, no reason why I shouldn’t.’ Each year the question had come…. You will be eating, I suppose? Of course, why should I fast? Yes, why should you? Just because it’s Dhruva’s birthday, and because he happened to die, must I punish myself all my life like you do? But that was wrong. It wasn’t her own self that her mother had been punishing. It was Saru she had tried to punish. She would lie in her bed, stiff and immobile like a corpse, get up and cook for Saru,

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serve her with an exaggerated solicitude, and then go back to bed and her corpse-like pose, like a prisoner who had earned a reprieve. ‘I’ve forgotten him,’ she said now. ‘Completely. I don’t ever think of him.’ Her voice rose on a triumphant note. ‘I’m glad,’ he said quietly. But there was something in his face which told her he didn’t believe her. It enraged her. And nothing I say will convince him of the contrary. There was the same infuriating feeling of helplessness she had often had as a child. (180–81)

Saru’s insistence that she has forgotten her brother’s birthday, in spite of frequent and overt reminders, points to more than poor memory on Saru’s part. It points, rather, to a pattern – let us say: even an unconscious habit – of disavowal of her love for her brother, a disavowal that needs to be flagrantly and aggressively chewed and swallowed in defiance of her parents’ memorializing fast. Maria Torok describes this kind of manic appetite as a magical procedure in which “eating” (the feast) is paraded as the equivalent of an immediate but purely hallucinatory and illusory “introjection.” Manic persons announce with fanfare to their unconscious that they are “eating” [...]. Yet, this is nothing but empty words and no introjections.25

To honour Dhruva’s birthday by fasting would be for Saru to admit that she, like her parents, had something to lose, the most painful admission possible, more painful even than her uncertainty about the role she played in Dhruva’s death. What follows this series of disavowals is the novel’s climax, in which Saru’s father finally breaks his own silence with regard to Dhruva’s death by wondering aloud if Saru had taken her “mother seriously and blamed [her]self for Dhruva’s death” (181). His words evoke a torrent of accusation, denial, and defensiveness from Saru that he then attempts to stem: All the grievance of an old but monumental injustice was in her words. She was not a wife, not a mother, not a professional woman whom others looked up to. She was the wronged child again, the unloved daughter, the scapegoat. (182)

25

Maria Torok, “The Illness of Mourning,” 115.

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The day following Saru’s outburst, a wall has come down between her and her father, allowing Saru to tell, and her father to hear, however reluctantly, about the horror she has been facing at the hands of her husband. What her father finds most difficult to believe in a story that is already virtually incomprehensible to him, is Manohar’s behaviour between these attacks – his seemingly complete obliviousness to his role in them, something that Saru tells her father is “perfectly possible”: “‘I know there can be such cases. Blackouts about certain actions. Oh yes, it’s perfectly possible’” (203). In this passage, Saru does not exonerate Manu for his actions, but in linking her own propensity for disavowal to that of her husband, she perhaps unwittingly suggests a kind of psychological explanation for the problems in their marriage: they are both driven by, and unconscious of, a maternal shame, a maternal crypt, a point relative to Manu that I will more fully explore in the next chapter. In an extremely telling passage, Saru links the failure of maternal responsibility, the nightmare of rape, and the obliteration of self in a single figure: the man in the brown scarf. One of the most cryptic ghosts in the novel, “the man in the brown scarf” first appears in the description of the nightmare in the Prologue to the novel, a figure from a nightmare that, as I argued, offers proof of the reality of marital rape. It would seem, initially, that this figure is a trope for sexual assault by a stranger, perhaps every woman’s worst fear. Or so I would claim if this were the figure’s only appearance. But “the man in the brown scarf” reappears much later in the novel, at a critical point in Saru’s struggle to come to grips with the four things that haunt her: her guilt with regard to Dhruva’s death, her inability to rid herself of her mother’s ghost, her fear of meeting her husband again, and her fear of passing undigested secrets on to her children. After describing her husband’s bizarre behaviour the mornings after his assaults, she looks to her father for his understanding and support: She stopped and stared at her father as if she would communicate the enormity of her statement only by silence. There was no response from him. She went on. ‘Do you understand, Baba? He was his usual self. Absolutely his usual self. There was no change in him, no difference. And how could I say to that man… Why did you do it? Had he done it at all? I began to think after a while… how could any man do such a thing and be so unchanged?. . . that I had perhaps dreamt it. Maybe a nightmare. I had terrible nightmares after Renu’s birth. You know nothing about that. I should have been here, really,’ and she stared at

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him accusingly, ‘for Renu’s birth. My first child should have been your responsibility. Maybe if I’d been here, I wouldn’t have had that nightmare. Who knows?’ She shrugged and was silent for a moment, seemingly lost in some conjecture of her own. ‘It was a man in a brown scarf trying to strangle me in that nightmare. And I could do nothing then, either. Luckily I woke up before I died. I thought this was again that kind of a night- mare. But it couldn’t have been because of the bruises.’ (202–203)

A deeply ambivalent figure, associated both with Manu’s perverted sexuality and Saru’s fear about bringing a new life into the world, the “man in the brown scarf” provides an important clue to the transgenerational nature of the curse that Saru labours under. The image of the scarf, in fact, uncannily undoes the oppositions between pleasure and pain demarcated by the chalked lines in the novel and points to another consummation, that of death, according to Hamlet and psychoanalytic theory, the consummation “devoutly to be wished.” In particular, death by choking, inflicted by a man in a scarf in a post-partum dream, suggests a strangulation in utero: a death that occurs in the womb, even before birth, and a re-incorporation into the maternal: being eaten by the mother, and, in Saru’s case, becoming the mother that she never wanted to be, if only to escape being suffocated by her. The Dark Holds No Terrors is a novel which suggests the possibility that terrible known unknown secrets can be passed from mother to child, which admits to the possibility of a nescience, of a maternal crypt that extends through “several generations and [threatens to] determine the fate of an entire family line.” The nightmare that sexuality has become for Saru is, at some level, not an aberration from healthy sexual relations but, rather, the fulfilment of an internalized, maternal proscription on life, on joy, on desire: an enslavement to the crypt. In saying this I do not mean that, in any way, Saru has ‘asked for’ these assaults or has done something to deserve them, as she herself would have us believe; rather, Saru’s quiet, terrified acceptance of them is just another manifestation of the effect of her mother’s curse, as a result of which Saru believes that she does not deserve to experience happiness unless it is laced with pain. Understandably, given the mechanism of maternal incorporation that Saru unconsciously bears (in both senses of that word), one of Saru’s greatest concerns is that she will pass on her mother’s legacy of selfabnegation, her mother’s curse, to her own children. She watches them

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carefully for signs of sibling jealousy; she imagines her daughter, Renu, to have inherited her grandmother’s judgmentalism and tendency toward silence and secrecy: Renu. My daughter. She stares at me critically at times, a cold, shrewd, objective observer behind those little girl’s eyes of hers. And I become nervous, unsure, uncertain of myself. She does not talk much. She reminds me of a room whose doors are closed. Nothing emerges, neither her joys nor her sorrows. And I sense a lack of feeling, of sensitivity in her. But when she sits down with a paper and pencil, it is as if she suddenly becomes articulate. One drawing of hers is for me unforgettable. Trees, tall and straight, towering almost, drawn in black crayons. Scarcely any gap between the trees. A feeling of brooding darkness. Of frightening confinement. And in the foreground a child. Smiling. Smirking rather. What is this, Renu? A forest. A thick forest. And this child… why is she laughing? Because she feels like it. You see…. No more. Just a closed up face. [Saru] had not slept that night. My child, my daughter, draws not sunny gardens, colourful flowers, cheerful sunrises and playing children, but frightful pictures like this. ‘She has a look of [your mother] about her,’ Madhav said, after staring at the photograph. (33)

The black crayon lines drawn here between Saru’s daughter and her mother would appear to bypass Saru, but this passage must be read in the light of both Saru’s internalization of her mother’s proscriptions and the secrets that Saru herself has kept from her children: Dhruva, their grandparents, the horrific night-time assaults that have put enormous strain on their parents’ marriage. Saru’s silence about Manu’s behaviour is at least partly motivated by her concern that the children never learn about it: But they knew nothing. That was her only comfort. That the children knew nothing. (What about that guarded watchful look in Renu’s eyes as she looks at us? What about Abhi’s hostility to me recently?) (99)

Similar to the handmaidens’ protection of Shakuntala from the risi’s curse, Saru’s instinct to protect her children from knowledge of the adult

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world and its potential evil is both well-intentioned and potentially devastating. Protected from horrors they can (and will) only imagine, they too will learn to keep secrets and to erect monuments to their silent suffering. Jasbir Jain points out the use of “spatial metaphors”26 in many of Deshpande’s novels, metaphors in which closed doors, locked rooms, and closets signal psychological states of being. Without using the term ‘gothic’ or relying on gothic poetics, Jain intuits one of the fundamental premises of the gothic, according to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick: “It is the position of the self to be massively blocked off from something to which it ought normally to have access.”27 Understanding the way in which these internal ‘spaces’ stand as silent monuments or tombs to the unmourned dead helps us to elaborate on Jain’s observation that “Death and mourning are intimately connected” in Deshpande’s fiction. It is not just, as Jain argues, that “The dead are constantly present in the thoughts and minds of those who are bereaved, so much so that the bereaved fail to lead their own lives.”28 As we have seen in The Dark Holds No Terrors and shall continue to see, it is not the process of mourning that prevents the bereaved from leading their own lives: it is precisely their failure to mourn that holds them and their children in thrall to the ghosts of their past.

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26

Jain, Gendered Realities, 49. Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, 13. 28 Jain, Gendered Realities, 133. 27

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4

“you can never be the heroine of your own story”

— Peering Into the Other’s Crypt in That Long Silence

The theories of symbol and anasemia open a new perspective from which to address the poetic status of fictional characters, and from which to delineate how and why the speech and behavior of these poetic entities can be made accessible to analysis. And the relationship between trauma, secrets, and the phantom suggests that considerations of gender and identity in certain texts may be oriented by the presence of characters who unknowingly voice or enact secrets concealed by characters of the opposite sex.1 Silence is not exterior to language.2

I

N A N I N T E R V I E W with Chandra Holm following the publication of Small Remedies, Deshpande responds to a question about the autobiographical aspects of her writing by saying, “Basically there is your philosophy of life as a writer in your books. […] in my novels, you see the aloneness of the human being.” Holm interjects, “of women.” But Deshpande repeats, “of human beings” and adds, “we are all alone. In this world where we think that relationships are important, when we come to the roots we are alone, always alone.”3 This exchange places us in familiar territory: the critic’s initial assumption that Deshpande’s work is always about only women, and Deshpande’s own insistence that her focus is on the individual, the “human being.” As Jasbir Jain com1

Esther Rashkin, “Review: Tools for a New Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism: The Work of Abraham and Torok,” Diacritics 18.4 (Winter 1988): 32. 2 Derrida, cited in Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny, 86. 3 Deshpande, in Chandra Hol, “A Writer of Substance,” interview with Shashi Deshpande, Indian Review of Books 9.8 (16 May–June 15, 2000): 8.

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ments, in relation to a number of collections of essays on Deshpande’s writing, very little of it “necessarily takes into consideration Deshpande’s own stand that the impulse behind her work is more than the ‘woman question’.”4 If the fact that, in many of her novels, the protagonist – and often the narrator or centre of consciousness – is a woman, seems to contradict this observation, then we have capitulated to the double standard so often applied to writing by women and men, by which male consciousness is assumed to be the universal norm and female consciousness its deviation, derivative, or supplement. Tabish Khair, in his otherwise excellent book Babu Fictions: Alienation in Contemporary Indian English Novels, succumbs to this tendency when he relegates his discussion of (just a handful of) Anglo-Indian women writers, including Deshpande, to a single chapter entitled “Gender and Class,” as though the male writers in his study, who each rate a single chapter of their own – Rao, Narayan, Rushdie, Naipaul, and Ghosh – have transcended the limitations of both class and gender altogether. On the other hand, to argue that Deshpande’s work is about the “human being” does not entail subscribing to the belief that gender is immaterial to consciousness or being. Indeed, the materiality of gender, class, nationality, and, as we shall see in this chapter, language, constructs the human being to which Deshpande adamantly refers. Of these, both gender and class are important categories, but they are not the only ones: what a cryptomimetic reading of Deshpande’s work reveals is precisely the idiosyncratic and idiomatic nature of socially contextualized “beings” confronted with the abys(s)mal knowledge of their singularity and aloneness. Critics who either decry or deny a Western, and therefore individualistic, feminist impulse in Deshpande’s work (and, as we have seen, there are critics in both camps) have failed to note that the roots of her thinking about individuality lie not in the radical Western feminism of the latter half of the twentieth century, but in the existentialist liberal philosophy of the middle part of that century, particularly that of Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir, a philosophy that itself is not blinkered to the materialist forces that shape consciousness and proscribe the limitations of human action. Deshpande’s frequent insistence that reading feminists like Germaine Greer and Erica Jong only confirmed her own views about 4

Jain, Gendered Realities, 29.

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women’s subordinated place in society must be considered in the light of her earlier exposure to Continental existential philosophy and her recontextualization of that philosophy through aspects of Hindu philosophy and Indian literature and culture and through responses to living in India. Ultimately, in Deshpande’s fiction, notions of existential freedom and Western individualism, as attractive as these ideas are to a writer who longs for equality between men and women, are always tested within an Indian social context, a context in which, as Vrinda Nabar argues, “the basic parameters of life – responsibilities, meaning and fulfillment – are not automatically considered as contained in self-actualization, a natural conceptual off-shoot of individualism.”5 Existential influences can be seen throughout Deshpande’s work and have already been discussed in relation to the flawed mystery novel If I Die Today, where she examines, within a particular social context, the possibility of radical human freedom and the consequences of absolute transparency or candour in human relationships: in other words, “the aloneness of the human being.” Whether one is a member of a large, extended or smaller nuclear family, whether one belongs to a supposedly like-minded community such as can be found on the campus of a small medical college or in a private, walled-in girls’ school, the individual consciousness is depicted, ultimately, as alienated within that environment. Ironically, the more intimate and sheltered the relationship, the more potential there is for the sense of alienation and aloneness. Moreover, as we have seen in the depiction of marital and family relationships in all of the novels discussed so far, the exploration and definition of an alienated self seeking to become a self-determining human being takes place within a specific social matrix where the psychological stakes are very high indeed. Most emotionally alienated of all in Deshpande’s fiction (with the possible exception of mothers and daughters) are those alleged in(ti)mates – husbands and wives. A Western reader, steeped in the ideological biases of her own culture, may hasten to conclude that such alienation is inevitable in a society where many marriages are arranged, giving couples very little time to get to know each other before cohabiting. Deshpande has, in fact, written about the potential for emotional disaster in arranged marriages; however, she has also written about the marital difficulties experienced by partners whose marriages are not arranged – those who have 5

Nabar, Caste as Woman, 32.

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engaged in so-called ‘love’-matches, such as that between Saru and Manohar. To argue that the basis for the marital bond is not the only factor contributing to spousal alienation in much of Deshpande’s fiction is not, however, to deny specific cultural influences on these depictions. The very fact that, in choosing a spouse, men and women in Deshpande’s novels quite often do so in opposition to societal norms and/or parental wishes indicates that no marriage – and no married couple – can escape cultural pressures and expectations, whether those pressures are viewed in a positive or a negative light. Importantly, these cultural pressures on married couples in India (particularly in Brahmin families) include fairly well-defined, traditional gender roles; an expectation that the primary purpose of marriage is to establish a family and perpetuate the family line, particularly through the birth and nurturing of sons; and an implicit understanding that, in order to maintain respectability, personal difficulties must remain strictly within the private realm. Such notions of marriage and family are not, of course, restricted to either Hindu or Brahminical culture: as I’ve discussed previously, however, the shared assumption about these values among a broad section of the Indian population puts considerable social pressure on men, women, and children in many Indian families to conform to those values and to internalize societal expectations. I want to stress here again the inclusiveness, within the middle-class world that she depicts, of Deshpande’s fictional world: it includes men, women, and children. The obsessive critical focus on Deshpande as a feminist writer or a writer about women means that very little attention has been paid to the male characters, particularly the husbands, in her early novels, aside from the role they play in suppressing or obstructing the desires and ambitions of female protagonists. A careful reading of most of these novels reveals, however, that very few of these protagonists see the man–woman relationship simply in terms of oppressor/victim. Saru may be an extreme case of a woman who (wrongly) blames herself for the violence inflicted upon her by her husband, and we have seen how her inability to separate her sense of self from an unforgiving mother contributes to this belief, but Saru is not the only Deshpande protagonist to identify the cultural and societal pressures that shape the behaviour of both men and women in the middle class and to locate in them, if not the entire problem of marital difficulties, then at least part of the solution – in an individual’s own potential for thought and action.

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As Shalmalee Palekar has astutely observed, Deshpande at no point offers a radical critique or rejection of marriage as an institution. While many of her novels are critical of the subtle and sometimes not so subtle pressures that force middle-class husbands and wives into taking on normative roles – often without even recognizing they have done so until a precipitative crisis shatters that complacency – rather than challenging the legitimacy of marriage per se, she depicts the negotiations that must occur within marriage if both partners are to be recognized as subjects. For Deshpande’s female protagonists in many of her novels, this negotiation often begins with a withdrawal, either psychological or physical, from the husband and/or the marital home, and a reconsideration, either conscious or unconscious or, usually, both, of how the past has contributed to the present crisis. Meanwhile, in what may appear to be an objectification of the spouse, like Dushyanta’s objectification of Shakuntala during her exile, the husband often remains ‘off-stage’ during the narrative present of the novel, depicted primarily in the thoughts and memories of the narrator. What my reading of The Dark Holds No Terrors suggests, however, is that such objectification also occurs in relation to an alienated self whose (family) secrets are held so deeply that self-knowledge, let alone knowledge of the interiority of the other, is difficult. Difficult, but not impossible, even in a novel like The Dark Holds No Terrors, in which Manohar’s behaviour makes him a cipher not only to Saru, but, apparently, to himself. One of the most bizarre aspects of Manu’s violent sexual attacks on his wife is that, afterwards, in the light of day, he seems genuinely not to remember these sadistic episodes. The normalcy with which he greets Saru after every one of these episodes and the fact that he responds in horror and with concern upon seeing the bruising on Saru’s arms suggest to her that he is not consciously aware of his brutality: such a situation is “perfectly possible” (184), Saru tells her incredulous father (drawing on her knowledge as a physician, but also, perhaps, on her own experience of disavowal). Such a situation may seem to be even more possible, perhaps, in a novel in which forgetting as a psychological coping strategy is the dominant theme. Through Saru’s troubled consciousness, Deshpande depicts Manohar as a man who, while he appears to exhibit no shame about his sadistic behaviour toward his wife, may be motivated by precisely that emotion: shame. We learn this not only from Saru’s reconstruction of events that lead to Manu’s transformation into a “sadist” – encounters with other

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people who draw attention to the fact that Saru is more successful professionally than her husband – but also through her description of visits that Manu’s lower-caste parents pay to Manu and Saru’s upper-middleclass house. She describes her own discomfort and what she suggests is Manu’s sense of humiliation on the occasion of these visits: She remembered how painful even their brief visits had been. They had been two glaring incongruities in their son’s home. The mother, rustic-looking, with her sari covering her head, green tattoo marks on chin and forehead, and feet that looked clumsily unaccustomed to the slippers she wore. And the father, a man with paan-stained teeth and lips, his coarse speech and thickset body so much at variance with his features which had a strange delicacy. The visits had been total failures. She had never been the cruel daughter-in-law. On the contrary, she had been too gracious, too patronising and had felt their resentment and disapproval. And over it all had hung Manu’s shame. (75)

In a similar vein, thinking about her mother’s objections to her marriage to a man from a lower caste, Saru reflects: We belong to the same caste, really. Both of us despise ourselves. What he does to me, he does it not so much because he hates me, but because he hates himself. And I… I hate myself more for letting him do it to me than I hate him for doing it to me. O yes, she could be reasonable and rational enough now, at this distance from him and their life together. She could dispassionately analyse his motives, her motives, her reactions. And try to find out why this, that had happened to their marriage, had happened. But at home, sitting in the same room with him […] she became just a terrified animal. (98–99)

Admitting that Manu is “groping in the dark, as much as I am” (96), Saru hints at the shameful secrets that have shaped Manu’s character and that have transformed him from a loving husband into a sadist. As Jasbir Jain argues, “None of the men [in Deshpande’s novels], no matter how coarse or lowly placed, is totally bereft of understanding and sensitivity. Even the worst of them has some redeeming quality.”6 I am not suggesting here that, in The Dark Holds No Terrors, we get anything like a full psychological portrait of Manu (any more than we get 6

Jain, Gendered Realities, 106.

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a full interrogation of the stereotypes evoked in the depiction of Manu’s parents that point to a ‘caste’ consciousness extending well beyond the metaphoric mental categories deployed in the latter passage), nor that what little we do know about his character either explains or absolves his behaviour toward Saru. The novel’s point of view simply cannot allow for the former possibility, and Manu’s actions, whatever his motivation, obviate the latter. Deshpande has expressed astonishment at some critics’ assumption that Saru, at the end of the novel, is considering the possibility of returning to a marriage in which she has been subjected to such abuse. As in Kalidasa’s play, the ring of recollection does not, in itself, re-unite lovers so much as it unlocks the very possibility of a future, a movement forward in time, for the one who possesses it. What I am suggesting, rather, is that the limited points of view in Deshpande’s narrational repertoire and her focus on the inner lives of female characters in her early novels do allow glimpses into, or at least fully acknowledge, the existence of a male unconscious that will become more fully elaborated in her later novels: A Matter of Time and Moving On, in particular. Moreover, the female protagonist in many of Deshpande’s novels is quite often haunted not only by her own memories – of both childhood and marriage – but by those of her husband as well. It is as though, in re-writing her own (s)crypt and reclaiming a limited kind of agency, Deshpande’s protagonist must confront or at least imagine the (s)crypt of the other that also haunts her and the marital relationship. Chanchala K. Naik intriguingly hints at this possibility when discussing Deshpande’s later novel Moving On: In probing into the complex relationship within the family, Deshpande weaves her narrative around multiple acts of transgression while bringing into contestation self / other, man / woman, bone / body, physical / emotional, sexual / ethical, individual / social binaries. As the narrator is a woman, these dichotomies are interrogated in the self-reflexivity of her own position, as she locates the self in the labyrinth of her lived experience and socially contestable norms. The experiential becomes the touchstone above and beyond other things where the existential is not a compelling motif but facilitates reflections on life in that others’ secrets are discovered complicating

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one’s own opinions about them and also continually revising oneself, one’s perspective.7

If such a process of discovery is true in an early novel such as The Dark Holds No Terrors, in which it would be easy simply to vilify Manohar, it becomes even more significant in both That Long Silence and The Binding Vine, where the narrative focal point is also that of a woman experiencing serious domestic crisis. In these novels, which most critics have seen as exploring the silencing of women’s voices, the silences (and absences) of male characters provide a haunting counterpoint. Both novels, but particularly The Binding Vine, provocatively raise issues regarding the provenance of narrative: whose story is it we are telling when we try to tell the stories of our lives and what responsibility do we have to share knowledge about another person’s (s)crypt? Both novels also venture outside of the ‘cloister’ into a more diversified urban setting, thus testing the individual’s sense of alienation within a broader community, continuing to raise and intensify the focus on issues of class, as well as individual, consciousness. 

You can never be the heroine of your own story. — That Long Silence (1) This is not Mohan’s story entirely. — That Long Silence (34)

More than any of Deshpande’s novels to date, That Long Silence has established her reputation as a feminist and as a ‘woman’s’ writer. Winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1990, this single novel has attracted more critical attention than all of Deshpande’s other fiction combined. The focus of that criticism has been almost exclusively on the difficulties inherent in what is broadly conceived as generic ‘man–woman’ relationships and, specifically, Jaya’s realization of how unhappy she is in her 7

Chanchala K. Naik, “Moving On: In Search of Individual Autonomy and SelfRealization,” in Writing Difference: The Novels of Shashi Deshpande,” ed. Chanchala K. Naik (Delhi: Pencraft International, 2005): 218; emphasis added.

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marriage to her engineer husband Mohan. Indeed, the epigraph to the novel points to the strong positivist feminist impulse behind it: ‘If I were a man and cared to know the world I lived in, I almost think it would make me a shade uneasy – the weight of that long silence of onehalf the world.’ Elizabeth Robins, in a speech to the W W S L , 1907.8

There can be no denying that the novel foregrounds women’s silence – not just that of Jaya, the main character, but of many other women depicted in the novel – in the face of oppressive social forces, including everything from marital incompatibility and societal expectations of women as wives and mothers to horrific spousal abuse. Some of the most harrowing accounts of marital abuse, in fact, involve Mohan’s parents and are related to Jaya by Mohan himself. Most interesting of all, as we shall see, one of the most poignant stories about Mohan’s mother is one that Jaya withholds from Mohan. However, That Long Silence is not simply a diatribe on the sadistic behaviour of men and the victimization of women, nor is it a wholesale condemnation of marriage, arranged or any other kind, as several critics have recognized. Y.S. Sunita Reddy and Sarla Palkar, for example, note the self-reflexive and self-questioning stance of a narrator who accepts responsibility for her “victimization”9 That Long Silence is, rather, a (horror) novel about particular characters facing specific circumstances. In fact, what has been described by most critics in feminist terms as an inner psychological meditation on a marriage in crisis is also, I will argue, very much an exploration of a middle-class couple coming face to face with what is to them the terrifying, almost unimaginable and therefore ineffable, possibility of social disgrace and economic ruin. Reading this novel from a perspective that recognizes the multiple and complex –yet often not conscious – environmental determinants of character, we can better understand the heightened atmosphere of anxiety and terror in the novel that cannot be wholly ascribed, as one critic has suggested, to Jaya’s

8 Cited in Shashi Deshpande, That Long Silence (New Delhi: Penguin, 1988): Author’s Note. Further page references are in the main text. 9 Sarla Palkar. “Breaking the Silence: That Long Silence,” Indian Women Novelists Set I, vol. 5, ed. R.K. Dhawan (New Delhi: Prestige, 1991): 169.

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“morbid, chaotic, fragmented self”10 and her “masochistic brain,”11 symptoms of the “malady of the modern woman” whose “excessive development of the sensibility” has made a “shambles of her mind.”12 As we learn just after the novel opens, Jaya has followed Mohan into a kind of self-imposed exile from their comfortable suburban home where they can privately wait out an investigation into corruption in Mohan’s company. Mohan fears he may lose his job over the charges, of which the reader never learns specific details, and this fear of unemployment and homelessness hovers over and haunts the entire novel. The prospect of a decline in the family’s fortunes is also a source of deep shame: after their children have been conveniently packed off on a summer holiday with family friends, Mohan tells Jaya “They must not know, they must be told nothing” (50). Without telling their children or any of their friends or relatives, Mohan and Jaya retreat to Jaya’s family-owned flat, a somewhat seedy apartment in the Dadar district of Bombay13 in which she and Mohan had begun their married life. Significantly, although the flat is not an ancestral home, it is described as haunted: “There was one thing I hadn’t bargained for when I had agreed to come here with Mohan – the ghosts who sprang out at me the moment I entered” (12). Jaya lists these ghosts, many of whom are still living: the first family owner, “The amiable ghost of our amiable uncle” (41) Makarandmama, a Muslim who fled India after Partition; Jaya’s mother and brother and his friends; Jaya’s first child, a son named Rahul, who began life in the flat; and the ghost of her young husband Mohan, whom she ironically recalls telling her after they were first married, “‘We won’t be here long’” (12). This list is by no means complete, as we come to learn later in the novel. Two other less “amiable” presences haunt Jaya at the Dadar flat: Kusum, Jaya’s mentally deranged cousin, who rented the flat for some time and, after insisting on ending her psychological treatments in Bombay and going home to her village, committed suicide by jumping into a 10

S. Sengupta, “That Long Silence: Imagery of Death, Decay and Desolation,” in The Fiction of Shashi Deshpande, ed. R.S. Pathak (New Delhi: Creative Books, 1998): 215. 11 Sengupta, “That Long Silence: Imagery of Death, Decay and Desolation,” 216. 12 “That Long Silence: Imagery of Death, Decay and Desolation,” 217. 13 The name Bombay, rather than Mumbai, is used throughout Deshpande’s novels. For the sake of consistency, I refer to the city as Bombay as well.

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well; and Kamat, Jaya’s upstairs friend and confidante, whose dead body Jaya had, some years before, discovered in his flat, but had inexplicably abandoned, without informing anyone of her discovery. Confined to this haunted space and in the midst of a crisis that leaves her feeling helpless, Jaya finds herself re-evaluating her life and her marriage and becoming increasingly distant from a husband whose air of authority has crumbled and who is suddenly uncharacteristically vulnerable and needy. While Jaya is as uncomfortable with the dirt and squalor in the unused apartment as is the “fastidious” (12) Mohan, she is at first more sanguine about the (potential) change in the couple’s circumstances and with the return to the Dadar flat, seeing the latter, at least, through a nostalgic haze as a return to a former home and a relief from the tyranny of keeping up middle-class appearances. In the reduction in their circumstances, Jaya even romanticizes a kind of existential freedom from the burden of property, drawing an analogy from their situation to a figure in the Mahabharata: Maitreyee comes to my mind now, Maitreyee who so definitely rejected her philosopher husband Yajnavalkya’s offer of half his property. ‘Will this property give me immortality?’ she asked him. ‘No,’ he said, and she immediately rejected the property. To know what you want. . . I have been denied that. (25)

This complacency about their reduced circumstances, in which Jaya initially sees even the ghosts that haunt the apartment as benign, does not last long. When Mohan abruptly storms out of the apartment after a bitter argument and fails to return, Jaya realizes how much of her identity is invested in a marriage whose routine predictability, while it had settled into a deadening complacency, also provided a sense of security against what is described frequently in the novel as a chaotic and threatening urban environment. As Jaya becomes extremely anxious and her thoughts increasingly haunted by the recollection of past traumas, particularly after she realizes that Mohan may not return and after she learns that her son has run away from his vacationing guardians, the less amiable ghosts of the past and the bleak prospects for her future can no longer be kept at bay. Jaya’s descriptions of events begin to take on a more surreal and nightmarish quality. After succumbing to a brief but intense physical illness, Jaya appears to find the inner resolve necessary to make changes in both her life and her

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marriage. Like many of Deshpande’s novels, this one ends on a somewhat positive note, but still inconclusively: reunited with her runaway son, Jaya also receives a telegram from Mohan announcing “All well returning Friday morning” (189). While it is unclear what exactly has been resolved – the scandal or the marital rift or both – it does seem evident enough that the crisis, like Jaya’s fever, has passed and that Jaya and Mohan will resume their former lives, although perhaps on quite different terms. This linear description of the novel’s plot has been wrested from a labyrinthine and cryptic narrative structure in which the description of significant events from the past – such as the horrifying discovery of Kamat’s body – are deferred until very late in the narrative. The novel is written in the first person, retrospectively. Like Indu in Roots and Shadows, Jaya is a writer attempting to order her thoughts and convey her experiences, as honestly as possible, from a point in time after the crisis in her life has passed; Guru Charan Behera notes the novel’s status as “a novel about a novel-to-be-written, a self-referential self-reflexive writing in which, as William Gass wrote, ‘the forms of fiction serve as the material on which further forms can be imposed’.”14 Indeed, as Behera notes, True to the antillusionistic [sic] mode of narrative self-consciousness the condition and artifice and the process of invention of the novel are ‘laid bare’ in the ‘prologue’ that reveals the identity of the narrator as an order of discourse not a mirror of life.15

Part I of the novel, which serves as a kind of prologue, does indeed espouse a kind of manifesto about the brutal frankness, and the potential for resistance, that might be required of such an approach to writing about the self: To achieve anything, to become anything, you’ve got to be hard and ruthless. Yes, even if you want to be a saint, if you want to love the whole world, you’ve got to stop loving individual human beings first.

14 Guru Charan Behera, “The Multicoloured Patchword Quilt: The Narrative Pattern in Shashi Deshpande’s That Long Silence,” in Writing Difference: The Novels of Shashi Deshpande, ed. Chanchala K. Naik (Delhi: Pencraft, 2005): 131. Quoted from Gass, Fiction and the Figures of Life (1970; New York: David R. Godine, 1983): 24–25. 15 Behera, “The Multicoloured Patchword Quilt,” 132.

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And if they love you, and they bleed when you show them you don’t love them, not specially, well, so much the worse for them! There’s just no other way of being a saint. Or a painter. A writer. Why am I thinking of these things now? Is it because I find myself struggling for words? Strange – I’ve always found writing easy. Words came to me with a facility that pleased me; sometimes shamed me, too – it seemed too easy. But now, for some reason, I am reminded of the process of childbirth. The only memory of it that remains with me is that of fear – a fear that I was losing control over my own body. And so I resisted. Am I resisting now? Perhaps. For I’m not writing of all those innocent young girls I’ve written of till now; girls who ultimately mated themselves with the right men. Nor am I writing a story of a callous, insensitive husband and sensitive, suffering wife. I’m writing of us. Of Mohan and me. And I know this – you can never be the heroine of your own story. Self-revelation is a cruel process. (1)

We learn later in the novel that Jaya’s earlier attempts to write honestly about marriage met with Mohan’s disapproval and that, in writing a column on domestic life under the pseudonym “Seeta,” she has practised a kind of self-censorship, as only one of the many compromises she has made in her marriage, a process she describes as forging “a delicately balanced relationship, so much so that [Mohan and I] have even snipped off bits of ourselves to keep the scales on an even keel” (7). This admission of a mutual accommodation of husband and wife is followed by the often-quoted metaphor that Jaya uses to describe the present state of her marriage: “A pair of bullocks yoked together…. that was how I saw the two of us the day we came [to the Dadar flat]” (7). Along with the frequently quoted simile about marriage – “a man is like a sheltering tree” (advice Jaya is given on her wedding day) – the idea of two bullocks yoked together conveys what, precisely, is at stake in the threat to Mohan’s position as primary bread-winner in the family: the crisis the couple is facing threatens a carefully balanced, if plodding, partnership that has, until this point, appeared to work for both of them. In an ironic touch, Jaya, leading the way up the stairs to the couple’s economic descent, senses the shift in their roles and, from that moment until the novel’s conclusion, struggles to understand the impact on her self of this challenge to their economic future and the predictability of their marriage.

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However, as Jaya realizes, the idea of ‘self’ is an illusory and evasive concept: But what was that ‘myself’? ‘Trying to find oneself’ – what a cliché that has become. As if such a thing is possible. As if there is such a thing as one self, intact and whole, waiting to be discovered. On the contrary, there are so many, each self attached like a Siamese twin to a self of another person, neither able to exist without the other. Perhaps this is why I had been so confused when I heard, years later, from Kamala-kaki, that between me and Dada [Jaya’s brother] there had been a baby girl who had died soon after birth. I with an elder sister? I had felt an entirely different person at the thought. (69)

If the self, in this view, can be seen as a somewhat fluid and contingent entity, it is also, paradoxically, one that is always already “chalked out”: relational, circumscribed, and pre-destined by accidents of birth. One of these accidents, in Jaya’s case, was to be born into a ‘progressive’ Brahminical family. Jaya’s father’s decision to send his three children to an English-medium school, arguing, over the objections of his wife, that “It’s going to be more useful to them than being good Brahmins” (90), is a decision taken by an astute man who understands the cultural capital of the English language in post-Independence India. Indeed, this education proves decisive in Jaya’s arranged marriage to Mohan (and probably as well in Jaya’s brother’s emigration to and success in the U S A ). What I find fascinating about the treatment of language in this novel by an Indian woman writer whose writing is, according to Tabish Khair’s argument in Babu Fictions, alienated within the Indian market because it is written in English and, as I have argued elsewhere,16, marginalized by the international market because of its modernist and bourgeois sensibilities, is the writer’s complex awareness and uncanny portrayal of the way that language and class coincide to produce the existentially and socially alienated bourgeois subject in India. This uncanniness is reflected in some of the most cryptic passages in the novel.

16

See my essay “‘Think of the Brontës’: Domesticating the Exotic in Shashi Deshpande’s Small Remedies,” in South Asia and Its Others: Reading the “Exotic”, ed. V.G. Julie Rajan & Ayetree Phukan (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009): 33–53.

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While many critics have commented on Mohan’s desire for an Englishspeaking wife, few have paid sufficient attention to the medium through which Mohan’s desire is initially addressed in the novel17 – we come to learn of it through a dream (or nightmare) from which Jaya awakens: At first we are walking together. Then he goes on ahead and I am left behind. I am unperturbed and go on at my own pace, walking now between rows of houses, so close to one another that there is a slight sense of claustrophobia. For some reason, I have to pass through a house, but it is impossible for me to climb the flight of stairs that leads to the house. As I struggle, a girl comes to me. She is not surprised by my presence; on the contrary, she accepts it as if she had expected me. She helps me up, but suddenly when I am in the house it comes upon me with a sense of shock that I am alone, that I have been left behind. I will never be able to find him now. The realisation that I am lost overwhelms me. Worse – I do not know where I am, where I have to go and how I can find him. The disorientation is total. The girl has helped me into a room and I find myself surrounded by a number of young girls. They are all smiling, and the thought comes to me. . . they are on my side. But none of them can help me. I am utterly helpless and really ill now. I lie down, stiff as a corpse, and the faces around me change from curiosity to sympathy. The girls talk in low tones among themselves, discussing my predicament, while I continue to lie there, paralysed, aphasic. Suddenly, he is there in the room. He comes straight to me through the girls. I am up in a moment, my illness, my helplessness quite gone. I run to him. ‘Come,’ he says, ‘we have to hurry. The taxi is waiting. If we don’t hurry, it will go away.’ ‘Where is it?’ ‘It’s waiting near the Portuguese Church. Hurry up.’

17

Behera’s article describes the incident without even noting that it is a dream: “Towards the end of Part-2 (85–86), there are passages of hallucinatory vision expressed through a cinematic visual, of their (Mohan and Jaya) walking together, her being left behind, struggling to climb the flight of stairs [. . . ]. This is presented in italics to underscore her sense of disorientation, helplessness and insignificance resulting from her long continued dependence on and domination by her husband”; Behera, “The Multicoloured Patchword Quilt,” 138.

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But as I run after him, I realise that it is too late anyway, we will never be able to make it, we will never be able to get away, it is all my fault, all my fault. . . (85–86)

Immediately upon awakening, Jaya places this dream in both a transgenerational – she is reminded of how she and her father had related their dreams to each other – and a sceptical context: she recalls previous nightmares in which she was “trapped in ghostly passages” where “sepulchral, deep voices [...] filled me with horror,” nightmares that “slid away as I woke up.” Just at the point of dismissing this latest nightmare, however, Jaya catches sight of Mohan’s sleeping face and, with “a sudden jolt of recognition,” realizes that she knows not just the house in her dream, but is at some level aware of its significance to their current plight: “It was the one Mohan had pointed out to me in Saptagiri, saying, ‘It was here that it all began’” (87). Facing not only an existential crisis about her role as Mohan’s wife but also an important crisis of economic security, Jaya dreams of a house she has never entered – a house symbolically named Crossword House – that has had a significant impact on her husband’s notion of social mobility and in which she finds herself alone (although accompanied by a “girl” and then “surrounded by a number of girls”), physically immobilized, stripped of language (“aphasic”), and desperately trying to catch up to her male companion. Jaya’s reference to her father after this dream alerts us to the fact that the dream incorporates aspects of her past related to the trauma of her father’s death (“like a corpse”) and its aftermath, in which the family was forced to re-locate and the teen-aged Jaya experienced a serious illness, from which she recovered to a renewed sense of loss and dislocation. The dream is also prescient in that it portends Mohan’s sudden departure the next day and Jaya’s own subsequent illness, during which she is tended by neighbour women in the tenement who are sympathetic (“on her side”). Most of all, however, the dream is heavily encrypted as an overdetermined site of the ‘other’s’ (incorporated) desire, as it features both elements of the story that Mohan has told her about the significance of this house to his dream of upward social mobility and Mohan’s current anxiety (which Jaya also experiences) about a threatened descent from middle-class privilege. Mrinalini Sebastian suggests that in That Long Silence, unlike in other Deshpande novels, the “power wielded by the English language, by the

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people who can call themselves ‘educated,’ who see themselves differently because of their ability to talk this language” is “not regarded as positive by the self-critical protagonist, Jaya.”18 But, for Jaya, the issue is not simply one of determining the positive or negative value of possessing the English language; rather, as is clear from Jaya’s nightmare and the story she relates about Mohan’s moment of “recognition” in Crossword House that language possesses one, as much as it is possessed, and it is this link between possession of the trappings of privilege and the fear of dispossession that opens the novel to a reading that goes beyond (while still acknowledging much of the validity of) seeing Jaya’s crisis as a “neurosis” attributable to “the low level of tolerance that Jaya is bestowed with, an earlier traumatic experience, that of her father Appa’s sudden death.”19 Rather, what is at stake in the novel is more than an individual identity- crisis or even a crisis in the relationship between two individuals in a marriage – it is the horror of recognizing the contingency of privilege and of facing an unimaginable, unspeakable, and shameful dispossession: of language, of home, and of self. What Jaya’s (encrypted) dream reveals is Mohan’s desire to escape from the impoverishment of his youth through his own education, as well as through the acquisition of a privileged language (if only indirectly through marriage to a woman who speaks fluent English). In the aftermath of Jaya’s dream/nightmare, she remembers the stories that Mohan had told her of his past: the desperate poverty that resulted in his Brahminical family having to accept charity from the community; the ignominy (from a Brahmin’s perspective) of his mother’s having to take work as a cook; and his father’s heavy drinking and physical abuse of his wife and children. Mohan’s desperation to transcend this background proves greater than his shame at receiving charity in only one area of his life. Seeing education as his only way out of poverty, he accepts school tuition from a stranger, a wealthy old man who, for reasons not elaborated, takes a special interest in him. It is at the request of the old man that Mohan attends a dinner at “Crossword House,” so named because the proceeds

18

Sebastian, The Enterprise of Reading Differently, 187. Rajeshwar Mittapalli, “The Trauma of a House-Wife: Shashi Deshpande’s That Long Silence,” in Studies in Indian Writing in English, vol. 2, ed. Rajeshwar Mittapalli & Pier Paolo Piciucco (New Delhi: Atlantic, 2001): 59. 19

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from a crossword contest allowed the benefactor’s son to escape the extended family. It is at the aptly named Crossword House that Mohan, as he later tells his carefully selected convent-educated wife, was dazzled by the presence of three well-dressed and perfume-smelling young women, perhaps “‘rich relations’” (89) of the old man, one of whom he hears “‘speaking in English’” “‘as if it was a real language, easily and fluently’” (89). Mohan cannot remember the words spoken, “‘but I can remember how wonderful it seemed to me to be able to talk like that, to be so... so easy and... confident and how terrible it was to be shut out...to be different...’” (89– 90). And so, Mohan goes on to say, he had been reminded of these women when he first encountered Jaya and, overhearing her speaking to her brother in English, decided “‘I would marry you’” (90). Jaya says later in the novel: I was conscious of having been chained to [Mohan’s] dream, the dream that had begun for him when, as a boy, he had seen a gleaming vision of three women in a dingy corridor. It seemed to me that I’d carried those three women of his through all the years of our marriage. (120; emphasis added)

Jasbir Jain suggests that Jaya “feels inhibited by Mohan’s dreams, which imprison her and reduce her area of freedom”;20 however, Jaya is more than inhibited by Mohan’s dreams: she is inhabited and possessed by them, as not only her actual words, but the manifest content of her nightmare indicates. Jaya’s depiction of Mohan’s halting speech above is a fascinating contrast to the verbal alacrity of his wife, but also to the topic on which he is speaking: the fluency with which the young woman speaks English. While it is unclear in the novel how well Mohan himself commands the English language (implicit in any of Deshpande’s novels is the fact that characters whose dialogue is rendered in English may be speaking to each other in any of a number of languages) the frequent disruptions in Mohan’s speech – and, indeed, Mohan’s silence at times – can be read as a sign of his deep and barely articulate anxiety about escaping both poverty and the squalid domestic scene at home, where his father’s brutality

20

Jain, Gendered Realities, 83.

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and his mother’s submission to her husband’s physical needs were sources of deep shame to him. Mohan’s difficulty in using language in the scene above should remind us of an exchange much earlier in the novel. Just before the crisis that threatens Mohan’s job, Mohan comes back from Delhi with a story of something he has witnessed that has visibly upset him: the sight of middle-class women, whose army husbands had been accused of spying and summarily arrested, protesting alongside the road, “sitting on the bare ground, right in dirt [....] Just sitting there on the ground like – like beggars. Imagine, Jaya, people like us in that situation!” (5). Obviously shaken by the fact that “Well-educated, hard-working people in secure jobs, cushioned by insurance and provident funds, with two healthy, wellfed children going to good schools” (5) might be reduced to such circumstances, Mohan is at first uncharacteristically eloquent about the families’ plight and then reduced to speechlessness in what Jaya felt at the time to be an “exaggerated” response to someone else’s tragedy. When Mohan, surprisingly, resorts to poetic language, comparing the dripping ink on the women’s signs to tears, Jaya “sat up and gave Mohan my entire attention” (5), but then he has to search, twice, for the right word to describe how the women looked to him, both times reduced to uttering a single banal word, “terrible” (6). But even if Jaya is (ironically, in a novel purportedly about women’s silences) the more articulate of the couple, Mohan’s heavy investment in Jaya’s knowledge of the English language extends to his perceived control of her public use of that language; in the argument that sends Mohan off in an angry rage, an argument that stems from Mohan’s accusations that Jaya is selfish and does not care about what is happening to them (to him), Jaya reminds him of the sacrifice she feels she has made to their marriage: “‘I gave up my writing because of you’” (143). By “writing,” Jaya means, of course, a particular type of writing. She is alluding specifically to a decision she had taken after Mohan’s reaction to seeing her first published short story, a work of fiction about a married couple. Assuming that others will read the work as autobiographical, Mohan accuses Jaya of invading the couple’s privacy and respectability: “‘reveal[ing] us, how can you reveal our lives to the world in this way’” (144). In turning from the type of creative writing she had wanted to do to writing formulaic stories and a column for a women’s magazine about a dutiful housewife, Seeta, Jaya feels she “had relinquished them instead, all

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those stories that had been taking shape in me because I had been scared – scared of hurting Mohan, scared of jeopardising the only career I had, my marriage” (144). Ironically, after the threat to his job and on the same night that Jaya dreams about Mohan’s “Crossword House,” Mohan suggests to Jaya that she might consider taking up writing as more than a part-time hobby, as a way of earning income to help support the family. Jaya does not respond to this suggestion; instead, she thinks silently to herself that “I’ve abjured them, all those things – ‘Seeta’, my weekly column, my stories” (99). Her resolve can be read as a kind of silent resistance to Mohan’s desire to continue to control and commodify her speech, as her subsequent dream, set in a house built with the proceeds from a crossword-puzzle contest, indicates. The relationship between (the English) language and class anxiety and privilege is drawn even more clearly when Jaya recalls a visit to the emergency room of a hospital during her second pregnancy. Having had no time to prepare herself for the visit, she is dressed in a somewhat soiled and shabby sari. When the doctor addresses her in “convent-accented Hindi,” putting “the questions in the simplest terms, struggling to find [...] words simple enough to be understood by the kind of woman he had judged me to be from my appearance” (60), Jaya replies “in English, not deliberately using the language but doing it automatically” (61); in other words, she uses it as though it is a “real language,” thus indicating her class status. The transformation in the doctor’s attitude, particularly after she is identified as “Mrs. Kulkarni,” from deprecating to apologetic and deferential, is dramatic. When Jaya tells Mohan about this encounter, he misses her point entirely: rather than sharing Jaya’s amusement at the doctor’s embarrassed reaction, Mohan is mortified that the doctor was misled by her appearance as to her class and insists that Jaya dress better, even at home. When Jaya protests about the costs of adding to her wardrobe, Mohan expresses desperation about getting out of his low-paying job; there is even a strong suggestion that this episode sets Mohan on a course of seeking advancement at work by less than honest means. Possession of (and by) the English language may be fetishized as one of the symbols of bourgeois accomplishment, but for Mohan it is also just one of the means to a specific end: obtaining financial security for himself and his family. However, as Mohan points out in the later argument that almost ends their marriage, and as Jaya herself has to admit, though only to herself, that security has been important to her as well: “That woman [the

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woman who had married Mohan] – she’d married a man with a promising future” (122). That secure future now threatened, Jaya and Mohan face the potential of being reduced to “nothing but our bodies, and after we had dealt with them we faced blankness. The nothingness of what had seemed a busy and full life was frightening” (25). If, at first, that thought had evoked in Jaya a “curious sense of [existential] freedom” (25), of being released from the conventional (s)crypt of her life as a housewife, the “cross words” between the couple, followed by Mohan’s apparent abandonment, bring home to her a very real threat: the complete physical and psychic vulnerability of a woman who lacks her own resources and is not under the “sheltering tree” of a man’s protection. As Jasbir Jain explains, “all definitions [of femininity in India] begin with the body, its visibility and invisibility, its cycle of development and its sphere of use.”21 However, class privilege can provide a kind of shield for women’s bodies against abuse and neglect. Until Jaya replies to the doctor in English and is immediately identified thereafter as Mrs Kulkarni, for example, her appearance signals that she possesses nothing more than a (lower-class) body to be tended, a body that may potentially receive less careful attention from the medical establishment than would an upper-class body, a point made clear when Jaya is asked to intervene in the medical treatment of her servant Jeeva’s son, who has been stabbed in a drunken brawl. Jaya’s increasing sense of vulnerability points to her growing recognition of the impact of class status on her material, as well as psychological, well-being. An aspect of That Long Silence that has received insufficient critical attention22 is the frequent reference to the current (the novel is set in the early 1980s, during a time of great labour unrest in the city) and historical economic crises in Bombay – discussions of past famines and scarcity, recent strikes and marches in the streets, the increasing number of beggars in the city. In contrast to Sebastian’s claim that That Long Silence must be read contrapuntally to reveal its class biases, Rashmi Varma notes that “The fact that Jaya realizes how those moments of engagement with masses of people construct her as an upper middle-class privileged 21

Jain, Gendered Realities, 104. A notable exception is Rashmi Varma’s essay “UnCivil Lines: Engendering Citizenship in the Postcolonial City,” N W S A Journal 10 (1998): 32–55. 22

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woman provides the narrative with its emancipatory trajectory.”23. Scenes of social unrest are depicted in the novel with a sense of either fascinated horror or horrified fascination. One scene, in particular – the scene at Juhu beach, prior to the family’s decline in their fortunes, where the family car is surrounded by beggars who watch the children eat ice-cream cones – is imbued with an almost filmic sense of horror that seems vastly exaggerated, like Mohan’s response to seeing the protest in Delhi, in relation to the real threat to the car’s occupants: The circle had closed in. A face was peering in at me now, a hand reaching in. I began to roll up the glass, while the eye glared balefully at me. This was no child, this was a malevolent stranger. Fear entered into me – I had to roll up the glass, I had to keep her out. Higher and higher I went, the hand still holding on, clinging on as if it would never let go. It was a silent struggle between the two of us, or so I though, until Rahul screamed out, ‘Don’t, Mummy, don’t do that!’ Startled, I stopped. And it was, I suddenly realised, a child’s hand that let go, a child that stepped back from the car. (73–74)

Jaya’s blind terror, and her son Rahul’s response, reveal, at the very least, the narrator’s awareness of the yawning disparity between the comfort and privilege of the life that she and her family enjoy and the hunger, poverty, and desperation by which their middle-class island of privilege is surrounded In other words, in this scene, she is given a glimpse into a possible future in which the tenuous barriers that separate her middle-class family from that urban squalor are transparent and fragile. Jaya’s oftenquoted warning – “Stay at home, look after your babies, keep out the rest of the world, and you’re safe” (17) – is typically read ironically: the home, as we have seen in The Dark Holds No Terrors, is not always a safe or comfortable asylum. However, the threat in That Long Silence comes from both inside the family and outside. The threat from the streets is chillingly portrayed in a scene that takes place in the Dadar flat after Jaya and Mohan’s relocation. Jaya first recalls her early fascination with the “teeming life” of Bombay streets, including its “mobs,” “brawls,” and “drunkards” (54), and then contrasts this fascination with her response to a protest march on the streets below her flat:

23

Rashmi Varma, “UnCivil Lines,” 49.

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But now, standing on the balcony, the sun-warmed wooden railing under my hands, as I watched the men march past with flags and banners, men hemmed in by baton-swinging policemen, I felt somehow that this procession was different. Was it because these men marched in silence, with neither slogans nor angry, violent gestures? (The anger, though, was unmistakably there, making its presence felt through the semblance of orderly protest.) Or was it because, for the first time, I did not have the comfortable detachment of a spectator? I felt threatened, and not by the men, not by the violence I could feel simmering in them. I had a queer sensation, as if something was breaking up, a design or a pattern I was familiar with. Without it, I would have to face the unknown. . . . All of us standing on our balconies, at our windows, watched the men in silence. The traffic had been halted to let them go past, and there were no sounds but the shuffling of feet, the harsher ringing of the policemen’s hobnailed boots, the occasional tap of a lathi against the ground. There was something about these men – to me, they seemed as enigmatic as the words I’d been seeing splashed in white paint on walls and bus shelters, huge words screaming out – T O T A L REVOLUTION. A nauseating whiff of human excreta came to me from the road bordering the slums. Holding my hand to my nose, I turned round sharply and saw Mohan near me, a magazine he had been reading dangling from his fingers. (54–55)

This scene is remarkable for several reasons. First, the silence and orderliness of the men’s protest seem, to Jaya, much more sinister than the noisy protests she associates with Bombay’s past. No longer a “spectator,” Jaya is drawn sympathetically to this mute protest against an oppressive status quo at the same time as she is horrified and repelled by the idea of an “enigmatic” future in which “T O T A L R E V O L U T I O N ” will lead to a “breaking up of a design.” There is both a sense of solidarity with the working men in this scene, as well as a sense of repugnance at all that a workers’ revolution might bring: the flattening of distinctions among classes, the wholesale re-ordering of society and redistribution of wealth. What this scene reveals is Jaya’s deep ambivalence about social change, an ambivalence that disturbs, disrupts, and undermines a positivist reading of the novel’s feminism. The “whiff of human execreta” that causes Jaya to turn away from the window, even though it comes from the slums rather than from the protesters below, is an abject sensory image that

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reinforces Jaya’s ambivalence about a social body stripped bare of its veneer of respectability and class privilege. As the recurrent images in the novel of the emaciated bodies of the poor and of seething violence in the streets remind the reader, the crisis that Jaya faces is more than a marital crisis: it is a psychological and a physical crisis in response to a threat not only to Jaya’s identity as a married woman but to the potential of her own self being reduced to a naked and unprotected (by class and marital status) female body. When Jaya’s servant Jeeja mentions to Jaya merely that she knows that “Saheb has gone away” (161), Jaya registers an immediate and abject bodily sense of mortification and shame: It was like being in that crazy recurrent dream of mine. I was looking for a toilet, I was desperate, I had to find one, I’d disgrace myself if I didn’t find one at once. And yes, there it was – the immense relief, and then the overpowering shame as I realised I was in a public place surrounded by people staring at me steadily and silently. I struggled to find words to rebut the shaming charge ‘Saheb has gone away.’ (161–62)

Without “that barrier Mohan had raised between me and other men” (167), Jaya feels herself to be an object of “pity” and “[c]ontempt” (167), even less able to control her own body than she could in marriage, as it becomes a body available to other men, on new and therefore unknown and frightening terms. In That Long Silence, the ‘natural’ body and its functions – which offer both “relief” and “shame” – can be read ambivalently throughout the novel across both gender and class lines. If writing honestly is described as similar to the pain of childbirth and the sensation of “losing control over my own body,” a victory over feminine self-censorship that is, nonetheless, inflected with feelings of shame, so, too, is there a sense of shame, of public exposure, in the idea of a woman’s being ‘liberated’ from marriage. These metaphors have obvious feminist implications (not in spite of their ambivalence but because of it), but they may also reveal class biases, as we see when such an ambivalence goes beyond the metaphoric in Jaya’s response to actual bodily functions. Upon catching a glimpse of the stained underwear of her lower-class neighbour’s daughter, for example, Jaya is both “uncomfortable” about and somewhat envious of Nilima’s lack of shame about what is, to Nilima, not just “a monthly

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curse” but “a hated enemy” (63). Jaya’s genuine empathy with Nilima’s complaints about the nuisances of the body – she is reminded of her own failed experiments to control her body’s reproductive system by taking the birth-control pill – do not entirely conceal a sense of class difference in relation to bodily functions: for example, the young lower-class woman’s lack of self-consciousness about her body and its functions is contrasted both with Jaya’s own “awkwardness” as a teenager about such things and with Jaya’s daughter Rati’s “neat and tidy” approach to the onset of menses (64). Not all such distinctions, however, are drawn between classes or castes: Jaya also contrasts her own sense of order and cleanliness, in mind and body, with that of her mentally ill relative, Kusum, who acts as a touchstone throughout the novel for Jaya’s own predicament and whose solution to being without a husband – madness and suicide – Jaya very nearly emulates but, ultimately, rejects. Moreover, as Rashmi Varma points out, much of the shame and discomfort that Jaya feels toward uncleanliness stems from an “always uncomfortabl[e]” internalization24 of her husband Mohan’s carefully cultivated “fastidiousness” (12) that is also a legacy of her own Brahminic upbringing. While it is difficult to determine whether Jaya’s reactions to squalor and disorder stem from a cultivated Brahminical response to pollution or whether they stem from individual experience or preference, it is probably safe to say that, as we discovered in Roots and Shadows, these two determinants operate, at an unconscious level, iteratively. At a conscious level, however, Jaya is fully aware of the way that class/caste prejudice informs her behaviour, despite her best intentions. Significantly, she silently expresses this self-awareness in her argument with Mohan about his stifling of her written expression, and her self-recognition also reflects further on the crucial episode with the doctor, in which Jaya knows she had reaped the benefits of her class: The [Seeta] column, yes, it had made me known. My profile silhouetted in stark black that accompanied each article frightened me each time I saw it. It was like seeing someone masquerading as myself, or as if I was masquerading as the woman who wrote that column. The woman who wrote it had no doubts about anything, only strong convictions. And she was a liberal, without any prejudices. Whereas I – when the pockmarked doctor in Ambegaon, so 24

Varma, “UnCivil Lines,” 48.

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grey and dusty otherwise, had suddenly sparkled at my presence, my instinctive reaction had been a kind of recoil, my immediate thought had been – but he’s so ugly! And when Rahul was born, my first question, even before I had come wholly out of the anaesthesia, had been – is he fair? (119–20)

Jaya’s confession here, like Indu’s in Roots and Shadows, is that her identity has been shaped by, and is torn between, an informed liberal individualism that knows itself to be at odds with the deeply internalized prejudices of caste. It is perhaps not surprising that, within the context of received criticism of Deshpande’s work, this passage has been almost entirely overlooked, even by a critic such as Mrinalini Sebastian, who calls for a class-conscious reading of Deshpande’s work that, she argues, could only be accomplished through a contrapuntal reading of Deshpande’s novels – against the grain – to reveal what Sebastian contends are the concealed workings of class privilege in Deshpande’s novels: The privilege of class, that of liberal education and that of birth in the upper caste (even though it is not overtly present) not only splits this sign [of gender] but puts the woman having these privileges in opposition with the woman who has no education, the woman who comes from that section of the society which is obviously disadvantaged. Thus it is not enough, as Bhabha does, to recognize the difference in content but to recognize that marginalization can occur even among the marginalized group – woman in a patriarchal society – and that the agents of such a marginalization are very often women themselves.25

Yet Jaya’s confession is precisely an overt and painful splitting of the sign of gender by class, and reading it as such (not against the grain, but with it) provides an essential clue to an understanding of the overdetermination of some of the most cryptic episodes in Deshpande’s novels. For example, Jaya’s bizarre reaction to discovering Kamat’s dead body in his upstairs suite, just days after he has suggested to Jaya the possibility of their having an affair, can be attributed to any one, but more probably all, of at least three impulses. Implicitly invoking a feminist interpretation, Jaya’s neighbour Mukta accuses Jaya of abandoning Kamat’s body because she was “‘frightened of what anyone, of what Mohan would say’” 25

Sebastian, The Enterprise of Reading Differently, 154; emphasis added.

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about having visited a single man in his apartment, in response to which Jaya acknowledges silently to herself that it was “not Mohan but marriage that had made me circumspect” (187). Jaya’s actions can also be interpreted from a psychoanalytic perspective, for which there is also compelling textual evidence: after Jaya finds the body, she describes being paralyzed at first, and then, “After a moment, a moment when I had been aware of nothing but the furious pumping of my heart, I had walked away from him, as if a small hard finger was in my back, steadily pushing me away from him” (151), a distinct echo of the horror she had felt as a teenaged girl when her grandmother forced her into the room in which her dead father lay: “She pushed me, aiji, who never touched anyone for fear of defiling her pure [widowed] state, she pushed me towards him. I closed my eyes and still I could feel aiji’s small, hard finger in my back pushing me” (155). Finally, if we consider the words “defiling” and “pure” in the latter statement in terms of Jaya’s visceral and “sordid” description of Kamat’s dead body – “his eyes glassy and wide open, vomit dribbling out of the corner of his mouth, the smell of vomit in the room, of urine too, as if he had voided himself in the moment of dying” (151) – we may also attribute Jaya’s response to a deeply internalized class aversion to bodily waste and the pollution of death. In other words, no single explanation accounts for the unpardonable action of abandoning Kamat’s body without telling anyone about her discovery, making it clear that the secrets of the crypt are so deeply hidden from the self and are so heavily overdetermined that they escape both the rationality of linear consciousness and the proscriptions of conscience. Jaya herself, in spite of her brutal honesty in confessing to what is at the very least a betrayal of a friend, if not an ethical and even perhaps legal crime, cannot fully account for the way that she closed the door on the horrific scene of her close friend Kamat’s dead body, returned to her suburban home feeling “detached” and “remote” (157), bathed and ate, wept alone in the bathroom (“It had been like a sudden haemorrhage,” (158), and then made passionate love to her husband. The latter actions, rarely the focus of sustained critical scrutiny, might seem startlingly inappropriate and incomprehensible to a reader expecting a realist narrative, but are much less so to one accustomed to the cryptonomy of a gothic poetics. Maria Torok, in making the important distinction between the process of introjection as a gradual means of successful

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adaptation and incorporation as a “magical” and instantaneous response to sudden trauma, notes the potential for such unexpected behaviour: the recuperative magic of incorporation cannot reveal its nature. Unless there is an openly manic crisis, there are good reasons for it to remain concealed. Let us not forget that incorporation is born of a prohibition it sidesteps but does not actually transgress. The ultimate aim of incorporation is to recover, in secret and through magic, an object that, for one reason or another, evaded its own function: mediating the introjection of desires. Refusing both the object’s and reality’s verdict, incorporation is an eminently illegal act; it must hide even from the ego. Secrecy is imperative for survival. Here we see one more difference between incorporation and introjection. True to its spirit, introjection works entirely in the open by dint of its privileged instrument, naming.26

Not able to “name” her relationship with Kamat or deduce her motivations for climbing the stairs to see him after his overt offer of an extramarital affair (“I had gone not knowing why I was going,” 157), Jaya is even less able to face the ultimate foreclosure of an illicit but potentially liberating relationship signalled by Kamat’s lifeless and abject body. This foreclosed possibility, paradoxically, finds release, after the purifying ritual of a bath, in a series of evacuations and incorporations: a “haemorrage” of tears followed by an attempt to satisfy the body’s sudden, unexpected, and inappropriate demand for food and sex. Even the earliest psychoanalytic therapists have noted that some of their patients reported, with both surprise and shame, a sudden and unanticipated increase in libido following immediately after the death of someone close to them. This response has been attributed to a number of causes, but Torok sees such a response as a manifestation of the “illness” of mourning, a substitution of “fantasy for the real thing, magic and instantaneous incorporation for the introjective process” that “exults in orgasm.” She goes on to argue that when “such regression to magic does not match the ego’s present conformation,” “this fleeting fulfillment is struck with explicit condemnation and immediate repression.”27

26 27

Maria Torok, “The Illness of Mourning,” 114. Torok, “The Illness of Mourning,” 117.

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Is it any wonder, then, that Jaya, after facing Mukta’s accusations of callousness about Kamat’s death, “needed to be alone” to “painfully retrace my way back through the disorderly, chaotic sequence of events and non-events that made up my life” and decides that she must begin “with the child” that was herself (187; emphasis in original)? Of course, I would suggest that Jaya must go back further than her child-self and must cast her net more widely to find clues to her cryptic situation. It is from this perspective that I would like to approach the reading of another story that Jaya keeps to herself, another story of an abject body, but this time the body of Mohan’s mother. This story is connected to a number of the themes already adduced in this chapter, and is linked as well to something that has not yet been addressed: the abortion that Jaya procures of her third child, without telling Mohan about either her pregnancy or its termination. As such, the story of Mohan’s mother that Jaya deliberately withholds from Mohan links issues of bodily abjection and shame to issues of secrecy, censorship (self and otherwise), and narrative provenance that are central to Deshpande’s work and that will play an even more important role in subsequent novels. When Jaya tells the reader that “This is not Mohan’s story entirely” (34), she is referring to a specific story that Mohan tells her about his childhood. Extremely ill and feverishly clawing at the mat upon which he is lying, young Mohan is beset by his father, who berates him for damaging the family’s property and delivers a hard kick at Mohan’s hand. Primarily a story about Mohan’s father’s brutality, it is also a tale of masculine shame and stoic silence: when Mohan’s mother bends down to comfort her son, Mohan turns away from her, “impatient, resentful, humiliated” (34). In contrast to this story, which Jaya admits to having embellished and almost censored – “I would have left out the kick, it is hard to reconcile that crude gesture with the man I saw and knew” (35) – Jaya then goes on to tell another story about Mohan’s father’s brutality, one she claims that she is relating “in his words,” a story so compellingly told by Mohan that it provides for Jaya a “picture of extraordinary clarity and vividness” (35). This episode from Mohan’s past is another example of his father’s cruelty, but this time to his wife, Mohan’s mother. Returning from work very late to find that, although his dinner is ready for him, the chutney is not fresh, the father throws his plate of food against the wall and leaves the house. Mohan’s mother’s response to this is to wake her young son and send him out in the night to buy the ingredients for

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fresh chutney. She then grinds and prepares the chutney and sits by the fire, keeping her husband’s meal warm for his eventual return. While Jaya relates this story in Mohan’s words, she feels, nonetheless, that she understands its significance better than Mohan does: “If I found the story painful, I found his comment on it strange. ‘God,’ he said [...],’ ‘she was tough. Women in those days were tough’” (36). Jaya suggests that what Mohan finds in this story is female strength; what she finds, instead, is “despair” (36). Just as she draws the conclusion, however, that women can understand better the stories of other women, she rejects that facile sentiment, because she recognizes that she is “bringing to [her] understanding of [Mohan’s mother] some facts Mohan does not know, something I came to know from Vimala, Mohan’s sister” (37). And then Jaya tells the story that she (along with Mohan’s sister, now dead) has kept from Mohan. It is Vimala’s story of witnessing something, as a girl, that she was not intended to see: her mother, standing in the kitchen weeks before her death from a botched abortion, pregnant with what would have been her ninth or tenth child: ‘I was collecting my books when suddenly the thump of her hands as she beat out the bhakries came to a stop. I thought it was the usual pause between two bhakries, and I didn’t bother until I heard her screams. I didn’t even imagine it was her screaming at first, it wasn’t like her voice at all, it was a thin, ugly voice that scared me to death. And then, as I watched, she began to beat herself on the face. Her hands were all floury, and wet too, and her face soon became white and floury. Soon there were red patches as she went on and on hurting herself. I tried to stop her, I tried to stop her screams, I tried to hold her hands, but I could do nothing. [. . . ] ‘At last she stopped crying and lay still, breathing heavily. There was ash from the fireplace on her hair, and that flour on her face–her face was swollen by now. With her eyes caved in she looked like a dead person, her face was the face of a dead woman. A week later, she died. She went to a midwife and tried to get herself aborted. Did you know that?” Did Monya [Mohan] tell you about it?’ ‘No.’ ‘How could you? Monya never speaks of it. He never spoke of Avva after she died, none of us at home did. People whispered and talked and looked at us oddly. I was ashamed. I knew my mother had done something shameful.’ (37–38)

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The silences with which this story resonate are multiple and echo throughout the novel: the childless Vimala, who, ironically, claims she is nothing like her mother, dies because she remains silent about the pain caused by a slow-growing ovarian tumour; Jaya remains silent about many things, but most significantly her abortion, even though she admits that Mohan had the right to know about their unborn child; and Jaya never discusses Vimala’s story with Mohan or even lets on that she knows about the circumstances of his mother’s death. After all, both of his parents’ pictures occupy places of honour on the walls of the ancestral home, all of the father’s brutality and the mother’s desperation and “shame” eclipsed by the next generation’s censorship of their story in a desperate bid to rewrite the past and to maintain the façade of respectability. More importantly, we must recall, it is Jaya’s casual reminder to Mohan that his mother was a cook that initiates their very first marital quarrel, a bitter quarrel that, early in their marriage, teaches Jaya the consequences of opening the other’s (s)crypt, particularly in a society where class and gender roles are so intertwined and so sharply defined. Jaya has discovered “all the things I could and couldn’t do, all the things that were womanly and unwomanly” (83), even as she recognizes that a certain power accrues to women who learn how to play within, and even against, these roles. But so, too, has Mohan internalized a sense of what it is to be a Brahmin man, for whom silent suffering is ‘heroic’ and too much selfrevelation is viewed as weakness. As much as he understands, and anxiously insists, that he is not the callous brute that his father was, Mohan’s silence about the most deeply shameful aspects of his parents’ past is something that cannot be breached even in the intimacy of marriage, and this disavowal remains a yawning gulf in the couple’s relationship and the legacy that they pass down to their children. As Jaya argues (about the generations of women, although it could be equally said of the generations of men in her novels): “How well, how scrupulously we played out our roles! I had done it with my mother, and she, perhaps, had done it with hers, and, surely, it would be the same with Rati and her child as well. Yes, and I had to admit the truth to myself, the child I had destroyed so easily, she would have been the same too. Yet, the guilt remained” (131). And so, too, does Mohan’s silence appear to be passed on to their son Rahul, whose increasing isolation and silence “frighten” Jaya (49). In fact, Jaya links father and son in one of the most startling similes in the novel, her description of the expression on Mohan’s face at the end of

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their final quarrel in the novel, the one that sends Mohan away from the Dadar flat and brings Jaya face to face with the realities of their predicament. In this pivotal passage, Jaya suggests the way that individuals are infantilized through the vicious cycle of role-playing: ‘What do you think I am, what kind of a woman do you think I am?’ I asked him angrily. ‘I know you,’ he said and, as if to reassure himself, repeated, ‘After all these years together, don’t you think I know you well enough?’ ‘No,’ I wanted to say, ‘no, you don’t know me at all.’ But he was right; of course he knew her well, the woman who had lived with him as his wife. That woman – she’d married a man with a promising future. Now, she would. . . . she would. . . . As I hesitated, my confused thoughts swirling in my mind, Mohan said, his tone mournful now, his face too, ‘Do you think I haven’t seen how changed you are since we came here, since I told you about my situation?’ Mohan’s face, now what did it remind me of? Yes. Rahul. Rahul had looked like this when I had pulled the nipple or the bottle out of his mouth. Poor Rahul, poor Mohan deprived of the nipple. . . . (122)

Coherent language having, for once, failed her, Jaya is unable to suppress her laughter at this image. In fact, Jaya’s hysterical and somewhat cryptic laughter at this point, more than the quarrel itself, is what drives Mohan from the flat. In that laughter – is this not exactly Cixous’ “laugh of the Medusa”? – we should be prompted to see the plight of the individual facing both an existential and social crisis (if the two of these can be seen to be separate). By the end of the novel, the existential crisis seems to be resolved: Jaya has revised her view of herself and Mohan as “two bullocks yoked together,” seeing herself, significantly, at a “crossroads,” facing “so many choices” about her life. She cites the advice that Krishna gives Arjuna at the end of the Bhagavad-Gita: “Do as you desire” (192). For Jaya, this means a conscious literary decision: not to censor her own speech (not to speak prakrit – the language of women and children in classical Sanskrit plays) and not to accept Mohan’s carefully “edited version of what has happened” (192). But what of the social crisis? Has Jaya’s confrontation with the prospects of losing “it” – not just her sanity or her status as Mohan’s wife, but the security of middle-class wealth and respectability – changed anything except, potentially, her relationship with her husband? Is trying to

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open the other’s (s)crypt – “telling the other’s story” – if such a thing is even possible, a first step toward a larger goal: gender and social equity? Mrinalini Sebastian would argue that it is not, suggesting instead that “it is as if the conflicts faced by Jaya [...] are resolved in the form of some kind of individualism, which is perhaps possible only to somebody like Jaya, with a superiority inferred upon her because of her ability to write.”28 Similarly, Shalmalee Palekar questions the use of a patriarchal text like the Gita as a vehicle for affirming a woman’s independence: At the heart of the Gita lies the notion of ‘dharma’, which means doing one’s rightful duty, appropriate to one’s role in life, but in a selfless way [. . .]. […] what Deshpande does not do is look at how the concept of ‘dharma’ itself is interpreted very differently for men and women, that is, how ‘stri-dharma’ or rightful duty for womankind is full of gendered violence and patriarchal morality, revolving as it does, around the concept of ‘pativratya’ – absolute subservience and devotion to a husband.29

Deshpande herself would, no doubt, reject any suggestion that her novel has a social agenda, let alone that it fails in accomplishing it. However, the questions that Sebastian and Palekar raise about That Long Silence, as well as about Deshpande’s next novel, The Binding Vine, are worth asking, even if the answers must remain crypt-ic.

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28

Sebastian, The Enterprise of Reading Differently, 169. Palekar, “Gender, Feminism and Postcoloniality,” 65; no italics used in original for Sanskrit words. 29

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5

“This book is mine as all can tell, if you steal it you will go to hell”1

— Transgressing the Other’s Crypt in The Binding Vine

what haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others2

B

and incorporating into her novel the commissioned poetry that inspired the title for The Binding Vine, Shashi Deshpande had called her sixth novel “The Great Divide,”3 the words taken from a part of the novel that was excised during the author’s revision process: EFORE RECEIVING

No man will be able to understand the fear, the physical helplessness, the sense of outrage and disgust, the horror that overcomes a woman at the invasion of her body. It is an invasion of not just her body, but her whole being. Here lies the great divide. (MS dates 21/3/1990; 156/176)

Clearly, the “great divide” above refers to a division between Indian men and women, and their very different understanding of the significance of rape. Indeed, the issue of rape, both inside and outside of marriage, is one of the important concerns of the published novel. However, Deshpande’s revisions have resulted in a novel that is far less didactic – and, as I will argue, only a little less problematic – than the sentences above suggest it might have been. These lines from an early draft of the novel (1990) are part of an essay about rape and about two specific rape victims that the 1

Deshpande, The Binding Vine, 48. Abraham, “Notes on the Phantom,” 171. 3 Manuscript held at Study Centre for Indian Literature in English and Translation, American College, Madurai. 2

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first-person narrator Urmila (Urmi) submits to the local newspaper for publication. Neither of these victims is Urmi herself; moreover, neither of these women has authorized the telling of her story. Neither of them, in fact, is capable of either telling her own story or of preventing Urmi from telling it on her behalf. One of them, Urmi’s mother-in-law Mira, has been dead for over thirty years, and the other, a young woman named Kalpana, lies comatose in hospital. Through Deshpande’s act of authorial self-censorship (and good judgment!) this essay does not appear at all in The Binding Vine, yet, within that fictional world, the story of Kalpana is published, and the narrator is contemplating publishing Mira’s private papers – which include both diaries and poetry – at the end of the novel. The Binding Vine is a completely different novel from “The Great Divide” as a result of the deletion of the essay and, of course, the addition of the commissioned poetry. But the issues that are raised of authorial censorship, narrative provenance, and emotional trespassing remain, and they not only survive the author’s revision, but continue to haunt Deshpande’s next three novels: A Matter of Time, Small Remedies, and Moving On. Interestingly, we can still find reference to the idea of “the great divide” in the published novel. Shalmalee Palekar cites the lines from the novel that contain these words – “‘Perhaps it is this, the divide in ourselves, that is the greatest divide. Perhaps it’s this divide in ourselves that’s the hardest to bridge, to accept, to live with’” 4 – and then goes on to say that Deshpande does not portray her characters in black and white. Her characters are often divided into the categories of good and bad, but the author herself views human relationships in a greater complexity. She often grants her female protagonists the insight into ‘the great divide’ that lies within people; the contrary pulls of the need for freedom and the need for love. Deshpande’s women do not opt out of imperfect relationships, but try and redress the power and gender imbalances through self-knowledge – a strategy that is effective in a limited way.5

I would agree with Palekar that the quoted passage from the novel points to the kind of psycho-social alienation and self-alienation that have been the central topic of this book: in particular, the self-alienation that stems 4 5

The Binding Vine, 201; Palekar, “Gender, Feminism and Postcoloniality,” 56. Palekar, “Gender, Feminism and Postcoloniality,” 61.

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from the gap or nescience that is opened, but barred from consciousness, by the (s)crypt of the other. Like her previous novels, but more explicitly and with a much greater awareness of what is at stake, The Binding Vine poses questions about the unconscious social and psychological determinants of characters’ actions and the equally cryptic resistances to exploring the consequences of incorporation. In other words, the division is not just, as Palekar suggests, to be found in the ambivalence of characters who cannot choose between love and freedom; it is the basis for an alienated subjectivity that cannot know, when it is attempting to choose between these (and other) alternatives, whose choice it is making. Within this context, the very idea of “self-knowledge” to which Palekar refers comes under assault, and, along with it, the notion of “self-revelation.” As we have seen in almost every one of Deshpande’s novels to date, the disturbances created by the crypt require a type of confessional narration that almost inevitably trespasses upon someone else’s story. Of course, this is true of all fictional narrative, no matter how limited or broad the point of view. The heteroglossia of the novel, in particular, makes it an ideal form for exploring character through multiple contexts and speech acts. What distinguishes Deshpande’s work in this regard is its uncanny insistence that, when the other’s crypt occupies space in the narrator’s own unconscious, the attempt to unlock its secrets cannot be read simply, or only, as acts of trespass but must be understood, rather (or as well), as acts of narrative reclamation in the service of psychological healing. But if to attempt to heal oneself necessarily involves the opening and revelation of the ‘other’s’ (s)crypt, what are the personal and interpersonal risk of doing so outside of the private space of the diary or the psychoanalyst’s office? Moreover, what are the ethical implications of such an appropriation? Is appropriation even the correct word to use here, if, as Abraham and Torok’s theories suggest, the crypt of another has been internalized by the revealing subject? To whom do such cryptic stories belong? In The Binding Vine, Deshpande takes this question, for the first time since If I Die Today, outside of the family and, indeed, takes the question further than does that early mystery novel, as The Binding Vine’s setting also moves outside of the cloister of like-minded individuals with a common frame of reference. Unless, that is, we consider the possibility, as the initial title suggests, that Deshpande is attempting to extend the notion of

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affiliation to the ‘Stri Jati’, or caste of women.6 Reading between the draft manuscript and the published versions of the novel, I would suggest that the “great divide” in the novel both suggests the possibility of a solidarity among all women (in opposition to men vis-à-vis the issue of rape) and also raises the question of whether the division “within ourselves [the individual human]” is not also – perhaps inevitably – an insurmountable class or caste division “within ourselves [the caste of women].” Deshpande has been both praised and criticized for her depiction of meaningful interactions among women of different classes in The Binding Vine. K.M. Pandey falls into the laudatory camp: [. . . ] Urmi [. . . ] is concerned with the redemption of her own caste [of all women]. The effort of Urmi to publish Mira’s poems aims at discovering the strangled voice articulating woman’s silent discourse, deciphering the coded language and liberating the imagination of woman from interior to exterior.7 Urmi’s effort to publicise the gruesome reality of Kalpana’s life is an effort to oppose a “culture in which such feminist dreams have been replaced by fundamental patriarchy that divides women into rigid categories based on function.” [Nancy Walker, Feminist Alternatives]. Though not free from the dangers of being treated as a propaganda literature, The Binding Vine occupies a significant place in the Indian feminist fiction. It succeeds in deconstructing the interior colonialism of which women have been victims.8

Other critics argue that, although the upper-middle-class Urmi becomes deeply involved in the problems faced by several lower-class women, there is no doubt by the end of the novel that the representation of the latter remains extremely problematic. Mrinalini Sebastian, for example, suggests that Urmi is one of several Deshpande protagonists who occupy the “position of the writing-thinkingennobled middle-class woman [whose privilege] allows the protagonist to think the way she thinks,” but that “the differences between the classes are 6

K.M. Pandey, “Dimensional Depth of Female Consciousness: Shashi Deshpande’s The Binding Vine,” in Indian Women Novelists in English, ed. Amar Nath Prasad (New Delhi: Atlantic, 2001): 82. 7 Pandey, “Dimensional Depth of Female Consciousness,” 82. 8 “Dimensional Depth of Female Consciousness,” 83.

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so great that the condition of women belonging to different classes cannot be universalised in spite of these moments of ‘universal’ recognition.”9 Palekar also offers a cogent criticism of the portrayals in The Binding Vine: while [Deshpande] does attempt to examine various ideologically encoded binaries such as speech / silence, modernity / tradition, male / female, oppressor / victim, dominant / resistant, central / marginal, majority / minority, etc., the politics of this strategy can become problematic, particularly in terms of a class analysis, and raise such questions as: are poor / working-class women used as agents for middleclass self-realization? How does the narrating persona ‘speak for’ her class ‘others’? For example, it is Urmi, the middle-class, educated narrator in The Binding Vine, who leads Shakutai, the poor, illiterate woman, to an understanding that rape is never ‘deserved’, that her daughter has not ‘shamed’ the family by ‘asking for it.’ [. . . ] the author’s own ambivalence towards feminism [. . . ] comes through in her work. Thus, Deshpande’s novels lend themselves to multiple critical readings, as it is difficult to read them within any one prescriptive postcolonial and/or feminist framework.10

In taking up Palekar’s challenge to avoid a “prescriptive” framework, I would like to shift the perspective of analysis slightly to demonstrate the way that The Binding Vine anticipates the type of critique offered by Sebastian by openly staging multiple crises related to emotional trespassing, or appropriation of voice. As is typical in Deshpande’s work, however, there are no easy resolutions to such crises – indeed, they remain largely unresolved by the end of the novel. In this respect, The Binding Vine is an ambitious, if flawed, novel that negotiates the very boundaries of existential consciousness and human agency, as its epigraph from Emily Brontë slyly suggests: “‘What were the use of my creation, if I were entirely contained here?’” In attempting to tell a number of tenuously related stories from a single point of view – that of the first-person narrator/protagonist Urmi – the novelist risks running the narrative aground in the cul-de-sac of a confused solipsism, just barely escaping that plight, as she does with better success in That Long Silence, through

9

Sebastian, The Enterprise of Reading Differently, 169. Palekar, “Gender, Feminism and Postcoloniality,” 55–56.

10

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the acute self-awareness of her narrator and the dialectical movement of a narrative that provides multiple frameworks for understanding. Among the stories that Urmi tells within that narrative are those closely related to her own lived or immediate experience, involving herself and others very close to her, such as the story of her childhood; the deaths of her grandparent; her marriage to Kishore; the death of her daughter Anusha (Anu); her relationship with her parents, in-laws, and her surviving child Kartik; a brief flirtation with a doctor. While these are Urmi’s ‘stories’, they are not represented, by any means, as transparent windows into her life, as the opening words of the novel suggest: We all grow up with an idea of ourselves, an image rather, and spend the rest of our lives trying to live up to it. But for me, I suddenly realise as [sister-in-law] Vanaa talks to me, it’s been a constant struggle against an image of myself imposed upon me by Vanaa.11

This idea is reinforced in an anecdote about the different versions that Urmi, her husband Kishore, and her sister-in-law Vanaa, who grew up next door to each other in a town called Ranidurg, tell of a single event from their childhood. Moreover, there are aspects of her past that Urmi resists narrating and clearly does not want to confront, such as the reason she was sent as an infant to live with her grandparents in Ranidurg while her younger brother was raised by their parents in Bombay. As in many of Deshpande’s novels, the revelation that solves the latter mystery is deferred until the final pages of the novel, where, like the ring of recollection in Kalidasa’s play, it has the potential to reverse time and re-orient both characters’ and readers’ perceptions of events and characters. But central to The Binding Vine are the ‘experiences’ of other characters whose lives intersect with Urmi’s in a less direct manner. The story of Mira, Urmi’s mother-in-law, who died within days of giving birth to Urmi’s husband Kishore, comes to Urmi not entirely through the oral mediation of her husband (who, in fact, never alludes to her) or another relative, as does the story of Mohan’s mother in That Long Silence, but, rather, through a “gift,” from Kishore’s step-mother, of Mira’s poems and diaries. It is primarily through these papers that Urmi comes to learn of Mira’s desperately unhappy marriage to a man who, under the sanction of 11

Shashi Deshpande, The Binding Vine (1993; New York: Feminist Press at

C U N Y , 2001): 7. Further page references are in the main text.

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marriage, forces himself sexually on the unwilling young woman. In one of the threads of narrative in this multi-storied novel, Urmi not only faces a dilemma about what to “do” with Mira’s poetry and her diaries, she finds herself in the position of fending off others’ claims to Mira’s life story. In another major plot-thread thematically linked to the story of Mira, Urmi becomes involved with the plight of a woman, Shakuntala (Shakutai), whose daughter Kalpana has been brutally raped and lies comatose in hospital. Urmi faces a similar dilemma regarding exposure of Kalpana’s story when she is asked to assist Shakutai in preventing the hospital from moving Kalpana to a distant hospital. Urmi’s intervention on behalf of Shakutai and Kalpana is successful, but it is achieved by drawing negative media attention to Shakutai’s family. That both of Urmi’s dilemmas are resolved through an act of (or, at least, consideration of the act of) publication that is also the revelation of an other’s secret, is a significant extension in Deshpande’s work of the idea of narrator as writer, as, for the first time, the narrator both contemplates and observes the effects on others of publication. As Amrita Bhalla notes, Deshpande seems to be asking about the ‘wages’ of breaking a silence and of telling a story. The recovery of Mira’s poems, the story of her repression and the domination of her mind and body would implicate others – Vanaa and Kishore’s father.12

What is also interesting, given my argument that Deshpande continues to work in the mystery genre, is the intimation in the novel of the potential for such public exposure not only to solve a crime – in leading to a revelation about the identity of the man who assaulted Kalpana – but, at least incidentally, to open and/or reveal several other crypts in the text, one with tragic consequences. Untangling the ethical issues of existential and narrative provenance is precisely the (impossible) task facing the novel’s first-person narrator, Urmi, in the aftermath of a personal tragedy: the sudden death, from meningitis, of her one-year-old daughter, Anu. Facing the bleakness of a future without her daughter, Urmi is sick with grief, at times literally so, as the asthma she had experienced very early in childhood returns after Anu’s death, threatening, literally, to suffocate her. Nonetheless, she 12

Amrita Bhalla, Shashi Deshpande (Writers and Their Work; Tavistock: Northcote House, 2006): 59.

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strives to re-engage with life if only for the sake of her young son Kartik. In the period immediately after Anu’s death when the novel opens, Urmi is surrounded by concerned family members: her widowed mother, Inni; her brother Amrut; her childhood friend and sister-in-law Vanaa; Vanaa’s physician husband Harish and their two daughters; and, of course, her young son Kartik. Significantly, Urmi’s husband Kishore, a merchant marine who has had to return to work when the novel begins, is absent as a character engaged in the present narrative time of the novel, although he is, as I will argue later, a pivotal character in the narrative. In spite of the close attention of others to her well-being, Urmi feels entirely isolated in her grief and she consistently rejects her family’s efforts to comfort her. Intellectually understanding the need to go on with her life, but emotionally unable to feel anything but a sense of hopelessness, Urmi relates her feelings to the horror stories told in a game she played as a child: I feel I’ve emerged as the final victor in that game we used to play round the disused well in Ranidurg. All of us squatting round it, peering into its murky depths, trying to describe the horrors we said we could see in there. The point was to say the most horror-rousing thing: ‘I can see long white soft wriggly worms. . . ’ ‘I can see green frothing, bubbling scum – something is coming out of it – I can see one eye. . . ’ The truth was we could see nothing. There was just darkness. And a smell, the smell that was the worst thing about it, the smell we never spoke of because we could never find words for it. Now I know what it was. It was the smell of hopelessness. That’s what haunts me now, the smell of hopelessness. I’ve lost hope entirely; I used it all up in that one day and night of frenzied hoping [during Anu’s illness] and there’s nothing left. But hope is a fragile support anyway on which to rest the whole of your life. I can do without it. I will have to do without it. I have to live with the knowledge that it’s real, that Anu’s gone, that she will never return. It’s cruel to leave the dead behind and go on, but we have no choice, we have to let them go. Let them go? But it’s Anu who won’t let me go. She comes to me, over and over again she comes to me. I have hallucinations. (20–21)

Although there is a distinct echo in the above words of the horrifying account of Dhruva’s drowning and its haunting effects in The Dark Holds

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No Terrors, Urmi, unlike Saru in that novel, is a grown woman who is fully supported by her family during the difficult grieving process. Even Urmi’s sense of guilt – she confesses to Vanaa that Anu’s death must be a punishment for Urmi’s having been “privileged” and having had “too much” already in life and “That’s why I had to lose Anu” (8) – is a conventional response to grief, and not a deeply internalized sense of shame. But it is also a narcissistic response that sees Anu’s death as a punishment specially reserved for her, and her alone. Thus, when her sister-in-law Vanaa, who had been tending Urmi’s children when Anu fell ill, expresses her own feelings of guilt, Urmi dismisses them by saying “It’s nobody’s fault [...] There’s no use doing these – post-mortems” (14). Urmi’s refusal to allow her family to share her grief (or her guilt) raises the issues of existential aloneness and experiential and narrative provenance that, I would argue, continue to haunt – and even plague – the novel throughout. Urmi clearly sees Anu’s death as an event that has happened to her and has had a significant impact on her; as a result, she finds it difficult to cope with or understand others’ grief as a predictable response to her child’s death: A sound seeps through the silence in the flat. The sound of someone crying in the next room. [Urmi’s sister-in-law] Vanaa always cries easily, but these racking sobs begin to irritate me. ‘I can’t bear your pain.’ Why can’t I feel her pain? Why can’t I feel anyone’s pain? Kishore lying beside me in bed, his arms by his sides, his profile sharp and clear as always, and the tears pouring down his face. When was this? The night after Anu’s death? I could have wiped his tears, but I didn’t. I watched with a detached curiosity instead. How could a person cry so soundlessly? And now Vanaa. Has Anu taken all my capacity to feel away with her? I begin to bang my head against the wall. I can hear the dull rhythmic thud thud. There’s nothing else. No pain at all. (14–15)

Urmi’s status as bereaved mother, of course, does confer upon her a unique and profound sense of loss and all of the special consideration that comes with that status. But even Urmi’s mother Inni, who lives with her daughter’s family (Inni owns the house) and has assisted with caring for her grandchildren, accuses Urmi of being too steeped in her own grief to recognize that of others: “You think you’re the only one who cares, you never think, you never imagine what it is like for me. I was with her the

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whole day, she played with me, she slept in my bed in the afternoons, it was I who put her to sleep” (69). As we learn, Urmi has other reasons – particularly her feelings of being abandoned as a child by Inni – for her difficulty in responding to Inni’s sense of bereavement; what is clear, however, is that, in her state of paralyzed grief, Urmi can respond only mechanically to signs that others around her are also suffering. As mirrors of her own grief and reminders of her loss, their outbursts are most often portrayed as sources of irritation to her, rather than opportunities to share the process of mourning. At the same time, Urmi swears never to let go of her “suffering for Anu” (27) because to do so would be a betrayal of her memory: “To forget is to betray” (21). Frozen and isolated in her grief – caught between the inability to mourn for her daughter and the inability to let her go – Urmi vaguely realizes that she faces a crossroads in her life. As her brother Amrut reminds her, Urmi had vowed to herself to give up her college teaching job to pursue a doctorate in literature once Anu “was older” (26). In this way, Anu’s death, Urmi’s interminable suffering, and the possibility of either compensation for or distraction from the tragedy through writing and publication are inextricably linked, much as they are for Madhu after the death of her son in Deshpande’s later novel Small Remedies. It is not until a condolence visit from Urmi’s friend Priti, an ambitious actress, however, that these impulses come together, at an unconscious level, to set at least one of the novel’s plot-threads – the recovery and relation of the story of Mira – into motion. I would like to think that it is significant that this movement begins to happen during a discussion of Kalidasa’s play Sakuntala, a work that is already invoked in the name of one the novel’s major characters, Shakuntala. Alone together after watching a televised movie with other members of Urmi’s family, Urmi and Priti move quickly beyond the uncomfortable topic of Urmi’s loss and begin, instead, to discuss the predictability of the movie’s plot and its idealized portrayal of the relationships between men and women. When Priti “chants” “‘Rich man / poor girl, simple man / sophisticated girl, city man / village girl…’,” Urmi replies, “‘That’s a hoary tradition, it began with Kalidasa’”: ‘Kalidasa!’ She looks at me puzzled, unsure of my attitude. Am I serious? Finally she laughs. ‘I’m serious. Tell me, what’s Shakuntala but a simple village girl? And Dushyanta? He’s the classical city roué.’

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‘I never thought of that. But, Urmi, don’t these movies make you angry? They’re such total male fantasies….’ ‘Well, what do you expect? They’re made by men and so….’ ‘I know. That’s why….’ In the silence that falls between us, I can sense the ghost of Mira. (37)

While the invocation of Kalidasa’s play here contains no reference to the ring of recollection, the issues of memory, repression, and forgetting are central to the novel’s plot. Moreover, discussion of the play’s romanticized portrayal of men and women does serve as a prompt to memory when it raises, for Urmi, the “ghost of Mira,” Kishore’s mother, whose poems and diaries lie (mostly unread until just after this point in the narrative) in a dusty trunk that Urmi had been given by Kishore’s stepmother, Akka, several months before Anu’s sudden death. Even before we learn who Mira is, though, another spectre is raised: that of betrayal, of opening and revealing a family crypt. Immediately after Mira’s name is recalled during her conversation with Priti, Urmi recalls as well her sister-in-law Vanaa having exclaimed, after realizing, “from something Priti said, that she knew about Mira,” “‘Why did you tell [Priti] about Mira?’” (37). The question of who has a right to know and to tell (and hear) the story of Mira, or, as Sonita Sarker puts it, “who has the power to represent whom, and how,”13 arises at precisely the moment Mira’s name is first uttered in the novel. Within the space of several sentences, in fact, we learn that at least three women – Priti, Urmi, and Vanaa – feel they have some kind of stake in Mira’s story. Priti, an avowed feminist, first hears about Mira during a debate with Urmi about whether women’s lives can be improved through legislation, an argument in which the sceptical Urmi blurts out the few details she has learned, or deduced, thus far about Mira’s brief existence, particularly her status as a victim of marital rape. Priti, who is looking for narrative material for her next film, breathlessly tells Urmi that Mira’s tragic story is “‘what I’ve been waiting for all these years, this is the movie I’m going to make, this is the story I’m going to tell’” (39). With a proprietorial air that annoys Urmi, Priti claims: “I know this woman, I know her story” (39). Urmi, for her part, senses 13

Sonita Sarker, “Afterword” to Deshpande, The Binding Vine (1993; New York: Feminist Press at C U N Y , 2001): 231.

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“something jarring” in Priti’s dramatic response: an inauthenticity that reminds her of Priti’s overly dramatic statement about why she left the U S A after Robert Kennedy’s assassination. When Priti asserts, “‘I want you to give me the story [of Mira]’,” Urmi reacts with an “instinctive ‘No’” (39– 40). Pressed further, Urmi simply cannot share Priti’s enthusiasm about turning her dead mother-in-law’s experiences into a melodramatic ‘message’ movie, and so she refuses to let Priti have access to the material. Significantly, Urmi also refuses Priti’s request that she (Urmi) write a screenplay based on Mira’s life. Vanaa’s dismay at learning that Priti knows about Mira is, if anything, even greater than Urmi’s. Vanaa is Kishore’s younger half-sister, and she has learned from her own mother Akka, presumably at the same time as does Urmi, about her late father’s obsession with his youthful first wife, Mira, whom he pursued ruthlessly until he finally procured her from her family for his bride. Vanaa also learns at this time about her father’s inconsolable grief after Mira’s death, as well as the callous and cruel way her father’s second wife, Vanaa’s mother Akka, came to learn the story of Mira herself. Akka tells Vanaa and Urmi that Akka was informed by her new sister-in-law on the very day she entered her husband’s house as a bride that “‘My brother was crazy about his [first] wife [....] I’ve never seen any man like that. And since her death [...] it’s his son.’ He brought the day-old baby away with him the day after the funeral, she told me, nobody could stop him. ‘What he really wants now is a mother for that motherless child’” (47). Mira’s story, then, for Vanaa, is a painful exposure of her father’s obsession with and, indeed, lust for his first wife, and the single-minded and equally obsessive love for Mira’s son that drove him to secure a second wife in a coldly calculated, utilitarian marriage, in which Vanaa was conceived. If anything, the story confirms for Vanaa her deep insecurity with regard to her father’s affection for her. Mira’s story, as passed down to Vanaa through the obvious pain of her mother and her own feelings of rejection by an indifferent father, to whom she nonetheless feels some sense of loyalty, is a crypt that Vanaa clearly does not want anyone to open. At some level, Urmi understands Vanaa’s reticence about learning more about Mira through her writing: I cannot speak of Mira, of Mira’s writing, to [Vanaa]. That is another pocket of silence between us. [. . . ] I know Vanaa’s loyalty and so I can

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never speak to her of what I now know her father to be – a man who tried to possess another human being against her will. (83)

Not surprisingly, then, Urmi’s growing determination to publish Mira’s work and Vanaa’s resistance to that idea puts a severe strain on their longstanding friendship. Whether or not Urmi has a larger stake in Mira’s story than does Vanaa, she clearly has a stronger interest in and claim to it. Urmi’s claim on Mira’s story is one primarily of family relationship – Mira is her husband Kishore’s mother and her children’s grandmother – and therefore she comes into possession of Mira’s belongings through legitimate inheritance. Akka, after telling her daughter and her daughter-in-law what she knows about Mira’s life, gives Urmi the trunk full of Mira’s papers: she gave me the trunk. ‘Take this, Urmi, it’s Mira’s.’ She gave it to me with the same formality with which she had given me the little bits of Mira’s jewellery. Only then she hadn’t said ‘Mira.’ ‘They’re Kishore’s mother’s,’ she had said. ‘I kept them for his wife.’ But this time she said, ‘Take this, it’s Mira’s.’ She did not mention Kishore at all, as if she was now directly linking me with Mira. (48)

Through the bequest of the trunk, Urmi is not only granted ownership of Mira’s papers, she literally comes to possess what she understands to be Mira’s story, in Mira’s own words, in the form of poetry written in Kannada (the language of Karnataka) and journals or diaries written in English. Akka herself appears to have just opened the trunk the evening she hands it over to Urmi. Urmi recalls the event in nostalgic and vivid detail: she and Vanaa, along with all of their children, including the infant Anu, are gathered in Akka’s attic in Ranidurg on a rainy evening. Presumably by way of passing the time, but also with the goal of giving Urmi and Kartik some sense of Kishore’s mother, of whom no one, including Kishore, seems to speak, Akka pulls down the dusty trunk and opens it to reveal stacks of books, manuscripts, and pictures. Akka reads aloud one of Mira’s poems, but it is Akka’s uncharacteristically emotional response to a poem that she reads silently to herself that compels Urmi to re-open the trunk soon after she gets it home: I came to a small poem about a newly married couple. I suddenly stopped. It began joyfully enough. [. . . ] Then, in the last stanza, the

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tone changed with a shocking abruptness. After I read it, I knew it was this poem that had moved Akka to tears. And I put the trunk away. But she comes back to me now, the sprightly girl who wrote This book is mine as all can tell, if you steal it you will go to hell, the woman who wrote those poems in the solitude of an unhappy marriage, who died giving birth to her son at twenty-two. (48)

Feeling that to read to further at that point would be “trespass, to violate Mira” (51), Urmi closes the trunk and consigns it to a space in her own closet. It is only after Anu’s death, when she is reminded of Mira during the discussion with Priti of Kalidasa’s play, that Urmi overcomes her compunction about Mira’s privacy and retrieves both the bittersweet memory of that night in Akka’s home, in which Anu was still with her, and the trunk she has hidden away in a closet. She then begins, systematically, to read, organize, and contemplate Mira’s writing and, eventually, to translate her poetry into English. It is partly within this context, then – that of compensation for loss and an obligation to memorialize the dead – that we are invited to read Urmi’s obsession with Mira, an obsession that might even be said to rival, at first, that of Mira’s husband, as Urmi perhaps unwittingly lets slip in several places. For example, when Akka opens Mira’s trunk and reveals its contents, including a picture of Mira, Urmi describes, in contrast to Vanaa’s expressions of pity, experiencing a “throb of excitement” (43). Later in the novel, Urmi confides to herself that “All these days I had been imagining myself the hunter and Mira my prey; I have been filled with the excitement of the hunter each time I approached her” (135), a feeling that, she admits, quickly gives way to a less aggressive stance: “It is Mira who is now taking me by the hand and leading me.” Cryptically, she adds, “on the way I have seen Kishore” (135), a point to which I shall return later. The question of the status of Mira’s writing and her life story – the important question of the possession of someone else’s life story – arises even before the trunk containing Mira’s belongings falls into Urmi’s hands; in fact, it originates even before Urmi’s birth. Why were Mira’s papers not destroyed immediately after her death? In answer to precisely this question, Urmi imagines a husband so infatuated with his wife that, even after her death, he cannot bear to destroy her personal belongings. While Urmi contemplates the probability that he may have seen and authorized the preservation of Mira’s possessions, Urmi cannot imagine Kishore’s father actually reading the notebooks in which Mira’s hatred for

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him is so clearly expressed: “I can see him collecting them, piling them in this trunk, locking it and putting it away. Did he read the papers? Perhaps, seeing these old notebooks, he thought they were relics of her college life and so he left them alone” (51). Perhaps Urmi’s inability to imagine Kishore’s father reading Mira’s diaries and poems stems from a sense that his – or anyone else’s – doing so would have been almost as serious an invasion of Mira’s right to privacy as the physical act of rape. Other questions about Mira’s papers are not overtly raised in the narrative, but remain puzzles: why, for example, has Akka kept the material in the years following her husband’s death, when she might have had an excuse to get rid of them? What is her investment in Mira’s story? What are her motivations, as the unloved second wife of a man who she knows was passionately obsessed with this woman, for keeping Mira’s poems and the diaries and then giving them not to Mira’s son, Kishore, but to Mira’s daughter-in-law Urmi? Finally, is inheriting the trunk full of Mira’s papers the same as inheriting the right to tell Mira’s story or publish her private writing? – for that matter, does inheriting the trunk give Urmi the right to prevent others who learn of it, such as Priti, from telling Mira’s story? Does the incantatory warning on the first page of Mira’s well-thumbed copy of A Golden Treasury – “This book is mine as all can tell, if you steal it you will go to hell” – a dire warning that appears not just once but three times in the novel, signify anything at all? Or does it make a difference that Urmi reads Mira’s writing with a sense of empathy for her plight? Does it make a difference that Urmi learns, through reading Mira’s notebooks, that Mira herself sought recognition and even publication during her lifetime? Finally, what is at stake, not just for each of the characters in the novel, but for the narrative itself, in the act of ‘trespass’ and ‘violation’ entailed in opening Mira’s crypt and contemplating the publication of its contents? As we shall see, these questions are all directly related to Urmi’s intervention in the plight of Kalpana. It is perhaps most clear what is at stake for Urmi in possessing her mother-in-law’s story. In an telling moment when Urmi recalls being pressed by Priti for access to Mira’s story, Urmi describes the “involuntary clutching movement of my hands” (40), an image that also poignantly evokes the empty arms of the bereaved mother who has had a child taken from her. The link between the incorporation of her grief for Anu and the strong, almost obsessive, urge to memorialize Mira in her place is made most clearly when Urmi returns home with a parcel containing a

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framed photo of Mira that her mother Inni innocently and not irrationally assumes to be a photograph of Anu. Urmi’s furious, almost hysterical, outburst in response to her mother’s assumption about the photograph – “I don’t need a picture to remember her [Anu]” (68) – points clearly to issues of memory, representation, and incorporation. Just as Anu is Urmi’s daughter, memorialized internally in such a way as to compel Urmi to eschew conventional and public methods of honouring the dead and to preclude others’ emotional investment in her loss, Mira becomes Urmi’s project. Urmi guards her relationship with Mira’s story as jealously as she guards her encrypted relationship with her dead daughter, Mira’s grand-daughter. These fleeting glimpses into Urmi’s unconscious desire to possess Mira subtly undermine the distinction that she repeatedly insists on drawing between herself and Priti. Urmi may have very different reasons from Priti for wanting exclusive possession of Mira’s story, but she is neither less aggressive nor less personally motivated than is her friend. While Priti’s fervent claim that “I know this woman. I know her story” (39) irritates Urmi and increases her resolve to keep the story of Mira from Priti, Urmi’s own strong identification with Mira may be seen as no less narcissistic. Much closer to her own father than her mother, Urmi sees a picture of Mira’s father and swiftly draws a number of conclusions: I have a feeling Mira was closer to her father. I imagine that she, his only daughter, was his favourite child. I guess he was proud of her, of her intelligence. And did he guess at her burgeoning talent? Was that why he gave her the book of poetry? Or was it part of his being a school teacher? I wonder too, did Mira speak to her father about her marriage and did he pooh pooh her fears, laugh at her feelings? And did she ever show him the bits she wrote? This, for example, ‘Written on my thirteenth birthday?’ It gives me the feel of something she wrote for an audience. (64)

In Mira’s writing, Urmi clearly sees mirrored aspects of herself: an idealization of an intelligent, if benignly indifferent, father; a denigration of a mother’s conformity and passivity; and a desire to reach the world through publication. If there is some basis for Urmi’s identification in Mira’s writing, so, too, is there some validity in Priti’s interest in using Mira’s story to shed some light on the issue of marital rape. Sonita Sarker points out that Urmi’s opposition to Priti’s desire to use Mira as a symbol

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of marital rape “is contradicted by [Urmi’s] own publicity of Kalpana’s rape as a symbol of injustice.”14 However, Priti’s later actions – her attempt to film Mira’s story without Urmi’s permission until a more sensational issue catches her attention – do ultimately reveal her to be shallow and sensation-seeking in her approach to women’s stories. Urmi intuitively senses this exploitive tendency in Priti, and she also believes that Priti is hypocritical: a feminist who claims to want to tell the stories of all women, no matter how sordid, Priti nonetheless refuses to discuss the sordid and embarrassing story of her own mother who, driving under the influence of alcohol, mowed down and killed a number of pedestrians. But Priti’s silence about this event is not unlike Urmi’s own silent condemnation of her mother Inni for abandoning Urmi to the care of her grandparents, an action for which Urmi has neither sought nor received explanation. Significantly, given her condemnation of Priti’s dismissal of her mother’s story, Urmi seems to blame Inni alone for this abandonment, in spite of her father’s agonized confession, in the months before his death, that “‘We wronged you, Urmila. No, I shouldn’t say “we”; it’s my fault entirely. Yamini always left all the decisions to me. I shouldn’t have sent you away to Ranidurg. I should have kept you with us’” (112). Without questioning him further, almost as though she does not believe that her banishment could have been his fault, Urmi simply reassures her father that she was happy in Ranidurg: that she felt “loved and wanted” (112) there. Urmi’s inability to face the circumstances of her abandonment is made very clear in a conversation she has with her friend Dr Bhaskar Jain, who asks her, with characteristic forthrightness, “‘why did your parents send you away to live with your grandparents?’”: ‘Why?’ ‘You must have been a horror,’ I think of [Urmi’s brother] Amrut saying, smoothing down his hair, preening himself. ‘Look how they kept me.’ But that was a joke. Or was it? ‘I don’t know,’ I say at last. (120–21)

14

Sarker, “Afterword” to Deshpande, The Binding Vine, 232.

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Moreover, Urmi admits to herself, “I’m not sure I want to find the answer, either, not here, not now anyway” (122). If not “here” or “now,” however, when will Urmi try to learn the truth about her parents’ actions? When Inni raises the issue with her daughter in the final pages of the novel – significantly after Anu’s death and after Urmi has set her own course of exposing both Mira’s and Kalpana’s secrets – the tone of the revelation is abject, revealing Inni to be a pathetic victim of patriarchal control: a very young woman overwhelmed by the demands of motherhood who is punished by her husband (and meekly accepts that punishment) for leaving their infant daughter for a brief time in the care of a trusted family servant – a male servant. The ironies in this story reverberate back throughout the entire narrative, in which issues of male sexual exploitation and female submission to male authority play a central role. Moreover, in light of Inni’s confession, Anu’s death can be seen as a repetition of the trauma that not only Urmi, but also Inni, must have experienced in that earlier separation of mother and infant daughter, a trauma that Urmi consistently disavows by idealizing her father, undervaluing her mother, and painting a falsely idyllic picture of her life with her grandparents – all points I shall return to at the end of this chapter. There is, however, even more at stake in Urmi’s desire to possess and understand Mira than her disavowed feelings of abandonment and the sublimation of her mourning for Anu. As are most other crypts in Deshpande’s novels, this one is largely overdetermined. To demonstrate this, it is necessary to quote a very long passage toward the end of the novel. In answer to Vanaa’s anxious question about Urmi’s motivations for wanting to publish Mira’s creative work – “‘It all happened so long ago. Why do you need to rake it up? Why? What do you want?’” – Urmi first recalls to herself several lines from Mira’s poetry: “What do I want, I ask myself. / The mind-slate wiped clean / mocks me with its blankness,” and then gives Vanaa the following ‘answer’: ‘You know, Vanaa, after Baiajji [Urmi’s grandmother] died and Aju [her grandfather] wanted us to go on as before, he asked me, “We can manage, can’t we?” And I said, so confidently, “Yes, we can manage.” But it was not easy, you know that, Vanaa. No, you don’t, you were away then. Aju became strange, sometimes for days he wouldn’t say a word. Without Baiajji he became a shadow. There were so many things I couldn’t cope with. You remember that cook of ours? I knew she was stealing, and her son used to leave dirty pictures in my

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books. And there was the ‘other family’ – they kept coming but Aju refused to meet them, so I had to. They made such sly insinuations, I hated it, but I said nothing, for if I did it would mean I couldn’t cope. And when I decided to marry Kishore,” I go back to her and as I speak I play with the bangles on her wrist, the musical tinkling becoming a kind of accompaniment to my words. ‘Papa asked me, “are you sure you can manage, Urmi? He won’t be home most of the time.” You asked me too, “Are you sure? You know how Kishore is,” you said. And I said it to all of you, “Yes I can manage.” I have, haven’t I? I’ve earned money, looked after the children and Papa when he was ill and Inni. . . And all the time, it’s like there’s been a voice inside me saying, “Urmi’s so smart, so competent”.’ Vanaa looks at me questioningly, and I force myself to go on. ‘After Anu died, the voice stopped. Then I saw Kalpana. I met Shakutai, I read Mira’s diary, her poems. And I’ve begun to think yes, I’ve managed, but I’ve been lucky, that’s all. While these women . . . You understand what I’m saying, Vanaa? They never had a chance. It’s not fair, it’s not fair at all. And we can’t go on pushing it – what happened to them – under the carpet forever because we’re afraid of disgrace.’ I look directly into her face now. ‘Have I answered your question?’ Vanaa’s face is blank. She is silent. I wait patiently for her reply. Finally she gives herself a small shake, sighs. And I relax. The danger is past. (173–74; emphasis added)

Rather than an explanation, Urmi’s rambling answer to Vanaa’s simple but open-ended question functions as a mise-en-abîme: the reason for resurrecting a painful family history is a painful family history; the reason for representing or publishing such a story is Urmi’s feeling that she has experienced tragedy but survived it, unlike the women whose lives she wishes to represent. The blankness on Vanaa’s face registers perhaps not acquiescence as much as confusion – a perplexity that, I would argue, is shared by the reader. For example, Urmi’s insistence that she has “managed” and that she has been “lucky,” an assertion that critics like Amrita Bhalla take at face value,15 is belied elsewhere in her narrative: her refusal to confront the mystery of her exile; the horror of her grandfather’s suicide; her wild grief, just prior to Anu’s death, at the thought of being apart, once again, from Kishore; her involuntary self-punishment 15

Amrita Bhalla, Shashi Deshpande, 59.

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after Anu’s death. Urmi’s insistence that she has “managed” all of these traumatic events is belied, in fact, in the answer itself, when she confesses “There were so many things that I couldn’t cope with.” How is this somewhat contradictory recapitulation of Urmi’s life an answer to Vanaa’s uncannily Freudian question, “‘What do you want?’” Indeed, what does Urmi want? While it is clear that Urmi wishes to draw a sharp contrast between her perspective on how to view (and ultimately how to ‘expose’) Mira’s story and the perspectives of others who claim a stake in Mira’s life, the slippages in Urmi’s own story raise questions not only about Urmi’s claim to her mother-in-law’s writing, but also, ultimately, about the role she plays in bringing to light the story of Kalpana’s rape. At the end of this chapter, I will return to Urmi’s life story, paying particular attention to the most cryptic figure in her narrative: her husband Kishore. 

what has happened to Kalpana happened to Mira too. (63)

If, as Urmi suggests, there are parallels to be drawn between Mira’s story and Kalpana’s – “what has happened to Kalpana happened to Mira too” (63) – what can be learned by thinking about issues of possession, emotional trespassing, and appropriation of voice as they relate to the idea of publishing the cryptic stories of these two women? Are these events of Mira’s and Kalpana’s life the same, though; did the ‘same’ thing happen to them? In one sense, the stories of their violation are more similar than Urmi knows when she makes this pronouncement. It is not until the story of Kalpana’s rape is made public through an article in the newspaper that her rapist is revealed to be a trusted family member, Kalpana’s uncle, a man with whom she was forced to live. Both victims, then, are sexually assaulted by a close relative within what is supposed to be a safe, domestic place. But in what other sense can we understand the connection that Urmi makes: “what happened to Kalpana has happened to Mira too”? This moment of discovery for Urmi is precisely where the strains and cracks of the novel’s point of view become visible and the illogic of cryptic interiority becomes apparent. If even Vanaa, Urmi, and Priti, women of the same class and background, cannot agree with one another

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about the value of exposing Mira’s story, as Urmi herself recognizes when she thinks about how differently even she and her childhood friend Vanaa view issues (125), how can Urmi begin to understand what has happened to Kalpana or how Kalpana’s mother Shakutai should respond to the circumstances of Kalpana’s tragedy? Urmi struggles with this question throughout the novel: on the one hand, she scoffs at Priti’s idea that there is a universal “woman’s vision” (125); on the other, she senses that there might be such a thing as an objectifying male gaze, a “man’s vision” (125), that unites women in their fear. At times, Urmi asserts that her own experiences with sexual harassment16 allow her to understand Kalpana’s ordeal, while at other times she recognizes the vast gap that separates her life from Shakutai’s and that therefore denies her authority on the subject of what to do to assist Kalpana’s family. Yes, all women can be reduced to the objectifying gaze of men and the body’s vulnerability, but, as Deshpande herself has demonstrated in That Long Silence, access to privilege and wealth can shield not only the body but also the mind from violence. In other words, as Sonita Sarker asserts, “Class constitutes a major factor in the different consequences women experience.”17 If The Binding Vine were simply a novel about a middle-class woman’s insistence on the importance of ‘going public’ about rape, despite the consequences for the family (in other words, if it were the type of didactic novel that we find in the earlier manuscript version), then we might be justified in condemning Urmi’s ultimate decision to go to the press about Kalpana’s story, or, for that matter, her tentative decision to publish Mira’s poetry. However, the novel is far more nuanced, complex, and cryptic than that: Urmi’s actions must be viewed in terms of the maternal crypt that she bears within her, a crypt that disturbs and informs her relationships with others and prompts many of the actions that she takes, with regard to both Kalpana and Mira. Amrita Bhalla argues that The Binding Vine is “a novel dealing with the recovery of women’s writing”;18 from a cryptomimetic perspective, however, it is also a novel dealing with the re-covering of women’s 16

Several such incidents are briefly and incompletely described at various points in the novel; the fragmentary nature of these descriptions, in fact, indicates how traumatic the events must have been for Urmi. 17 Sarker, “Afterword” to Deshpande, The Binding Vine, 233. 18 Bhalla, Shashi Deshpande, 50.

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stories. It is also, as Deshpande herself says, “a novel about mothers and daughters”19 and mothers and sons, as much as it is about rape and its consequences, but we must pay attention to the close imbrication of all of the novel’s diverse plot threads to see this, as Amrita Bhalla and Y. Sunita Reddy argue: Mira’s poem and Shakutai’s concern for her daughters and hopes for her own future become the axis for Urmi’s memories of her daughter Anu.20 The weaving of three different tales into a single narrative is, in the main, due to the bereavement suffered by the narrator. Urmi is grieving over the death of her year old daughter Anu and in this condition she is highly sensitive to the suffering and despair of others. It is this sensitivity which leads her to befriend Shakuntala, the mother of a rape victim. Urmi would never have associated herself with Shakuntala in the normal course of her life as she belonged to a different strata of society altogether. It is the same sensitivity which also makes her delve into the poems of her long-dead mother-in-law, Mira and frantically try to understand the mind of the young Mira.21

In other words, Urmi is drawn to Kalpana’s plight in much the same way as she is drawn to retrieve Mira’s poetry from the top shelf of her closet, to where she had consigned it initially: by her reaction to the death of her daughter Anu. It is in this context that I would like to revisit Palekar’s question: “Are poor/working-class women used as agents for middleclass self-realization?”22 While my claim that Urmi is motivated to help Shakutai out of empathy and perhaps a desire for some kind of compensation for Anu’s loss would appear to be a positive answer to Palekar’s question, we need to place Urmi’s actions in the context of her similar approach to Mira’s story and the multiple and conflicting ways that both of these actions are viewed by other characters in the novel. Ultimately, I disagree with Palekar’s conclusion that Deshpande’s portrayal of Urmi results from “the author’s own ambivalence towards feminism.”23 Rather, 19

Deshpande, cited in Bhalla, Shashi Deshpande, 50. Bhalla, Shashi Deshpande, 56. 21 Reddy, A Feminist Perspective on the Novels of Shashi Deshpande, 90. 22 Palekar, “Gender, Feminism and Postcoloniality,” 55. 23 “Gender, Feminism and Postcoloniality,” 56. 20

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Deshpande portrays and explores the complexity of human behaviour, which is driven by much more than conscious aims and programmatic ideals. The event that links Urmi to Shakutai and Kalpana occurs shortly after Anu’s death and Urmi’s rediscovery of Mira’s papers. Arriving late to meet her sister-in-law Vanaa at the hospital where Vanaa works as a social worker, Urmi is confronted by a scene of crisis: Vanaa is bending over a sobbing woman, who faints in her arms. As Urmi assists Vanaa with the woman, Vanaa explains that the woman’s daughter has been admitted to the hospital with a head injury, having been, reputedly, in an accident, but, according to the doctor’s examination, brutally raped. Significantly, the first coherent words the woman speaks when she is revived are “‘My daughter’ ‘my Kalpana’” (57).24 Having recently lost her own daughter Anu and having embarked on a project to understand her mother-in-law’s story, Urmi’s sympathies for this stranger are inevitably aroused Those sympathies are challenged almost immediately, however, when the woman Urmi comes to know as Shakutai objects vehemently to the doctor’s diagnosis that her daughter was raped: “‘It’s not true, you people are trying to blacken my daughter’s name’” (58). Told that a report must be made to the police, Shakutai protests even more vigorously: “‘No, no, no. Tell him, tai, it’s not true, don’t tell anyone. I’ll never be able to hold up my head again, who’ll marry the girl, we’re decent people. Doctor,’ she turns to [Dr. Bhaskar Jain], ‘don’t tell the police’” (58). Shakutai’s denial of what has happened to her daughter, as we learn, has many roots: her fear of public exposure and its impact on her family and particularly upon the future alliances of her daughters; her fear that the police might “harass” her family (62); and her fear that her daughter may have ‘asked for it’ by being stubbornly independent and wearing provocative clothing. It is vital to note here that none of Shakutai’s fears is to be taken lightly; nor does Urmi do so. At Shakutai’s request that she tell the “Jain doctor” not to report his findings of rape to the police, Urmi complies, only to learn that it is too late: the incident has been reported. The point is moot, however: the police have chosen not to pursue a rape investigation, 24

Although these words are rendered in English, it is apparent from Bhaskar’s difficulty communicating with Shakutai that she speaks only Marathi. This, indeed, is one of the first clues as to her lower-class status.

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as these cases are “messy and troublesome” and “‘[the girl’s] going to die anyway’” (88). Dr Jain paraphrases the police attitude toward cases of rape, suggesting that, indeed, Shakutai’s fears are not groundless: think of the girl and her family. Do you think it’ll do them any good to have it known the girl was raped? She’s unmarried, people are bound to talk, her name would be smeared. For all you know she may be a professional, we see a lot of that. But, if you ask me, the man said, she must have been out with a boyfriend – girls of that class always have boyfriends the families know nothing about it. (88; emphasis added)

Having already revealed an innate understanding of the attitudes of law enforcement officers when she expresses her fear of being harassed by the police, Shakutai seems to be entirely justified in her opinion, if we are to judge from Bhaskar’s report. It is apparent, however, that, in spite of this, Urmi and Bhaskar do not share Shakutai’s reluctance to pursue the rape case. Both are incensed by the reaction of police to Kalpana’s plight and it is clear that the doctor would pursue this case, if he thought he had any chance of changing the authorities’ minds. Urmi’s response is more visceral and private: she cannot get out of her mind Bhaskar’s description of the girl’s grievous injuries, and so she is drawn further into the lives of Kalpana and Shakutai when she feels somehow obliged to visit “this girl” who “is not to be stared at” (89). Urmi’s sense of being a “voyeur” (89) at Kalpana’s bedside is not unlike her initial sense that to read Mira’s poetry is to “trespass, to violate Mira” (48). However, Anu’s death and the void it has left in Urmi’s life compel her to continue reading and translating Mira’s poetry and to continue visiting Kalpana and Shakutai at the hospital, doing the latter in spite of the class differences that sometimes make such meetings uncomfortable for both of them. Initially, Urmi plays the role of passive listener to Shakutai’s stories, mostly about her eldest daughter – a smart but haughty and disobedient daughter, in Shakutai’s eyes – and about Shakutai’s sister Sulu, a selfsacrificing woman who doted on her niece, but nonetheless never visits her at the hospital. Sulu, Shakutai tells Urmi emphatically and somewhat mysteriously, “never goes out” (91) of her home, except to assist Shakutai with the management of her own home and family during this crisis. Shakutai also tells Urmi about her marriage to a man who has abandoned her for another woman. Not sure what role she is playing in Shakutai’s

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life or what compels her to visit the hospital repeatedly and even invite Shakutai to her home, Urmi eventually finds herself becoming “rampant with anger” over Shakutai’s refusal to see “the enormity of this thing that has happened to her daughter” (148): Sometimes [Shakutai] seems to forget that her daughter is unconscious and dying, and speaks as if getting raped is merely one more of those childish misdemeanours that so annoyed her. She grieves too, as often as she is angry. But through all this there is one constant strand; she talks as if the girl is to blame for what happened to her. It’s her fault, she says. She was stubborn, she was self-willed, she dressed up, she painted her lips and nails and so this happened to her. (148)

Ultimately, Shakutai argues, it was Kalpana’s lack of fear (149) that led to her being raped. When Urmi objects to this characterization of Kalpana’s behaviour, Shakutai retorts, “‘You don’t understand’ […] ‘It is different for you’” (149). For her part, Urmi resents Shakutai’s accusation that she does not understand a woman’s vulnerability: Urmi remembers occasions on which she had been sexually harassed or “threatened” (149). While Urmi is oddly unclear about the nature or extent of this harassment in her life – of one occasion she says she was accosted as a child by a boy who asked her to ‘Come with me’, but she does not report what happened after that – it is clear that Mira’s experience is also very much on Urmi’s mind when she thinks about all women’s vulnerability. When it is revealed, much later, after Urmi’s intervention in the matter, that Kalpana’s rapist was not a stranger, nor a boyfriend, nor a ‘client’, but the uncle to whom her mother had entrusted her daughter’s care and education, the connection between Mira, raped by her own husband within the ‘sheltering’ embrace of the family, and Kalpana is made even clearer. Moreover, we learn, Kalpana had a very good idea of her own vulnerability: she had, in fact, repeatedly tried to escape the clutches of her uncle, whose efforts to possess her as a second wife were abetted – or at least not impaired – by the complicity of Shakutai’s beloved sister Sulu and even inadvertently by Shakutai herself. No matter what class or under whose protection, in other words, women in Shakutai and Urmi’s patriarchal society are vulnerable to the unwanted attention and violent desires of men, even when they have the so-called protection of a loving family.

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Nonetheless, Shakutai’s assertion that ‘It is different for’ Urmi cannot be dismissed entirely. This difference, if it exists, may be one of class sensibility and, perhaps, education. Such a possibility is suggested in a conversation held between Urmi and Dr. Jain. Bhaskar confesses that “‘there’s something I don’t understand. Why is the mother [Shakutai] so anxious, frantic, almost, about her daughter’s marriage?”; “is getting married so important to a woman?’” Urmi answers, “‘For women like her, definitely’” (87). This ‘othering’ of Shakutai is repeated later in the conversation when Urmi says “‘women like Kalpana’s mother do find something in marriage’” (87): “‘Security. You’re safe from other men’” (88). Strangely, however, this belief is tested in the relationship that begins to form between Urmi and Bhaskar Jain. While Urmi has a husband, his long absences from home do leave her vulnerable to Bhaskar’s romantic attentions, to the point where her mother and sister-in-law are concerned about the relationship. In this context, it is difficult not to think about That Long Silence and the similarly middle-class Jaya’s terrified realization that, without “that barrier Mohan had raised between me and other men” (167), she was shamefully vulnerable. Of course, the relationship between Urmi and Kishore is very different from that between Jaya and Mohan – for one thing, it is his work as a merchant sailor and not a quarrel that has distanced Kishore from his wife. Urmi is able to reject Bhaskar’s advances by reassuring herself and him of her love for her husband, “the blade of grass” (162) that keeps her, like Rama’s devoted Sita, chaste, faithful, and inviolate to other men. In spite of the parallels drawn among women, therefore, the reader senses that there is a very wide gap between the experiences of Urmi and Kalpana, particularly in the resources on which they can draw for protection, even as these experiences are mediated through the figure of Mira, a woman subjected to rape under the sanction of an arranged marriage. In fact, two of the significant differences from the 1990 manuscript are, first, that Urmi, rather than going to the press on Shakutai’s (and Mira’s) behalf, convinces Shakutai to go to the press with Kalpana’s story in the published novel. Moreover, she does so in response to Shakutai’s desperate plea to assist her in preventing Kalpana’s relocation to an extended care hospital far from Shakutai’s home. Significantly, however, Shakutai’s access to a reporter in the published novel is heavily mediated by Urmi, who draws the attention of a reporter she had known in school to Kalpana’s plight: at first, though, Malcolm engages Shakutai with “polite

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disinterest. He’ll listen only because I’ve asked him to” (169). Clearly, according to the narrator, Shakutai would not have had the same access to publicity without Urmi’s intervention on her behalf. The second major alteration from the manuscript is that Urmi does not suggest to this reporter any link between Kalpana’s story and that of Mira, something that Urmi does on her own in her feature essay for the weekly press in the earlier draft. To link these stories in such a way – to flatten the distinctions between these events as is done in the earlier manuscript – would be to deny the very real differences in these women’s stories, as the author must have realized. What happened to Kalpana did not happen also to Mira. While both women may be said to have their lives cut short as a result of rape, Kalpana is dying from injuries sustained in that violent act, whereas Mira dies after giving birth to a child that, no matter her feelings for her husband, she wanted very much. The question of whether Urmi has betrayed or assisted Shakutai through her intervention is left unresolved in the finished novel, although most critics of the novel share the view that the breaking of women’s silences is always a positive thing. K.M. Pandey articulates this point of view: Though Urmi is accused of being a “traitor” to Mira and Kalpana, she is resolute to break the silence of women which come in different forms – sometimes in the name of the social taboos, sometimes in the name of the family honour. She justifies her stand because she sees these mishaps from the female point of view.25

However, Pandey overlooks the fact that there is not just one female point of view in the novel. In fact, multiple points of view – all female – are brought to bear on the consequences of Urmi’s action. Even Urmi is surprised by the unwanted media attention that is drawn to Shakutai’s family, attention that at first drives them into shamed isolation: “‘Everywhere we go they look at us as if we’re actors in a drama. We stay inside the house, we don’t come out unless we have to’” (177). Urmi begins to doubt herself: “I can say nothing to [Shakutai] that will take away the sting of selfreproach, because it pierces me too. Did I do wrong?” (178). In time, however, Shakutai’s family seems to begin to enjoy the celebrity, and, while some press reports are malicious in impugning Kalpana’s character, 25

Pandey, “Dimensional Depth of Female Consciousness,” 82.

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“for most of the papers, Kalpana is a victim, her family, martyrs” (179), “The disgrace Shakutai had so agonized over wilts in the fierce glare of publicity” (180), and issues of injustice to women are publicly debated. However, while the publicity leads to the solving of the crime and the revelation that Kalpana was attacked and raped by her uncle Prabhakar, it also results in the death, by suicide, of Shakutai’s beloved younger sister, Sulu, a childless woman whose facial scarring and low self-esteem have made her a recluse and victim in her own home of her husband’s bullying and callousness. So, in fact, the solution to the crime brings only more grief to Shakutai: it robs her of yet another family member and she is tortured by guilt for the role she feels she has played in her daughter’s attack and her sister’s suicide. The points of view of Urmi’s mother Inni and her sister-in-law Vanna with regard to Urmi’s actions are also ambiguous and equally problematic. Inni is portrayed as a conventional, deeply conservative woman, a “grande dame” (96) who disdains any whiff of scandal. We learn this early in the novel when Urmi describes her mother’s reaction to the “skeleton in the family cupboard” (96), Urmi’s paternal grandfather’s mistress and illegitimate son: the story was “something to be discreetly concealed, not flaunted. […] [Inni] was horrified when I told her I knew the whole story, that I’d pumped Balkaka and Papa and got the details from them” (96). In a later conversation with Bhaskar Jain, Urmi tells him that Inni had a “superior attitude” (120) towards her husband Kishore’s family. Inni expresses concern about Urmi’s close relationship with Bhaskar, but also about her relationship with Shakutai and Kalpana. But it is Vanaa’s reaction to Urmi’s very public involvement with Kalpana’s plight that initiates the most serious disagreement in the novel. The vehemence of Vanaa’s anger over the newspaper stories that Urmi facilitated seems exaggerated beyond proportion, even if we consider that Vanaa works at the hospital that is being, to a certain extent, vilified for its role in evicting Kalpana. Vanaa accuses Urmi of taking advantage of Shakutai, who “thinks you’re… oh, God Himself” (171). As Vanaa continues to berate Urmi, she “goes on and on, it’s incredible, she dredges up things from the past I’ve forgotten myself, […] she accuses me of being influenced by Priti, of wanting to become a do-gooder who needs victims” (171). Under this tirade, Urmi has a “sense of being battered, bludgeoned” (171) by a woman whom she no longer recognizes as her closest friend and sister-in-law. Indeed, Vanaa’s accusations take on a new direc-

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tion, as she accuses Urmi of being insensitive to Vanaa’s mother Akka’s feelings. It is at this point that Urmi realizes that it is not the exposure of Kalpana’s story that angers her sister-in-law: it is, rather, the threatened exposure of Mira’s story, and the effect that this may have on the family. As Urmi confesses to her brother Amrut later, Vanaa “has changed a lot,” “as if the knowledge of what her father did, of what he was, has threatened something, disturbed the inner rhythm of her being, so that there’s a sense of disharmony about her” (181). I have already discussed Urmi’s answer to Vanaa’s question, “‘It all happened so long ago. Why do you need to rake it up? Why? What do you want?’” (173). That answer is so convoluted, so disturbing in its equivocations, contradictions, and evasions, that it will require another section of this chapter to explore it further. Let me close this section by claiming that the decision to go public about a shameful event – the breaking of silence that is so often held up as a solution to problems in Deshpande’s novels – is never as unequivocally positive as her critics would have it. There is always an extremely high price to be paid – by someone – for opening the crypt. 

what happened to [Kishore] happened to [Urmi] too

It is clear that The Binding Vine is a type of a mystery novel. At least one crime has been committed – the rape and attempted murder of Kalpana – and, ironically, while no criminal investigation is launched, a perpetrator is eventually revealed, if not apprehended: Kalpana’s uncle, Sulu’s husband Prabhakar. Another crime – the rape of a married woman by her husband – is explored, and the criminal in that case, Urmi’s (dead) fatherin-law, faces public exposure by the end of the novel. Both crimes against women are deeply disturbing, and it is not surprising that it is these crimes that have been the focus of critics’ investigations of the novel, particularly since most of those critics have viewed the novel primarily as a feminist vehicle. However, there are hints of other deeply disturbing events, as well as even deeper mysteries, in this haunted and cryptic text. One of the deepest mysteries in the text is Urmi herself. The fact that the novel opens just after the death of Urmi’s one-year-old daughter, Anu,

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means that we meet Urmi at one of the most difficult times in her life. However, as is the case with many of Deshpande’s novels, this tragedy is only the latest blow in what has been a deeply traumatic and troubling life, as the recurrence of Urmi’s childhood asthma might suggest. Significantly, Abraham and Torok identify asthma as one of several psychosomatic symptoms that plague those who suffer from the “illness of mourning,”26 or unresolved grief. Such a link is drawn in the novel itself when Urmi, overtaken by a sense of grief, describes feeling “breathless, aghast with the weight of my loss” (130). The physiological asthma attack that Urmi experiences early in the novel takes her by surprise, but her brother-in-law tells her that, according to Urmi’s mother Inni, Urmi had experienced attacks as an infant, before she was sent to Ranidurg: ‘Inni says you used to get these attacks as a child.’ ‘She does? That’s funny. I knew nothing about it.’ ‘You couldn’t. You were too little. It was before you went to live in Ranidurg, she said.’ ‘Oh, maybe that’s why…. Anyway, it’s over. It won’t happen again, will it?’ (18; ellipsis in original)

The ellipsis in the passage above leave a lacuna upon which the reader can only speculate: ‘Maybe that’s why… I don’t remember’? or, perhaps, ‘Maybe that’s why… they sent me to Ranidurg’? At this point, of course, Urmi has no idea why her parents sent her, as an infant, to live with her grandparents. Nor, as I have demonstrated earlier, has she expressed an interest in knowing. The ellipsis in the text points to an elision in Urmi’s own story – it points to an unopened parental crypt. In that context, the words following the ellipsis – “‘it won’t happen again’” – uncannily remind us of the effects of the crypt, which, according to the theories of Abraham and Torok, “gives rise to endless repetition and, more often than not, eludes rationalization.”27 Urmi’s asthma attack will, indeed, happen again, and the physical symptoms are again linked to Urmi’s recent loss of her daughter:

26 Nicholas T. Rand, “Editor’s Note” to “New Perspectives in Metapsychology: Cryptic Mourning and Secret Love,” in The Shell and the Kernel, ed. Nicolas Abraham & Maria Torok, tr. Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1994): 100. 27 Abraham, “Notes on the Phantom,” 175.

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Suddenly weary, I lay my head on the bed beside Kartik and am overcome by such a wave of longing for my daughter, it is all I can do to stop myself from crying out. ‘My Anu. I want her. I want her back.’ I feel the quickening in my womb… [a line from one of Mira’s poems] I’m too tired to go on any more. I feel I’ve reached the limits of exhaustion, I must get to bed. But this breathlessness, this heaviness in my chest – is it only exhaustion? As I get up from Kartik’s bedside, I realise it’s my asthma again. And this time, there’s no fear. I feel amazingly clear-headed, all the confusion gone. (150)

Like Saru in The Dark Holds No Terrors, Urmi has swallowed a devastating loss – the loss occasioned by her being sent away from her mother as an infant – that blocks her access to mourning and manifests itself in physiological and psychological disturbances. As in the earlier novel, images of smothering in relation to the womb and to the umbilical cord provide vital clues to Urmi’s cryptic behaviour. Indeed, the novel’s title refers specifically to the umbilical cord; it is taken from one of Mira’s poems – poems that Deshpande commissioned from Pratibha Nandakumar in the latter stages of the novel’s creation. The title of the novel comes from the following stanza, part of a poem written by Mira in anticipation of her son Kishore’s birth: Desire, says the Buddha, is the cause of grief; but how escape this cord this binding vine of love? Fear lies coiled within this womb-piercing joy. (136–37)

As we have seen in previous novels, the umbilical cord in Deshpande’s work is an ambivalent image, as suggestive of death as it is of life. But the image of the umbilical cord here as binding vine suggests not only the major theme tying together the multiple threads of the novel – the strong yet painful bond between mother and child – but also the potential difficulty in discerning existential boundaries. As such, the image of the umbilical cord suggests a problem, a dilemma. In the lines that follow this poem in the novel, Urmi recalls her mother’s belief that “‘if [she] can get one word [in a crossword puzzle], the rest will follow’” and then confesses that Mira’s poem contains some kind of clue, a

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word which will help me to solve the rest of the crossword. After Aju’s death, Papa and I cleared out our Ranidurg house. When it was over, Papa, who had been as ruthless as I was in this clearing-up, looked sorrowful and bereft. But for me, there was relief. With the house cleared of everything, it was possible for me to leave it behind and go on. Now, with this poem, Mira has cleared my emotional life, swept away the confusing tangle of cobwebs. (137)

But what is the word in the poem that has this magical effect on Urmi? Is it “love”? Or is it “Fear”? Or, given that this stanza is only a fragment of the poem, is the word or clue located elsewhere in it? And what aspect of Urmi’s life requires “clearing” or “sweeping” away? Strangely, these questions are never directly answered; moreover, Urmi’s allusion to having put the Ranidurg house behind her after her grandfather’s death is belied in a number of places in the novel. For example, in the “blank” hours after Anu’s death, Urmi, somehow, manages to travel to the house in Ranidurg where Kishore, somehow, finds her. Clearly, the house and the events that occurred within it continue to haunt Urmi – and Kishore as well. Recalling the significant Crossword House in That Long Silence, the preceding passage should alert us to what Nicolas Abraham calls ‘anasemia’: those products of “designification” that “constitute new figures, absent from rhetorical treatises.”28 The instability of the narrative voice in the pages following Urmi’s ambiguous epiphany suggests a profound disturbance in – rather than a clearing away of – Urmi’s thought-processes. What she recalls following this point, in fact, is not her relationship with her own daughter or mother, but her wedding night, something to which she has briefly alluded earlier. Specifically, she recalls the look of fear on Kishore’s face as he cites the words to a “popular film-song”: “The two of us in a closed room […] and we can’t get out. That’s marriage” (137). Urmi describes her immediate reaction to these words: “And I walked out, not just to prove him wrong, though there was that too, but because of the look on his face. It frightened me. He looked trapped” (137). Urmi and Kishore reunite in the morning, and neither one ever speaks to the other or anyone else about this event. In response to Inni’s distress over the incident the next morn28

Nicolas Abraham, “The Shell and the Kernel,” 85.

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ing, Urmi describes Kishore watching Urmi’s and her father’s attempts to soothe his mother-in-law, “that remote look on his face again” (138). While the recollection of this scene goes some distance toward understanding the strange relationship between Kishore and Urmi, a relationship characterized by Kishore’s frequent and lengthy absences and by Urmi’s refusal to be either emotionally or financially dependent on him, it points toward a symptom, rather than the cause, of their alienation. In typical fashion, Deshpande withholds important information from the reader until late in the text, including the details of how Urmi falls in love with Kishore, the boy neighbour who had been, until then, more like a brother to her than a potential love-interest. But first, I need to explore further the trajectory of Urmi’s thoughts following her epiphany. It is at this point in the narrative that Urmi also recalls the horrible night when she learned of Anu’s illness: Urmi and Kishore, having left their children with Vanaa and Harish, are on a brief holiday, enjoying the rare time they get to spend with one another. Urmi recalls that, more than ever, she wished to tell Kishore how devastating their frequent separations were becoming for her; however, as always, she cannot form the words to tell him this. She imagines the moment of revelation and Kishore’s reaction: I could see Kishore in the mirror; was it a trick of the candlelight, or some fault in the ancient mirror that made him look so distant? Suddenly I thought, ‘I will say it to him now, I will tell him how I feel.’ It was like a fantasy. I saw myself crying out to him, ‘Don’t leave me and go. Each time you leave me, the parting is like death.’ I saw myself stretching out my arms to him, putting them round his neck – the classic, clinging female. And the fantasy relentlessly went on: I saw him detach himself from me, distaste on his face. (139)

Unable to bridge the distance to her husband even after they make love, Urmi runs out into the rain and collapses. Kishore brings her back to their room, but even then Urmi describes Kishore’s “cold” voice, and she fears what she might see in his face following her melodramatic exit (140). When Urmi wakes up, Kishore tells her that they have received a phone call reporting that Anu is very ill and they must go home. At this point in the novel, the stanza from Mira’s poem, quoted above, appears again, although Urmi’s subsequent thoughts refer to the next stanza in the poem:

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Smiling and joyful, Karna tore off his armour, his body trailed blood. will that courage be mine when, denuded, I stand naked and bare? (137) Yes, here it is, the knowledge I spared myself then. Kishore will never remove his armour, there is something in him I will never reach. I have lived with the hope that some day I will. Each relationship, always imperfect, survives on hope. Am I to give up this hope? Is this what Mira is offering me? (141)

If we recall that these passages in the novel follow directly after Urmi’s pronouncement that Mira’s poetry has offered Urmi a solution that can sweep “away the confusing tangle of cobwebs” (137), then we are left to wonder: is this the solution to the crossword puzzle that Urmi claims to have reached? That there is something in Kishore, the son that Mira gave birth to but never knew, that Urmi will “never reach”? That Urmi must give up hope for a deep connection with her husband? Or is “this” precisely what Mira’s poetry offers her: the hope that somehow she will be able to reach Kishore? The emotional distance between Kishore and Urmi has conventionally been read as yet another instance of male indifference and women’s inability to make their voices and concerns heard. Sonita Sarker, for example, argues that, in this novel, “The men’s distance – emotional, intellectual, physical – is symbolic of their inability to understand certain realities that women experience.”29 I believe that Jasbir Jain comes closer to the truth, at least about Kishore. Noting first that Kishore “is only an absent presence in the novel,” she argues that he is a man who “comes through as a sensitive and withdrawn person, as if carrying the burden of Mira’s unfulfilled dreams.”30 However, if he does so, he does so silently, refusing to share that burden with even with his wife and child. In other words, Kishore also bears the burden of a maternal crypt: reading Mira’s poetry alongside her diaries, Urmi discovers not only that Kishore is a product of marital rape – “He forced himself on her […]; it is out of this that Kishore was born” (83) – but that, initially, at least, Mira had viewed the idea of a child growing out of this union as abhorrent, a “monster 29 30

Sarker, “Afterword” to Deshpande, The Binding Vine, 226. Jain, Gendered Realities, 105.

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child” (83). Kishore’s refusal to acknowledge this dark history, of which he may consciously know very little, and to mourn the death of his biological mother seems to have resulted in a tendency to keep an “emotional, intellectual, physical” distance from those closest to him. If this is indeed so, then we must cast an entirely different light on Urmi’s motivation for laying “naked and bare” Mira’s story. If Kishore will never remove his armour, find the courage to make himself vulnerable, then Urmi will have to do that for him: she will have to open the crypt of his mother that he is too afraid to explore. Upon first reading Mira’s poems, Urmi thinks about showing them to Kishore, but she dismisses the idea at once: He has never once spoken to me of his dead mother. Something tells me that if I show him these, if I speak of her, his face will take on what I call his ‘closed room look.’ It’s like Mira’s warning on the first page of all her diaries: Strictly private and confidential. (51)

It is in this context that we must consider the risk that Urmi takes in seeking to publish Mira’s poetry. Both Akka and Vanaa, Kishore’s stepmother and half-sister, remind Urmi that Kishore might have a stake in his mother’s story as well, that he might object to the publication of her writing and the exposure of his family’s sordid history. In an exchange with Akka in which she tells her mother-in-law of her desire to publish the poems, Urmi is reminded that Kishore will be coming home soon; Urmi realizes suddenly that this is the first time that she hasn’t “crossed out the days” (156) in anticipation of his return, as though, perhaps, in reading the poetry of his dead mother, she is in some sort of communion with her living, but emotionally distant, husband. But Akka is anxious: “Have you thought of what Kishore will say to this plan of yours?” (156). Urmi has to answer that she doesn’t know. When Vanaa asks her the same question, “And what will Kishore say?,” Urmi has had more time to reflect on an answer: I’ve worked hard at knowing Mira, I’ve read her diaries, gone through her papers, absorbed her poems, painfully, laboriously translated them into English. And now, I tell myself, I know Mira. But Kishore? What will Kishore say? I try to think and there’s only blankness – the same blankness that confronted me when Bhaskar said ‘Tell me about your marriage.’ Have I never let Kishore become part

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of my real world? ‘There’s nothing of you here,’ Bhaskar had said to me; looking about me, contrasting the bareness of this room to the muddle of my room in Ranidurg, I realize he’s right. Even the bedcovers, faded to a bleached softness with much washing, have been bought for me by Vanaa. What will Kishore say? I must know the answer. It matters to me, to us. (174–75)

As the final sentences above indicate, there is much more at stake for Urmi in the publication of Mira’s poetry than exposing the repression of women’s voices. The novel ends before we learn the answer to Urmi’s question about what Kishore might say about the publication of his mother’s poems, but there are numerous clues given with regard not only to Kishore’s personality but also to the “blankness” that has drawn Urmi and Kishore together in the first place and that continues to connect them in marriage. One of the most important clues to the mystery of Kishore and Urmi’s marriage is buried in a flashback. When Bhaskar Jain confesses to Urmi that he has fallen in love with her, the look on Urmi’s face instantly conveys to Bhaskar that she is, indeed, in love with a husband whom she rarely sees and of whom she rarely speaks. Urmi recalls, but only to herself, the moment that she fell in love with Kishore, the boy who lived next door to her grandparents’ home in Ranidurg: I fell in love with Kishore when I was fifteen. […] – I fell headlong into that emotion in a moment. There was the same sensation of being shaken, of breathlessness that there is after a fall. Until then, he had been only Kishore, Vanaa’s rather strange, aloof brother. And then suddenly, as if someone had dawn a circle about him, he was singled out from the rest of humanity for me. I can remember not only the day, but the exact moment this happened. It was the day my grandfather died. (162–63)

At this point in her life, Urmi had continued to live alone with her grandfather following her grandmother’s death. As we have seen, this was a difficult time for Urmi, a time when, as she confesses to Vanaa, there were so many things she “couldn’t cope with” (173). When she comes home from school one day, she finds the door to her grandparents’ house locked. Sitting on the steps, waiting to be let in, she can hear a “mono-

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tonous heavy dull sound” (163), later described as a “kind of irregular, rhythmic heavy sound from the [inside] passage” (163). Kishore arrives on an errand to find Urmi sitting on the step, a “blank look” on her face. He goes to investigate the sound; Urmi has been sitting so long (or she is so deeply traumatized) that she cannot rise to follow him. She sees the ‘truth’ in Kishore’s face when he returns– that her grandfather is dead – but she insists on knowing how, and he tells her, after only a moment’s hesitation: “‘He’s hanged himself’” (164): I refused to leave the house – how could I, until Papa came? – so Akka came to me. It was sheer exhaustion finally that made me go to bed. Akka sat by me, she was still there when I fell asleep. When I woke up, she had gone, and Kishore was there instead. He was reading, totally absorbed in the book, his face calm and beautiful. It was at that precise moment that I fell in love with him. And when, on my eighteenth birthday, I got his letter, I had a sense of having willed his feelings into being by the strength of my own. (164)

Urmi’s love for Kishore is clearly and inextricably linked to a moment of trauma and dispossession: her grandfather’s suicide ensures that Urmi will be returned to her parents in spite of her deep attachment to her grandparents’ home in Ranidurg. But this sudden attachment to Kishore is just as clearly linked to a disavowal of that loss, just as her close attachment to her grandparents, especially her grandmother, allowed her to deal with the trauma of separation from her mother. Several elements in the scenes described above are connected to incidents in the narrative present – the rhythmic thumping of her grandfather’s swinging body is repeated in Urmi’s act of banging her head against the cupboard after Anu’s death, and the sense of breathlessness that Urmi feels when she looks at Kishore hints at her history of (possibly psychosomatic) asthma. Both of these responses to deep grief and sudden trauma are displacements that protect Urmi from feeling emotional pain. The “calm and beautiful” – one might even guess “blank” – look on Kishore’s face as he sits by Urmi’s bedside, reading, reflects precisely Urmi’s own need to move on without overt displays of grief. Urmi falls in love with Kishore, in other words, at a moment when his attention is absorbed in something else – she falls in love with his distance from her and her emotional pain. Like little Hans playing the fort–da game with a spool, Urmi unconsciously protects herself from abandonment by choosing someone whose abandonment of her,

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because, in a sense, it has already happened, is inevitable. After all, as she has insisted to Vanaa, Urmi is a woman who can handle things, who has handled things, without becoming the “classic clinging female” (139) so clearly represented by the mother whom she disdains and refuses even to call by that name. In this light, it is significant that, just as Urmi refused to wear the beautiful clothes that her mother sent to her each year while she lived in Ranidurg, preferring to wear the unfashionable clothes her grandmother sewed for her, Urmi refuses to spend the money that Kishore sends her each month. Urmi’s fear of dependence, something that Kishore and she joke about, and that Kishore himself seems to understand, is deeply rooted in the trauma of maternal dispossession, and, in Kishore, Urmi has found a partner in crime: Vanaa’s “strange, aloof brother,” whose sense of dispossession and fear of emotional dependence is, if anything, even greater than her own. While Urmi begins to dread their frequent separations, Kishore seems to take them completely in stride: Often, after he has gone, I find in myself a frantic grappling for his image, as if in going he has taken that away as well. Then he returns and we pick up the course of our lives from the moment of his return. Both of us behave – at least, he’s always done, and I’ve learnt to do so – as if there is only the present. Neither the past nor the future have any place in our life together; we reject both. (164)

We can now return to Urmi’s confused answer to Vanaa’s question, “What do you want?” to accomplish by publishing Mira’s poetry: ‘And when I decided to marry Kishore,’ I go back to her and as I speak I play with the bangles on her wrist, the musical tinkling becoming a kind of accompaniment to my words, ‘Papa asked me, “Are you sure you can manage, Urmi? He won’t be home most of the time.” You asked me too, “Are you sure? You know how Kishore is,” you said. And I said it to all of you, “Yes I can manage.” I have, haven’t I? I’ve earned money, looked after the children and Papa when he was ill and Inni….’ (173)

What Urmi wants, indeed needs, according to the theories of Abraham and Torok, is the ability not just to “manage” her life and cope with the multiple losses she has experienced; in fact, she is clearly unable to

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manage those challenges, particularly the distance she feels from her husband. What Urmi needs to do is to confront the maternal crypt(s) that forces her and her husband to walk the “chalked lines” of a destiny that has kept them existentially separate from each other, even in marriage. Both robbed of a maternal connection at a very young age, both suffering from an acute, if only partially understood, sense of maternal rejection, Urmi and Kishore have swallowed that loss whole: it remains undigested, and the significance of this loss cannot be recognized until some sort of magical intervention – such as opening a maternal crypt? – sets memory and mourning into motion. But while Urmi consciously (if, perhaps, for unconscious reasons) pursues her mother-in-law’s story after coming into possession of it, she is equally conscious in her refusal to hear her own mother’s story and therefore to deal with her own loss. As I have argued, the novel is not just about recovering women’s stories, it is also about re-covering them, or keeping them buried. The story of her life that Urmi has told herself – that she is more like her taciturn, stoic father than her dependent, “clinging” mother, and that therefore she had nothing to lose when she was sent to Ranidurg – is a story that keeps Urmi from confronting an acute sense of maternal abandonment. Even when, in the final pages of the novel, Inni reveals the circumstances that led to Urmi’s being sent to Ranidurg, Urmi seems at first somewhat reluctant to hear her confession. It is only when Inni breaks down completely, and Urmi has to comfort her, that recognition sets in: There’s something supplicatory about her; it’s as if I’m seeig that girl-mother of long ago, kneeling before her husband for understanding, forgiveness. She wants me to give it to her, the absolution Papa never granted her. I do. I put my arms round her. I tell her I believe her, that she never wanted me to be sent away. I say these things over and over again until she is calmer. She seems not only reassured, but unburdened, as if she’s passed on her load to me. But I don’t feel weighed down, either. It’s something else. A sense of being vulnerable and naked, as if some armour I’ve been wearing all these years – against what? – has fallen off. (200)

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Who, indeed, has been “unburdened” by Inni’s confession? The reference to Kunti’s armour clearly links Urmi’s own inability to mourn a maternal loss to that of Kishore. After Inni leaves her, Urmi finds herself overwhelmed by a number of emotions: I think of how I had agonised over why they had sent me away. I think of all the theories I had constructed and I begin to laugh – a laughter that suddenly turns into tears. It’s a painful, agonising tearing-myinsides-apart sobbing. […] it’s the ugly, unrestrained crying of childhood. It goes on and on, my breath coming out in painful gasps. Rekha stops me finally. I hear her frightened voice, and with an effort I get hold of myself. ‘Tai, what is it? Why are you crying?’ Why? Because the scars of an old cruelty have shown me how hopeless, how utterly hopeless it is? Because I’ve seen how bottomless the chasm is, how impossible to bridge? (200–201)

The novel ends with Urmi’s recognition that the “great divide” is indeed the “divide in ourselves” (201). What she does with this knowledge – whether it helps to bridge the gap between herself and a remote husband – goes unanswered in the novel. There is only the recognition that people “go on” because they must, because they cannot escape the “Chakravyuha”31 except, like Abhimanyu, a warrior in the Mahabharata, through death (202). Meanwhile, we, as readers, are left to wonder what the maternal crypt has already set in motion for the next generation. Urmi describes the concern she has for Kartik, her and Kishore’s overly serious son: Even as a baby he was so quiet, it sometimes frightened me – could a normal human being be so placid? Now I know he is perfectly normal, but I worry about the way he can hold things within himself. (75–76)

31

The Chakravyuha or Padmavyuha “is a seven-tier defensive spiral formation, used by Dronacharya, commander-in-chief of the Kaurava army.The formation is likened to a chariot wheel” (Wikipedia). Significantly, Abhimanyu learns how to penetrate this labyrinthine structure from his father, Arjuna, in his mother’s womb. His mother falls asleep during the story being told to her and so he does not learn how to exit; thus he must die.

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“‘Do we have to go on agonizing over the children forever’” (76), Urmi’s sister-in-law Vanaa asks her. As Deshpande’s next two novels clearly demonstrate, the answer to that question is, resoundingly, ‘Yes’, particularly if parents are compelled to “hold things within” and to keep shameful secrets from themselves and their children.

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6

“What could my mother be to yours?” — Disinheriting the Phantom in A Matter of Time

Families have a history. The past dwells in them through genealogy, resemblance, inheritance, deeds. They have their secrets and ghosts, they have their traditions and strengths and they have their weaknesses and feelings of guilt.1 We bury our fears deep, we stamp hard on the earth, we build our lives on this solid, hard foundation, but suddenly the fears come to life, and the earth shakes with their strggle to surface.2 old skeletons are harmless. […] It’s the newer skeletons you have to be wary of, they’re the ones you’ve got to keep securely locked in cupboards, be careful that they never get out and show you their deathly grins.3

C

that the world Deshpande depicts in her fiction, at least until the publication of Small Remedies (2000), is a narrow one, confined to the domestic and psychological space, tend to overlook the way that most of her novels are set in a recognizably larger world of politics and events. As we have seen in That Long Silence, the outside world not only impinges on domestic life, it is an essential factor in defining the aspirations and anxieties of its characters. The Binding Vine was inspired by a widely publicized rape case. While Deshpande’s novels are not overtly political, in the same way that, for example, those of Nayantara Sahgal are, they do exist within, and register, 1 2 3

RITICS WHO ARGUE

Jain, Gendered Realities, 69–70. Deshpande, A Matter of Time, 51. A Matter of Time, 164.

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the larger historical and political realm. Deshpande’s characters, in other words – men, women, and children – occupy recognizably situated historical-political-geographical spaces that have shaped their experience. Moreover, Deshpande’s insightful depiction of the role of the unconscious in shaping personal behaviour can also shed some light on the psyche of a nation which is, arguably, a projection of the desires and anxieties of its people. In Deshpande’s seventh novel, A Matter of Time, the importance of family history is announced in the opening lines, and this family’s history is connected to one of the most significant politico-historical events in south India: the fall of the Vijayanagar empire in the late-eighteenth century. Moreover, one of the key, if understated, plot-elements in the novel is the clash between academic historical investigation and a nationalist-driven, politically invested desire to falsify history in an effort to protect and project an idealized Hindu past, Deshpande works history and politics into her novels with such great subtlety, however, that it is easy to overlook some of these connections, particularly if the critic’s focus remains only on the ‘woman’ or the ‘man–woman’ question in Deshpande’s work. I would like to draw attention to one such episode in A Matter of Time: an allusion to the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi near the novel’s conclusion that fixes almost to the day (21 May 1991) the deaths of two central figures in the novel, the main female protagonist, Sumi, and her father, Shripati. More than just a device to situate this novel in historical time, however, the allusion to this particular assassination provides an astute commentary on historical time, and, particularly, on cyclical and transgenerational haunting. Sumi and Shripati’s family members, already deep in grief and shock over their recent loss, suspend mourning for their loved ones to watch television coverage in the aftermath of Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination. Naively, perhaps, Kalyani expresses disbelief in response to this national tragedy when she turns to her son-in-law Gopal for answers: ‘We’ve progressed, Gopal,’ Kalyani says. ‘They killed the Mahatma with a pistol, Indira with a machine gun and now they’ve used a bomb on Rajiv.’ Looking at the young people about her, she cries out in despair, ‘Such a young man – how could anyone have hated him so much! Can people hate so much?’

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The answer is ‘yes’, but it is not the answer Kalyani can take now and so they are all silent. ‘How will our children live in this world, Gopala? Where did we go wrong? What have we done to them?’4

These questions – “Where did we go wrong? What have we done to [our children]?” – reverberate through the entire novel, providing its central motif and informing its haunted structure. Not only does Kalyani’s anguished plea link the national tragedy unfolding on the television screen in her home to the personal tragedy her family has just endured, it also suggests the repetitive and escalating – in Kalyani’s ironic term, “progressive” – nature of unresolved trauma: pistols become machine guns become bombs. The national trauma of communal violence that has erupted with fatiguing regularity in India since partition, a theme that is more fully developed in Small Remedies, cannot be considered merely as a footnote in A Matter of Time. The reference to Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination at a critical juncture in the latter novel should suggest to us that the crypt plays a role in national trauma as surely as it disturbs individual lives. So while it is individual lives and family dynamics that are the primary focus of A Matter of Time, these lives are explicitly placed in a broader historico-political context. Moreover, Deshpande breaks free, in this novel, from the extremely limited first-person point of view that created such problems for her in The Binding Vine: A Matter of Time is written in a third-person omniscient voice that allows ‘unmediated’ access to, among others, the perspective of a male character for the first time in Deshpande’s novels.5 My hesitation over the word ‘unmediated’ stems, of course, from a general understanding of the mediation of all text, but also from a more particular caveat with regard to a novel in which the narrative is heavily mediated both by a dense intertextuality and by an intrusive narrator who sometimes directly addresses the reader and whose knowledge of events extends to the future of some of the novel’s characters. While Meenakshi Mukherjee is quite critical of these “authorial” intrusions, arguing that “there are too many references to a future that lies

4 Shashi Deshpande, A Matter of Time (1996; New York: Feminist Press at C U N Y , 1999): 241–42. Unless otherwise indicated, further page references are in the main

text. 5 Deshpande has used the male point of view in some of her short stories.

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outside the time frame of the novel – tantalising at first, but by the end unsatisfactory” (31), such freedom allows Deshpande to dramatize, rather than merely intimate, as she does in earlier novels, the disturbing and haunting effects of the crypt on the children of two troubled and secretive parents. Moreover, the broadening of the point of view allows the reader glimpses of the uncanniness of transgenerational haunting, which, like the ring in Kalidasa’s play, has the effect of disrupting temporal flow and disorienting its victims and witnesses. There is another sense, however, in which omniscience in this novel – specifically, access to characters’ interiority through the technique of free indirect discourse – is mediated in the novel. As might be expected of a novelist whose oeuvre explores alienation and the secrets that human beings keep from each other and themselves, even so-called omniscience is not sufficient to grant access to the crypt that certain characters bear, unwittingly, within them. To put this another way, there are ghosts in A Matter of Time who come back to haunt and whose presences can be, and are, acknowledged and then (partially) exorcized through recognition and speech, but there are phantoms that are equally persistent, even though their presence is never explicitly registered, either by the omniscient narrator or the character who suffers from the phantom’s destructive effects. Opening such a crypt is a task that can be accomplished only by a cryptomimetic reading attuned to omissions and disturbances in characters’ speech and actions. Deshpande’s most haunted novel, A Matter of Time is also her most overtly gothic work, as even a sketchy description of the plot, and the opening lines of the novel, might suggest. The narrative arc of the novel – its present action, if you like – begins in a contemporary middle-class south Indian home at a moment of crisis. Sumi lies alone in the dark in front of a flickering T V set, her husband Gopal having just announced that he is leaving her and their three teen-aged daughters. The interchange between the couple is not rendered on the page, but it becomes clear later in the novel that Gopal has not left Sumi for another woman, nor out of anger, nor for any one specific reason that he – or anyone else – can pinpoint, although many theories are put forward in the text. Gopal takes up a frugal, almost hermit-like existence not (physically) far away from his family. Without financial resources of their own, Sumi and her daughters move back to her ancestral home, where Sumi’s mother and father live together in separate parts of the house, having, literally, not

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spoken to each other for decades. The novel describes the struggle of each of these characters to adjust to new, unforeseen circumstances. However, just as Sumi’s daughters are beginning to accept their new situation, and just as Sumi begins to establish independence from her parents, Sumi and her father are killed in a motorcycle accident that seems to punctuate the more or less realist trajectory of the novel with a melodramatic and, for certain readers, wholly unexpected and extremely upsetting deus ex machina. The novel ends, as it begins, with Gopal’s departure from his family, this time, though, with Sumi’s ashes and his daughters’ blessings. But here is another perhaps equally valid way of describing the novel’s plot: Once upon a time there was a King who had one child, a daughter. Sons had been born to him and his wife, a foreign princess, but none of them had lived beyond infancy. The Queen was now beyond the age of childbearing, and the King began to wonder why God had not permitted any of these male heirs to survive. He was certain that leaving his kingdom to his daughter would lead to disaster; how could a Queen be strong enough to lead and to defend the realm? […] And so the King began to examine his conscience. He concluded that God must be punishing him for the sin of incest; his wife, the foreign princess, had first been married to the King’s older brother.6

The previous paragraph is, of course, taken from Anne Williams’ description of the (gothic) plot of King Henry V I I I . But how is it also an accurate representation of the plot of Deshpande’s novel, set in Bangalore in the early 1990s? As Gopal muses, paraphrasing Kierkegaard, “Life must be lived forwards, but it can only be understood backwards” (98). So let me begin to explain by backing up to the opening words of the novel, a description of the ancestral home to which Sumi and her daughters have not quite yet returned and a gothic foreshadowing of the deepest layers of the family plot: The house is called Vishwas, named, not as one would imagine for the abstract quality of trust, but after an ancestor, the man who came down South with the Peshwa’s invading army and established the family there. The name, etched into a stone tablet set in the wall, seems to be 6

Anne Williams, Art of Darkness, 27.

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fading into itself, the process of erosion having made it almost undecipherable. And yet the house proclaims the meaning of its name [Vishwas is the Sanskrit word for trust] by its very presence, its solidity. It is obvious that it was built by a man not just for himself, but for his sons and his son’s sons. Built to endure – as it has. (3)

In A Matter of Time, the House of Vishwas, or the Big House, performs the role of what Antoinette Burton calls an “architectural mnemonic,”7 charting a space saturated – indeed, classically overdetermined – by the history of the family’s dead and lost, who will not loosen their hold on the present inhabitants. Like Toni Morrison’s 124 Bluestone in Beloved, like Sutpen’s Hundred in Absalom, Absalom!, like Hawthorne’s Seven Gables, and Poe’s House of Usher, Vishwas is a “schizophrenic”8 and haunted space, a decaying monument to a patriarchal dream turned nightmare: Vishwas is a house built for a man’s “sons and his son’s sons.” In this context, the word “endure” evokes several connotations: the house has lasted or stood for a long time, but not without suffering – and witnessing – a great deal of hardship, much of it stemming from the difficulty of producing an appropriate heir for the property. My stammering introduction to this text, providing multiple points of entry into its narrative, highlights one of the most important architectural features of much gothic fiction (and all of Deshpande’s novels): its labyrinthine narrative, what Eve Sedgwick describes as “the difficulty the story has in getting itself told.”9 The very simple story of a man’s abandonment of his family and its effects on them all – what I have described as the novel’s present action – is only a single thread running through much more complex family tapestries into which are woven public and private histories that haunt every aspect of the contemporary plot. As these stories are unravelled, they expose the House of Vishwas’ most deeply buried and destructive secrets – including several manifestations of what might be called incest, mental incapacity, a ‘lost’ child, epic estrangements, and domestic terror –many of which are related to the anxiety about marital alliance and rightful inheritance.

7

Antoinette Burton, Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home and History in Late Colonial India (New York & Delhi: Oxford U P , 2003): 19. 8 Deshpande, A Matter of Time, 5. 9 Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, 14.

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The urgency to produce a male heir is an imperative not, of course, exclusive to Indian culture, but one that is expressed particularly well in that context in the epigraph to the second section of the novel, aptly entitled “The Family”: Whatever wrong has been done by him, his son frees him from it all; therefore he is called a son. By his son a father stands firm in this world. (91)

This epigraph, taken from the Upanishads, demonstrates what is at stake in the failure of a marriage to produce a son: for devout upper-caste Hindus, sons traditionally inherit not only the father’s material wealth, thus ensuring that the property remains in the family, but they also inherit the spiritual burden of performing funeral rites for the father, enabling his successful passage into a higher birth and thus facilitating his opportunity to escape the cycle of rebirths and the suffering and desire attendant upon life in the physical world. The strong connection between the Hindu religion and all social culture in India, exacerbated by outlawed but still flourishing dowry practices, means that the preference for a son over a daughter in India extends even to non-Hindu communities and to otherwise non-observant Hindu families. Tragically, in the light of the epigraph and all that it implies about the material and spiritual value of sons, the central family in A Matter of Time – Sumi’s family, the family of Shripati Pandit – has a surfeit of daughters and no living male heir in Sumi’s generation: there are Sumi and her three daughters, of course, but Sumi is also one of two daughters herself.10 Indeed, the impressive patriarchal lineage that is literally inscribed into the House of Vishwas, and whose roots allegedly go back to a venerable ancestor who arrived with the 1766 invasion of Karnataka by the Maratha leader Peshwa Madhavrao, has, like the house itself, fallen into a state of infertility and decline, expressed metaphorically in the following passage: The front yard is bare. Nothing, it seems, has ever grown or will grow on the hard unyielding ground. A star-shaped sunken pond is now only a pit harbouring all the trash blown in by the wind. A festoon of 10

Sumi’s sister Premi has one son, Nikhil. Sumi wonders whether the House of Vishwas will be willed to Nikhil, rather than to Premi or herself, as, she thinks, “to Baba he may be the only possible heir” (195).

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cobwebs, hanging in a canopy over the huge front door, speaks of its being rarely used. (3–4)

The description that follows explicitly personifies the house and its gardens, lending it a mysterious and even ominous air: to the “fanciful,” the house “has a sense of expectancy […] as if it were holding its breath, waiting for something” (5), perhaps its rightful heir? Sumi herself imagines that “the walls of this house […] seem to cry out that the very reason for their existence was a son” (71). As the description of the house continues, there are hints of a “wholly forgotten” past “cruelty” (4) in the roots of tangled trees and in deep, unbridgeable rifts between certain of the house’s inhabitants. These rifts are, in turn, inseparable from the ‘problem’ of the lack of a male heir to inherit the property, as the discordant and phallic nature of its most unusual feature suggests: Inside, the house seems to echo the schizophrenic character of its exterior. […] The staircase raises expectations of an entire floor above, but there is in fact only one room, obviously added on later. Looked at from the outside, it looks like an excrescence perched on top of the house, detracting from its main quality of integrity. (5)

Indeed, as is the case in the House of Usher, the deformed architecture of the dwelling provides one of the major clues to the plot. The “excrescence” is occupied by only one person: the self-exiled family patriarch, Shripati, who spends most of his time isolated in a room from which his wife has been forever banished and to which his children and grandchildren have access only through relatively formalized visits. In A Matter of Time, the patriarchal ‘design’ symbolized by the Big House’s architectural supplement is our first hint of a carefully suppressed family history that flashes, at first, only in fleeting, unexplained, and sometimes distorted glimpses. One of the earliest of these is Kalyani’s puzzling response to the arrival of her daughter Sumi, Sumi’s three daughters in tow, on the threshold of the House of Vishwas: “‘no, my God, not again’” (12). Forced back into the family home by circumstances that uncannily repeat, but with significant differences, her own mother’s rejection by her husband, Sumi inevitably confronts disturbing and disconnected childhood memories, including a terrifying one of her mother throwing herself at the door of her father’s room at the top of the

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stairs, screaming, in vain, to be admitted (74). The reasons for Kalyani’s banishment and Shripati’s self-exile are revealed only gradually in the novel, the clues given partly in stories related to Sumi’s daughters by Kalyani and her adoptive sister Goda, in a manner that is described as a game of “cat’s cradle,” the “skilful[ly] transferring [of] the thread from hand to hand, from finger to finger, creating a design between them, a design that allows certain facts to slip through. Clearly there are stories concealed in the interstices of silence.” And so, the narrator goes on to say, eventually, “One of these is of Kalyani’s marriage to her own uncle, Shripati” (121). While this clue does not yet reveal the immediate source of the grandparent’s alienation, it does lead the reader closer to an understanding of the shame and horror underlying one thread of the family plot, as does the further revelation by the narrator, several pages later, of the reason for the arranged marriage. Kalyani’s mother, Manorama, a woman without sons, could not stand to see the House of Vishwas, and all that it represents, fall into another family’s hands. Reassured by her husband, Vithalrao, that he is perfectly content to leave his property to his two daughters, Kalyani and Goda, but “terrified that her husband would marry again” (128) and produce a male heir, Manorama insists that her daughter Kalyani – who aspired to become an engineer, possibly “the first woman engineer in the country” (129) – leave school to marry Manorama’s much younger brother, Shripati: [Kalyani] was taken out of school and married off by Manorama to her own brother Shripati. Perhaps, after this, Manorama felt secure. The property would remain in the family now. Her family. (129)

And so the reader learns that the family’s precipitous decline – what Kalyani, for whom “everything is preordained” (93), will refer to simply as its destiny – finds its roots in a matriarch’s patriarchal design, a design fuelled, in turn, by her shame about her own humble background and her failure to give birth to a son, “that main crutch, the one most women depended on” (128). In this novel, the words “destiny” and “fate” function as cryptomimetic alibis for the puzzling repetitions in an opaque family history. Just as Gopal, whose occupation as an historian allows him to see “the holes and inconsistencies in the story told by this Vyasa [the family historian]” (96), senses that there is much more (or, perhaps, much less) to the story of his

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wife’s family’s fabled ancestry, so, too, the stories that Kalyani and Goda weave for Kalyani’s grandchildren have left out certain shameful facts. This pattern of secrecy in the family’s history thus repeatedly ensures traumatic ruptures with the past that threaten to usurp the process of successful introjection and foreclose a vision of the future for many of the novel’s characters. In A Matter of Time, in other words, Deshpande has clearly set the stage for a nuanced excavation of family history that invites a psychoanalytic approach. Noting “the extraordinary power and pervasiveness of the family as an organizing structure”11 in gothic fiction, Anne Williams builds her case for a reading of the family in gothic fiction based upon Freud’s notion of the anxiety-ridden “family romance,” in which children’s fantasies about their own origin are rooted in a “psychodynamics of feeling that may well affect human behavior far beyond the realm of the individual self.”12 Given the prevalence of incest (real or imagined) and illegitimacy (real or suspected) and the sense of horror attached to such illicit relationships in gothic fiction, Williams speculates that the overdetermination of “family” in Gothic registers changes and anxieties affecting both the mind and the heart. Further, all these tales about the power of the past (especially the deeds of one’s ancestors) to affect the present symbolically foreshadow (and express within the Symbolic) the basic psychoanalytic principle that the present self is shaped within the structures of the past.13

Williams suggests that gothic “is a narrative built over a cultural fault line – the point of conjunction between the discourses of alliance and sexuality, in Foucault’s sense of those terms.”14 While I agree in general terms with Williams’ statement and its applicability to Deshpande’s novel, we need to proceed with some caution when applying Western psychoanalytic terms and notions about marital and sexual affiliation to a narrative by an Indian writer about Indian characters – in other words, we need to pay particular attention to the word “cultural” in the expression “cultural fault line.” While A Matter of Time 11

Anne Williams, Art of Darkness, 90. Williams, Art of Darkness, 89. 13 Art of Darkness, 90. 14 Art of Darkness, 95. 12

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is clearly and multiply informed by both Eastern and Western philosophical influences, to the point where, within two sentences, a character such as Gopal might refer to an episode of the Mahabharata and comment on it with a line from Camus (68–69), Western assumptions about the significance of certain family relationships in an Indian cultural context, including assumptions about how incest is defined, can be very misleading. For example, in parts of south India, marriage between a woman’s brother and her daughter (such as that between Kalyani and Shripati) is not classified as incestuous: it is, indeed, a culturally sanctioned, traditional practice. As Jasbir Jain notes, The family graph [in the novel] reveals some of the south Indian practices, as for instance, the mother’s brother marrying the daughter (maternal uncle marrying his niece), and another Indian practice surfaces in the marriage between Gopal’s father and Sudha’s widowed mother. In themselves, these practices have a humane face […] but they also have their ugly face as they facilitate control of family property.”15

Kalyani’s marriage to Shripati, in other words, is devastating to her not because the man she marries is “her own uncle,” but because her mother’s motives for arranging the marriage are primarily selfish, and because the social expectations of a wife’s role foreclose Kalyani’s promising future as an engineer. The novel remains silent on the question of whether or not genetic inbreeding plays a role in producing a “retarded” child, but not on the injustice of the marriage itself. The marriage of Gopal’s parents, on the other hand, is not socially sanctioned within south Indian (Brahminic) culture, as Jain implies, and as I will discuss later in this chapter. But, while neither of these alliances could be considered incestuous by south Indian standards, the circumstances of these marriages seem to fuel an unaccountable anxiety – one might even say, sense of horror – within certain characters. In using the word “horror” to describe the marital alliances in this novel, I am not reading with “Western eyes,” as Chandra Mohanty would allege; rather, I am registering an intertextual and intercultural – indeed, overdetermined – anxiety about consanguinity and affiliation expressed throughout the novel itself, in relation not only to the marriage of Sumi’s 15

Jain, Gendered Realities,, 63–64.

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parents, which might be considered incestuous by Western, but not south Indian, standards, but also to the locally proscribed marriage of Gopal’s parents: an alliance between a widow with a young daughter and her husband’s younger brother. Moving from a rigidly Freudian framework, in which such relationships tend to be defined from a rigid, culturally biased perspective, to a reading informed by the work of Abraham and Torok, allows us to focus on the unique personal and social histories of the novel’s protagonists and the symbolic and intertextual significance of these alliances. A cryptomimetic reading of the text can also help us trace in a more nuanced way how these doubled representations of what may be called incest in certain cultures or at certain times in history operate beneath the surface of the novel, registering unspeakable, and therefore unresolved, traumas in the lives of Deshpande’s characters. Without knowing the details of either of these stories of alliance, Gopal’s and Sumi’s daughters nonetheless breathe the fetid air of mystery and secrecy that surrounds their father’s strange behaviour and his seemingly inexplicable abandonment of them; their mother’s passive acquiescence to this abandonment; and the odd estrangement between their grandparents, an arrangement about which they had always known, but that only begins to strike them as odd when their father’s departure forces them to move into the Big House. Aru and Charu, Gopal and Sumi’s two eldest daughters, eventually come to learn, from their mother’s sister, Aunt Premi, the truth about the “dark looming cloud” (121) hanging over their grandmother’s head, the reason for the estrangement: Kalyani and Shripati’s “lost” child, the second of their two children, a “mentally retarded” (140–1) son. Unnamed in the novel until very late in the narrative, the very moment, in fact, before Shripati and Sumi’s death, Madhav is the male heir who haunts the House of Vishwas, a revenant of the patriarchal dream who is, uncannily, neither dead nor alive. He is, simply, according to the story that Premi tells her nieces, lost at a busy train station when Kalyani, temporarily alone in charge of three very small children, somehow fails to see her four-yearold son wander off into the crowd and disappear forever. Although Shripati immediately abandons the rest of his family to seek his lost son, he is not able to find him. A husbandless Kalyani returns to the House of Vishwas with her two remaining children, daughters Sumi and Premi. Eventually, Shripati is coaxed back into the family house by his dying mother-

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in-law, but apparently under one condition: his physical isolation from his wife Kalyani (153). Of Madhav, the lost brother, Premi tells her nieces that “‘Each time I see a beggar, I think – maybe that’s my brother. There’s an idiot near the Siddhi Vinayak temple. I’ve stopped going there now, because whenever I see him, I think – that’s him’” (141). Armed with these bits of knowledge, Aru, at least, gains possession of the talisman that helps her to understand her grandparents’ lives, and this “ring of recollection” allows her, in a future to which the novel frequently gestures, to delve even more deeply into her family’s past. Overhearing the carefully censored stories that her mother and Goda tell her daughters, Sumi wonders whether her children in this “postFreudian age” (122) will be the chroniclers of their parents’ lives, “time” having removed “all the dross, leaving only the gold behind” (122). However, her children’s keen interest in the stories that their grandmother neglects or hesitates to tell, an interest that, significantly, they do not share with Sumi, makes it clear to the reader that, in the “post-Freudian” age, it is precisely the “dross” that needs to be exposed. Moreover, the children of Sumi and Gopal have two parents, each with a secret history, each bearing a maternal crypt. 

It is crucial to emphasize that the words giving sustenance to the phantom return to haunt from the unconscious. These are often the very words that rule an entire family’s history and function as the tokens of its pitiable articulations. Extending the idea of the phantom, it is reasonable to maintain that the “phantom effect” progressively fades during its transmission from one generation to the next and that, finally, it disappears. Yet, this is not at all the case when shared or complementary phantoms find a way of being established as social practices along the lines of staged words.16

Now that I have given away the secret of the House of Vishwas, what more is there to say about the novel? According to the therapeutic practices of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, revealing the secret – exor16

Abraham, “Notes on the Phantom,” 176; emphasis added.

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cizing the analysand’s phantom – marks the end of analysis: their aim is the cure, a dis-possession, if you will, of the magic spell and an opening of the crypt to reveal its secrets. But as we have seen, possession of the magic talisman – the ring in the case of Kalidasa’s play – is not sufficient in and of itself to reunite the lovers and repair a damaged past. Another act of divine intervention must take place before that can happen, if indeed it ever can. Moreover, literary texts – and literary analyses – do not proceed along the same lines as psychoanalysis. As Jodey Castricano, citing, among other things, Derrida’s introduction to Abraham and Torok’s The WolfMan’s Magic Word argues, [To write with ghosts] would, by necessity, be cryptic because it stands on the border of divulging and hiding, remembering and forgetting, producing a curious fort / da tension that is, as Deleuze and Guattari say of writing that deals with the “secret,” always “becoming” (289). In effect, the crypt is a model and a method of producing concealment or what Heidegger calls aletheia. The crypt, therefore, is not to be thought of merely as a metaphor for the unconscious, “hidden, secret, underground, [or] latent” nor as a “literal meaning” (“Fors” xiii), but rather as a term referring to a writing practice that takes into account a secret, a tomb, a burial, and a return – aspects of what Derrida calls “metaphoricity itself.17

As someone who writes not about, but “with ghosts,” Deshpande, as we have seen, is far less interested in revealing the secrets that haunt her characters than with revealing the disturbing “fort/da” effects of the crypt on characters who bear, unwittingly and unwillingly, the secrets of others. In her mystery novel A Matter of Time, Deshpande may assign the role of detective to Gopal and Sumi’s eldest daughters, who meet with some success in unravelling the dark secrets that haunt the House of Vishwas, but what remains unrevealed, mysterious, and cryptic is the behaviour of the novel’s two central figures: Sumi and Gopal. What is most extraordinary about the way that the narrative stages its investigation of family secrecy is the fact that Sumi and Gopal’s daughters learn an important family secret not from their parents, but from their grandmother and aunts. Nor, for that matter, do Gopal and Sumi’s daughters ever seek an17

Jodey Castricano. Cryptomimesis, 29.

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swers to the mystery from their parents. Most significantly, this is a novel in which the two central characters – one might call them the main focalizing characters in this omniscient text – never once explicitly acknowledge to their children the secret of the House of Vishwas that their daughters must actively work to uncover. Nor does Gopal ever share with anyone but the reader the burden of his secret history, leaving us to wonder whether the ghosts of the House of Vishwas can ever be laid to rest. Ciphers in an omniscient text that allows unprecedented (for Deshpande) access to their thoughts, Sumi and Gopal traverse the pages of the novel like actors playing a role in a (s)crypt that someone else has written for them, each expressing at times a sense of unreality and staginess about their lives. It is no coincidence, I believe, that Gopal recalls falling in love with Sumi not only while watching her from afar, but after retiring from that “scene” and recalling a similar one from Kalidasa’s Sakuntala and the Ring of Recollection: I can still remember the day my detachment ended. I woke out of a heavy drugged sleep in the afternoon – it must have been a Sunday – to the sound of girls’ voices. I went out to the tap to wash my face and saw them, Sumi and a friend, on the stone seat under the neem tree. I went back to my room, picked up my book and tried to go back to reading, and the voices and laughter came to me still, like a distant melody, filling me with ecstasy. I ceased to be an observer then and, like the king who stood watching Shakuntala and her two friends, I became part of the enchantment, I could see the bee hovering, I could hear its buzzing…. ‘We are searching for the truth; you, O bee, have found it’. (44–45)

Gopal, for whom the world before this point had become “hazy, the voices muted” (44), frequently describes himself as an observer, lacking a sense of “involvement” (44). And while he admits that “for a while” he “had found the truth” in Sumi, he also admits to “know now I had only lost myself in that beautiful, dense green foliage” (45) depicted in the scene from Kalidasa’s play. Explicit and implicit intertextual allusions to Sakuntala and the Ring of Recollection saturate A Matter of Time, not only drawing our attention to performance as a means of both self-projection and self-protection, but also intensifying the novel’s major themes of memory and existential isolation. Having convinced himself that he has successfully detached

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himself from his marriage, Gopal is stunned to discover the depth of feeling he still has for Sumi when he sees her at a party after their separation: I thought I’d left it all behind, but I haven’t, it’s here with me still and at the sight of Sumi everything comes back. It’s as if she’s brought me the ring and I move from nothing to everything in a flash. Dushyanta had only those few days in the ashram to remember when they put the fish-stinking ring in his hands, but for me it’s years, nearly half my lifetime, all my lifetime it seems to me. (106)

In a reversal of the plot of Kalidasa’s play, though, Gopal need only reach out and reclaim Sumi as a wife; that he does not do so reveals a great deal about Gopal’s mysterious commitment to detachment, in spite of his love for Sumi. It is interesting to note here that even Gopal’s decision to marry Sumi arises from a drama enacted outside of himself. He recalls sitting on a bus and overhearing a conversation between two strangers about whether or not one of them should marry a woman of a different caste from his own. The other man urges his companion to “‘Marry her, she’s a good girl, she’ll make you a good wife’” (67). Wondering whether he has dreamt the conversation, Gopal muses: No, I did not imagine it, I did hear it, the bus ride is still too vivid for me to have any doubts about that. But even today I cannot get over the strangeness of it, for they spoke as if for my benefit, the problem was mine, the advice for me. It was like hearing strangers relating my story, it was like hearing the end of my story in a strange place. (67)

Gopal seems to be doomed forever to viewing his life as a story told by others, a Camusian outsider to his own life. But what cryptic knowledge compels Gopal’s actions and prevents him from engaging fully in life? In the multi-faceted Sumi, the passive Gopal seems to have found his dramatic counterpart: as much as he is a willing and often distant observer, she appears to him frequently as a character on stage. Even before his recognition that he is in love with her, Gopal recalls walking home with Sumi and her mother Kalyani from a school play in which Sumi played the role of Kisa Gotami, “with all the stage accoutrements of grief: hair loose, white sari and tear-choked voice” (emphasis added): And the other Sumi, the girl I saw flashing about her home, was there too, darting out of those eyes, in the face framed in those two sleek

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wings of her hair, asking us, her audience: Am I not doing this well? Am I not a good actress? And then the girl, my landlady’s daughter, walking home with Kalyani and me, staggering a little in her sleepiness, floating on the cloud of euphoria of her success on the stage. As we moved out from under the shadows of the trees into the bright moonlight, I saw her face – the make-up inexpertly wiped off, patches still clinging to the corners of her mouth and nose, behind her ears, under her chin, the eyeblack smeared round her eyes, traces of it on her cheeks. Innocent, clownish, vulnerable. (86)

Gopal’s use of the word “clownish” links this passage with the opening scene of the novel, a heavily encrypted passage to which I will return much later in this chapter, in which Sumi lies motionless just before receiving the news that Gopal is leaving her: She is lying full length on the sofa, watching a movie on T V , her eyes fixed unblinking on the screen as if she has never seen these things before: a circus. A clown in the centre of the arena, singing and dancing. And the spectators, in the manner of the spectators in any movie, gazing ahead in complete unison. Perhaps in a sense, it is true that she has not really seen this before. She had never been to the circus as a child; children don’t go, they are taken. And who could have taken them, Premi and her? In fact, the first (and the last) time she saw a circus was when Gopal and she had taken their daughters to one. The girls, four and five then, ha[d] been enthralled and Gopal’s enjoyment had been almost as childlike as theirs. But she had been appalled. (7)

In a passage that powerfully signals Sumi’s fate in the novel, after Gopal has given her the news and left their home for the final time, Sumi “continues to watch the movie until the end, when the clown, tragic, doomed victim, dies” (9). Deshpande links Gopal and Sumi throughout the text by the “tragic, doomed” figure of the clown. Near the end of the novel, just before the deaths of Shripati and Sumi, the third-person narrator, sounding suspiciously like the reflective Gopal, uses the clown figure again to represent the constant presence of despair: “Hovering in the wings, if not centre stage. Whispering to us: if this is all we have, we may as well sing and dance. Like the clown in the circus, keeping the darkness away with mirth

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and laughter” (183). With this image, Deshpande draws our attention to the mysterious interiority of self, but also to the performative dimension of human relations, by which certain subjects protect themselves from others and from their own pain and despair. Having been told that Sumi has changed since his leaving her, Gopal recalls seeing “Sumi before the dressing-table, one of those with three mirrors. And the triptych of images in the three mirrors, each image slightly different. From what self has Sumi changed?” (86). One of the deepest mysteries of this mysterious text is the manner in which Sumi plays out the role of the abandoned wife: not only does she not ask Gopal why he is leaving her and their family, she does not attempt to pursue him, either for the purpose of reconciliation or to seek financial support, after he leaves. While, out of immediate necessity, she seeks the material support of her parents, she neither seeks comfort from her extended family nor complains to them about her abandonment. Deshpande has commented on Sumi’s aloofness during this trial in her life: Sumi’s acceptance is not passive. She blocks out the unpleasantness. She has a good opinion of herself, she is more concerned with getting on with life. She does not want pity, she would do anything for pride. She distances even her husband. The point is, they are both unusual. People are puzzled by the abandoned wife not feeling bad.18

While a reader of the novel might be tempted to agree with Deshpande’s comment that both Gopal and Sumi are “unusual,” she may reach another conclusion about Sumi’s composure, recalling Gopal’s description of the “vulnerable young girl, still in stage make-up with whom he walked home, asking, “Am I not doing this well? Am I not a good actress?” No less a cipher than her husband, Sumi puts on a face for her spectators and walks the “chalked lines” (26) that Gopal has told her mark out human destiny. But, the reader is left to wonder, why does Sumi “block out the unpleasantness”? What mechanism is at work in that blocking? What, if anything, does Sumi know and remember of a four-year-old brother who walked away not only from his mother, but also his fiveyear-old big sister, in a busy train station? And what does this knowledge 18

Deshpande, in Vimala Rama Rao, “In Conversation with Shashi Deshpande,” in The Fiction of Shashi Deshpande, ed. R.S. Pathak (Creative Books: New Delhi, 1998): 256.

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– or forgetting, as we learn obliquely that she only once alludes to the loss of her little brother – have to do with her serene imperturbality in the face of domestic tragedy? It is my contention that both Gopal and Sumi, like Urmi and Kishore in The Binding Vine, are bearers of a parental crypt, a secret to which they do not have access, a secret that paralyzes their lives, even as they go about, apparently, living, working, speaking – acting. Inheritors of the phantom, they are doomed to play out their lives as actors, driven by forces that they do not understand. Abraham and Torok explain this phenomenon in terms of Freud’s notion of the death drive: A surprising fact gradually emerges: the work of the phantom coincides in every respect with Freud’s descriptions of the death instinct. First of all, it has no energy of its own; it cannot be “abreacted,” merely designated. Second, it pursues its work of disarray in silence. Let us note that the phantom is sustained by secreted words, invisible gnomes whose aim is to wreak havoc, from within the unconscious, in the coherence of logical progression. Finally, it gives rise to endless repetition and, more often than not, eludes rationalization.19

Abraham and Torok’s theory of the phantom can assist us in interpreting, if not resolving, many of the enigmatic plot points of the novel, including Sumi’s sudden death just over three-quarters of the way into the novel. And while Gopal survives the novel’s present action, living to see the deaths of his estranged wife and father-in-law, they can also assist us in analyzing the Hamlet-like paralysis that “wreak[s] havoc” in his life. 

Gopal: Thus does your past come back to confront you, thus does it claim you. It’s a fool’s game trying to escape. But if I cannot escape my past, how will my children ever be free of me? I thought I had snapped the thread when I walked out, I thought there was nothing left to connect us, but…. Yes, what about my children? (218) Look here, upon this picture, and on this, The counterfeit presentment of two brothers. (Hamlet, I I I .iv.53–54) 19

Nicolas Abraham, “Notes on the the Phantom,” 175.

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Why does a husband suddenly leave his wife and family? Of course, there is rarely just one reason. The death of a marriage can be attributed to a number of causes, most of which may be captured in the phrase ‘irreconcilable differences’: estrangement, infidelity, disagreements, etc. But, as Sumi astutely notes, Gopal does not just walk out of a marriage, he walks out of a life. Recalling that, after recently quitting his job as a university professor, Gopal could tell her only that “‘I could no longer stand in a position of authority before my students’” (27), Sumi knows that if she asks Gopal “‘why are you leaving me?’” she will get no answer that makes sense to her. However, in a passage rendered in free direct discourse, she tells us what she really does wish to know: what makes a man in this age of acquisition and possession walk out on his family and all that he owns? Because, and I remember this so clearly, it was you [Gopal] who said that we are shaped by the age we live in, by the society we are part of. How then can you, in this age, a part of this society, turn your back on everything in your life? Will you be able to give me an answer to this? (27)

Sumi never asks Gopal this question; if she had ever intended to, when she visits him at the home of Shankar, a former student, where he has taken up residence, she is interrupted in this task by an overwhelming emotion brought on by reading a poem left on Gopal’s desk, a moment to which I shall return by the end of the chapter, as it is essential to a cryptomimetic reading of the novel. For now, I wish to join the novel’s characters, including Gopal himself, and its critics in a quest to understand Gopal’s odd behaviour, keeping in mind, as Jasbir Jain speculates, that Gopal’s “crisis in his profession” may be a “symptom rather than a cause”20 of this behaviour. One by one, characters in the novel approach Gopal to discover the reason he has left Sumi. His mother-in-law Kalyani, in traditional deference to male privilege, assumes that Sumi has “done something wrong” and begs Gopal to “forgive her” whatever indiscretions she may have committed (46); Kalyani even implicates herself in the problem, speculating that she wasn’t a good enough mother to Sumi (47). Kalyani then asks if it is a money problem that has driven a wedge between the couple. Gopal can only reassure her that Sumi had “done nothing wrong,” that “it 20

Jain, Gendered Realities, 109.

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is he...” (47). Equally perplexed about her father’s abandonment of them and her mother’s passive acceptance, Gopal and Sumi’s eldest daughter Aru also wonders if her mother is to blame, or even if Aru herself has played a role in Gopal’s decision: “Is it because I was rude to you, because I always argued with you? Is it because of what I said to you when you decided to resign? Is it money?” (50). Meeting a wall of silence, Aru, like her grandmother before her, fails to discover a reason for Gopal’s actions. Eventually, she gives up trying to discover why he left them and begins to seek the legal recourse to his action that her mother, inexplicably to her, refuses to explore. Sumi’s sister Premi comes closest to receiving a definitive answer from Gopal about his reasons for leaving his family. Definitive, but anything but straightforward, the explanation begins with Gopal’s declaration that he “just got tired,” but not of Sumi. He ‘explains’ with a reference from the Mahabharata: ‘You remember the Yaksha’s question to Yudhishtira: what is the greatest wonder in this world? And what Yudhishtira’s answer was? We see people die and yet we go on as if we are going to live forever. Yes, it’s true, that is the greatest marvel this world holds, it’s the miracle. In fact it’s the secret of life itself. We know it’s all there, the pain and suffering, old age, loneliness and death, but we think, somehow we believe that it’s not for us. The day we stop believing in this untruth, the day we face the truth that we too are mortal, that this is our fate as well, it will become difficult, almost impossible to go on. And if it happens to all us, the human race will become extinct.’ He pauses and goes on, ‘It happened to me. I stopped believing. The miracle failed for me and there was nothing left. You’ve got to be the Buddha for that emptiness to be filled with compassion for the world. For me there was just emptiness.’ (133–34)

I will return to the potential origins of Gopal’s views on death shortly, but it is important to note here that Gopal also confesses to Premi that he has not been a husband to Sumi (134) for some time, implying that, in the latter days of his marriage, he had chosen a life of celibacy or was impotent, the latter being more likely, as earlier in the novel, Gopal recalls nights in bed next to Sumi, “quiescent, feeling nothing” (69). Gopal remarks further to Premi that he “had a strange feeling about Sumi. It’s like when you think you recognize someone, you tap then on the shoulder and when they turn around you see it’s no one you know’” (135–36). Ironi-

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cally, in Premi’s view, given Gopal’s despair, the conversation ends with Gopal’s reassurance to her that his family “will be all right” (137). Given that Gopal appears to be suffering from a spiritual crisis, many critics, including Y.S. Sunita Reddy, have at least speculated about the possibility that Gopal is portrayed as a man who has chosen to leave the life of the householder for the fourth and final stage of a Brahmin man’s life: in other words, that he is taking sanyas, or retreating from worldly concerns into a life of spiritual contemplation. Such a theory would offer some kind of an explanation for his behaviour, an explanation, moreover, that finds its source in an Indian context. R.S. Pathak examines this theory more closely. He concludes that such a reading of the novel overlooks two facts: first, that Gopal has not yet discharged his responsibilities as a householder; and, second, that he hasn’t entirely relinquished desire. I would quibble about the latter point – while Gopal admits to feeling desire, he never attempts to act upon it and has, in effect, confessed to being impotent – and add to these points two other objections to the theory that Deshpande portrays Gopal as a man completing the fourth stage of a Hindu man’s life. First, Gopal has not entirely given up gainful employment; and, second, the most recent crisis in his life comes at a time when he is shocked to have Brahminic privileges and status he thought he had renounced used against him as weapons. After publishing an article that casts a sainted Hindu poet in an erotic light, Gopal is challenged and even physically attacked by Hindutva-inspired students who resent a “‘bastard of a Brahmin’” (218) for tainting the reputation of a popular hero. Gopal explains: My father had disclaimed his identity as a Brahmin out of disgust when they reviled him for marrying his brother’s widow, I had ignored it all my life; being a Brahmin meant nothing to me. And yet, they charged me with having written my article from the platform of Brahminism. Ultimately, I was nothing more than a ‘bastard of a Brahmin.’ (218)

I will return later to these words, contending that they sting Gopal in ways not even imagined by the hurlers of the insult. However, returning to Pathak’s analysis for now, the critic concludes that Gopal’s renunciation of the world is “skin-deep and a beginner’s attempt to attain a kind of self-

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knowledge”21 and that “It would be better to read Gopal’s transformation from the existentialist point of view. It is worth mentioning that the novelist himself [sic] has quoted Camus and Kierkegaard at crucial contexts.”22 While Pathak is correct in noting that Gopal cites Camus and Kierkegaard, he does not explore fully the background to Gopal’s existential crisis: in fact, such an exploration reveals that the crisis originates long before Gopal’s decision to leave Sumi and his daughters, and even before the death of Gopal’s widowed sister Sudha, after which Gopal realizes that “All human ties are only a masquerade” (52). In what seems to be almost an infinite regress of dispossessions, Gopal tells us, early in the novel, that he is a man for whom “a lifetime of commitment” (69) is just not possible, and has not been possible, perhaps since the death of his parents, both “crushed by a bus” when he was eight years old (212), when he “had a glimpse of [the pretence]” (52), but certainly since learning, as a teenager, that he and his older sister Sudha did not share the same father. Gopal explains: It happened to me when I saw Sudha’s school certificate and knew that we did not share a father. That was a betrayal that cut away at the foundations of my life. Sudha never realized what this did to me. She had always known it, she said, she had not told me because – well, because my parents never had. (52)

Gopal’s reaction upon learning this, a reaction that Sudha “could not understand” (52) and which provokes in her considerable grief and guilt, is to leave his sister’s home, where he had been, since the death of his parents, cared for by Sudha and her husband P.K. This separation from his sister is what eventually leads Gopal to a boarding situation in Sumi’s family’s “outhouse” and to his role as Sumi’s husband. However, as Gopal’s later behaviour demonstrates, he is forever haunted by the knowledge that he gains, accidentally, of his relationship to Sudha and his parents’ proscribed alliance: the marriage of a widow to her husband’s brother.

21 R.S. Pathak, “A Matter of Time: Of Human Bonds and Bondages,” in The Fiction of Shashi Deshpande, ed. R.S. Pathak (New Delhi: Creative Books, 1998): 166. 22 Pathak, “A Matter of Time,” 166–67.

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If we can assume from what he has said elsewhere that he does not agree with the Brahminic prohibition on his parents’ marriage, what, exactly, accounts for Gopal’s horrified reaction to learning about his origins and what does this reaction have to do with his abandonment of his family? In a chapter liberally laced with free direct discourse, Gopal struggles to find the words by which he might explain his desertion of Sumi to his wife and friends: What do I say? What were the lines I had prepared? I heard a voice…. No, I can’t say that, it sounds utterly phoney. Even Joan of Arc didn’t get away with that one. It’s a kind of illness, a virus, perhaps, which makes me incapable of functioning as a full human being, as a husband and father… . This is the right answer to give a doctor and [Sumi’s sister] Premi may accept it, but will [Gopal’s nephew] Ramesh? No, he won’t leave it at that, he will ask me for my symptoms, he will try to connect them and ultimately, yes, I’m sure of this, make an appointment for me with a psychiatrist. No, best leave this alone. (40–41)

But, of course, Gopal cannot leave the explanation – or his rehearsals of it – alone: he obsessively struggles with the question, finding some kind of answer or maybe solace in pleasant and benign dreams he has begun to have about his long-dead father, whose face has, up to this point in his life, been “erase[d]” from his memory. Gopal explains that, after his parents’ death in an accident, his older sister Sudha immediately put away their pictures, “sweeping the house bare of their presence” (42), then transformed “a house of mourning into a normal home in which a family lived. Man, woman and child. P.K., Sudha and I. And so I forgot, how quickly I forgot the faces of my parents. No memories at all” (42). It is in this context, years after Sudha’s magic act of erasure and substitution, that Gopal learns the “truth” about his origins: that Sudha is his half-sister, that Sudha’s father was his father’s brother. Gopal says that, in “recreating” his “protean” father in his dreams, he is “Inventing him,” as he always has, “the possibilities […] innumerable” (42): A man who sinned against his brother by loving his wife. The brother dying of grief and the wife and the man marrying immediately after.

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A kind man moved by pity to marry his brother’s widow, to make that brother’s daughter his own. A Lakshman-like younger brother, keeping a promise made to his dying elder brother to look after his young widow and child. (No, this never worked. Lakshman, who never looked at Sita’s face, not once, so that the only bits of her jewellery he could identify after her abduction were her anklets – this devoted brother had to be discarded.) (42–43)

His parents’ marriage an opaque and mysterious – even in some ways forbidden – text, maintained as such through their death and his sister’s swift erasure of their existence, Gopal suffers what might be described as a crisis of legitimacy: if he is not the person he believed himself to be in relation to others, who, exactly, is he? In reaction to this crisis, Gopal’s identity is vulnerable to any intertext that will unlock the mystery of the unusual relationship between his parents and the confused relationship he has to his sister and her husband. Not finding such a text in the platonic and epic story of the loyal Lakshman and the devoted (to Rama) Sita, Gopal falls prey to what can only be called, in his case (and also in the case of psychoanalysis23), a viral text, Hamlet: It was when I read Hamlet, fortunately much later, that the most terrible version of my parents’ story entered my mind. Just that once, though, for I slammed the door on it immediately. In this story my father became a man succumbing to his passion for his brother’s wife, the woman compliant, a pregnancy and a child to come and then, after the husband’s convenient death (no, I couldn’t, I just couldn’t make my father poison his brother) a marriage of convenience. The facts, of course, few as they are, spell out a different story: Sudha’s father died of typhoid and I was born two years after my parents were married. But that was how it was for me – my father was never a father to me – not after I knew their story. He was my mother’s guilty partner, he was Sudha’s uncle, her stepfather, he was my mother’s husband. (43)

23

Since Freud and to this day, the figure of Hamlet has become the target of multiple psychoanalytic readings. As discussed in an earlier chapter, psychoanalysts Abraham and Torok provide a ‘solution’ to the riddle of Hamlet’s personality.

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Gopal may have “slammed the door” on the story of Hamlet: what he tells us in the final paragraph above, however, is that he has shut important and shameful aspects of the story within himself. The peace that Gopal’s recent dreams about a benign and loving father have brought him – dreams that have replaced the nightmares that tortured him in the last few months of his marriage – offer a respite from the horror of this representation of his parents’ marriage as incestuous, illicit, and perhaps even criminal. However, Gopal recognizes that such respites are, for him, temporary and illusory, as has been his marriage to Sumi and his role as a father to their children. Having had his past erased through the actions of a well-intentioned half-sister whose silence about their real relationship to each other, refusal to mourn their parents’ death, and “o’erhasty” marriage are aimed at patching the horrific hole in their lives, Gopal is left susceptible to the virus of a compelling intertext. Acting out the intertext of Hamlet, Gopal seems doomed to lead a “weary, stale, flat and unprofitable” life, forever unable to connect with the world, except fleetingly, in a meaningful way. Unable to ‘believe’ in the legitimacy of his parents’ marriage or his relationship to his sister – sister, half-sister, according to Sumi, “a kind of mother” (22)? – Gopal feels himself to be, literally, a “bastard of a Brahmin.” There is no answer he can make to that charge when the students attack him for his work on uncovering another secret, sexually tainted history. The violent consequences of Gopal’s published research, in fact, can only confirm for him the danger of opening the crypt and revealing the shameful secret of an authority figure, like a saint or like a parent. Both Jasbir Jain and Khishori Nayak K have discussed the intertextuality in this novel. Nayak K says that “History [in the novel] is a consciously constructed intertext wherein family (hi)stories are re-written imaginatively.”24 I would, of course, argue that intertextuality operates on an unconscious level, as well. Jain pushes this idea even further when she asserts that in Deshpande’s work “intertextuality becomes a dominant means of cultural interpretation and character formation. Going beyond this, it guides the reader as to how to untie the text.”25 Jain comments at 24 Kishori Nayak K., “(Hi)Stories, (Her) Stories as Point-Counterpoint: Fiction as Countermode to Theory in Shashi Deshpande’s Works,” in Theory as Variation, ed. R. Radhakrishnan et al. (Delhi: Pencraft International, 2007): 268. 25 Jain, Gendered Realities, 231.

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length on the Hamletian intertext in A Matter of Time, providing some clues to how that intertext might help us to unravel the mystery of Gopal: When Gopal finds out that his father is the younger brother of Sudha’s father – a “Lakshmana [sic]-like younger brother, keeping a promise made to his elder brother’, he also realizes that the comparison does not go the full length. It did not work that way, for Lakshmana never looked at Sita’s face. The story that fits his imagination is the story of Hamlet (Time 42–43). Gopal gets caught between two kinds of cultural narratives as he looks for an explanation of his own parentage. Social customs and practices like ‘nata’ and socially permitted marriages between brother-in-law and older sister-in-law are not taken into account. It is difficult to say whether this coming together of cultural myths and narratives is an example of a hybridity where the two cultures are reconciled, or an overlaying of one by the other not in reconciliation, but in an act of obliteration. It reveals the impossibility of purity, whether in cultural memory or in psychological responses. Gopal is, in almost every respect, a man steeped in Indian tradition. Even his concept of freedom is an Indian concept, which finds its validity in the theory of the four ashramas. The Hamletian intervention is the recognition of sexuality which Indian cultural myths tend to gloss over.26

Even more than the recognition of sexuality, however, it is the “act of obliteration” and hasty substitution that compels Gopal to associate his parents’ relationship with a shameful sexual secret, such as that seemingly buried in the text of Hamlet. Burdened by a parental crypt whose key – the ring of recollection – is forever lost to him, Gopal adopts for himself another story, one that makes him, literally, ill, as he wishes to confess to Ramesh, as he confesses to the reader. But does he ever confess this to his wife Sumi? In a conversation with Ramesh about Gopal’s earlier sudden abandonment of his sister Sudha and her family, Sumi’s innocent questions imply that he has not. What we do know, however, or can learn, is that Gopal is “not all right” (223), as Sumi recognizes in their final meeting. But, then, neither is Sumi. In Sumi, Gopal has met his match. Like Urmi and Kishore, Sumi and Gopal appear to be drawn to each other’s sense of emptiness, bereavement, and isolation. While that earlier novel leaves us in suspense – 26

Jain, Gendered Realities, 228–29.

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we never learn whether Urmi and Kishore can live together happily once the parental crypt has been opened – the exploration of the crypt in A Matter of Time prematurely ends Sumi’s life, leaving the tired actor Gopal, wishing to escape the pain of suffering, to carry on his journey into oblivion, driven by a death instinct in the form of a “phantom […] sustained by secreted words, invisible gnomes whose aim is to wreak havoc, from within the unconscious.”27 

Sumi: “Gopal was right. Kalyani’s past which she had contained within herself, careful never to let it spill out, has nevertheless entered into us, into Premi and me, it has stained our bones. Premi’s more obviously perhaps, but mine as well. And will this, what is happening to me now, become part of my daughters too? Will I burden them with my past and my mother’s as well?” (75)

Abandoned by her husband of over twenty years, forced to take refuge with her daughters in her estranged parents’ home, haunted by terrifying childhood memories, Shashi Deshpande’s most enigmatic (20) heroine comes to a sudden realization early in the novel: “I must move out of this house [….] I must look for a house for my daughters and myself. I can’t go on living here. But how and where do I begin to look for one?” (76). After an exasperating day of house-hunting, Sum forces herself to sit down and draw a sketch of the house that she would build, if she could: That evening she begins doodling on a piece of paper, doodles that soon become a sketch. A sketch of a house, her perfect house, it is supposed to be. But a strange thing happens. When it is done, she finds she has drawn a sketch of this, the Big House. She destroys it and starts afresh, but once again it is the same. It is as if there is a tracing of this house already on the paper, on any paper that she begins to draw on and the lines she draws have no choice but to follow that unseen tracing. (78)

In this nightmarish scene of involuntary repetition that can only be described in terms of automatic writing and the death drive, Deshpande 27

Nicolas Abraham, “Notes on the Phantom,” 175.

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portrays Sumi as a woman locked in a past that she both fears and rejects, but also unconsciously longs to recover, her life always already inscribed in the “chalked lines” that spell out her destiny: a destiny that seems forever connected to her childhood home. While Sumi does not mention whether her drawing includes the “excrescence” that perturbs the features of the House of Vishwas, a scene that follows immediately after this passage may provide a clue. Sumi has finally found an upstairs flat that is suitable for her and her daughters: it is “safe,” she is reassured, because the bottom floor is occupied by an “old couple” who “want a decent family” (80). Sumi agrees to take the flat, but while she is waiting for the male owner to return so that she can remit the deposit, she visits with the old woman, who asks her how many children she has. Politely carrying on conversation with this “listless” (80) woman, Sumi asks her the same question and receives the following reply: ‘We have only one son.’ The sense of something wrong makes itself unmistakably felt. Sumi feels a prickling of her skin, a premonition of something fearful coming. ‘He died three months back. In a car accident. He was returning from Mysore.’ There is nothing that can be said to a person who looks this way, who speaks this way. ‘We built the upstairs flat for him. He was to get married. If we live together, Amma, he told me, there will be problems. But I don’t want to go far away from both of you. He said that. I don’t want to go far away, he said….’ Sumi’s hands begin to shake. Don’t, she wants to say, don’t tell me anything; but it is as if she has been struck dumb. (81)

The scene ends with Sumi pulling away from the old woman’s grasp and fleeing the apartment. She tells Nagaraj, the man she has hired to assist her in finding a home, that she will not be taking the apartment. She is surprised that Nagaraj “Can’t […] hear her moaning” (81). Just as her automatic drawings of the “perfect” house turn out to be the Big House, the house that she discovers is “perfect” and “safe” for her now diminished family turns out to be just as dangerous, just as haunted, just as deformed, just as bereft of a male heir as is the decaying House of Vishwas.

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These two scenes, in such close proximity in the novel, provide significant clues to the phantom that refuses to let Sumi move forward in her life. The accident that claims Sumi’s life, as well as her father’s, may appear sudden, melodramatic, and disturbing to readers who, invited by an omniscient narrator to share Sumi’s innermost thoughts and hopes, are beginning to believe that a future of independence and creativity are just within her grasp. After all, Sumi has survived what is arguably the worst fate of a married woman in India: desertion by her husband. Through the course of the present time of the novel, which traces the year following this traumatic event, she has learned to ride a motor scooter; written a play for the local school and had it performed to good reviews; is contemplating writing more plays; and has obtained a teaching position in a nearby city. Moreover, in a scene that is described by the intrusive narrator as the final meeting between them (“They will not meet again,” 224), she has forgiven her husband Gopal for deserting her. However, a cryptomimetic reading of the novel reveals that Sumi bears within her a secret to which even she does not have full access, except, perhaps, at the moment of her death. Y.S. Sunita Reddy suggests as much when she argues that “Unlike the general idea of a deserted wife, Sumi does not crumble to pieces at the pain and humiliation inflicted on her [….] But beneath her apparent stoicism is a pathos left for the reader to decipher.”28 This pathos, I would argue, has everything to do with an unmourned loss, as Sumi’s extreme reaction to the old woman’s grief might indicate. If Sumi is “unusual,” as Deshpande suggests, her strangeness can be accounted for, but not through an analysis only of what she says and does in the novel; rather, as readers informed by a gothic poetics, we need to be attentive to such things as non-verbal clues (such as Sumi’s drawing of the perfect house), unaccountable silences, narrative repetitions and parallels, and Sumi’s remarkable ability to “block out the unpleasantness” in her life. In spite of her gift for putting trauma behind her, however, Sumi is “visited’ by an extremely unpleasant memory very early in the novel. Having just met with her father in his upstairs room, Sumi experiences what she calls “a visitation, an apparition that she sees, not all at once, but gradually, developing before her like a sketch, the lines finally becoming a recognizable figure” (73–74): 28

Reddy, A Feminist Perspective on the Novels of Shashi Deshpande, 112.

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Kalyani. It is Kalyani she sees standing before the closed door, banging on it with her open palms, shrieking out something, slumping at last on the floor, her head resting against the still closed door. All the sounds fading away, finally leaving a silence that enclosed the thudding of a heart. The heart of a child who stood there terrified, watching her mother lie in a huddle. No sounds at all except this throbbing rubadub rubadub. And the child going down stiffly, holding on to the banister, her wet palms making a sliding sound on the smooth surface, her legs wobbling, thinking – I didn’t see it, I saw nothing, nothing happened. Now, after all these years, it can no longer be denied. It did happen. I saw it, I saw my mother lying there. And a little later I saw Goda helping her down, and Kalyani, as if foreshadowing her old age, bent, clinging to the banisters, her face spent and hollow. (74)

Several things intrigue me about this scene. First, it betrays the tendency on Sumi’s part, noted by Deshpande, to “block out unpleasantness”: Sumi, echoing almost precisely the words of Saru, another haunted Deshpande protagonist, recalls thinking, at the time, “I saw nothing, nothing happened.” But this unbidden memory also echoes a scene on the stairs that Sumi’s sister Premi recalls from her childhood, although Premi’s recollection is of trying to climb the stairs to see her father, “heart thudding in fear,” climbing “the forbidden stairs, opened the door and met the bland stare, the question: Why are you here?” (18). Unlike Sumi, who feels comfortable visiting her father, the adult Premi still fearfully anticipates “the possibility of being dragged down, of her fingers being prised away from the railings” (18). In these two images – one of a sister fleeing down the stairs from a scene of unthinkable horror and the other attempting to climb the stairs, all the while fearing the indignity of being dragged away from her father’s room – we see a vital difference between the two women. While both acknowledge the dysfunction in their family home, Sumi has repressed these memories, whereas Premi fully and consciously faces and acknowledges the harm her parents’ relationship has done her, admitting, for example that “The truth” about her family “was a father who stayed in his room, who never came out, never spoke to you, [and] a mother who put her hand on your mouth so that you did not cry out” (18). Why is there such a difference in the way these two women acknowledge the past? Why is it Premi, and not Sumi, who tells Sumi’s daughters the ‘truth’ about their

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grandparents’ relationship? The answer to these questions, I believe, lies in the difference between the way that Premi and Sumi have experienced a significant traumatic event: not just the abandonment of their mother by their father, which surely must have been traumatic, but also an earlier abandonment – the loss of Shripati and Kalyani’s son, Sumi and Premi’s brother. Although Sumi was five and Premi just a baby when their four-yearold brother wandered off at a busy train station, Premi appears to believe that Sumi’s knowledge of the event “is less complete than Premi’s” (138). Premi muses that “Strangely, [the sisters] have never spoken of it between themselves” (138) and assumes that “As children, they accepted it” (138). So the event that Premi describes to Saru’s horrified daughters is one based not on memory, but on what she has learned from her husband’s family, as “it was Anil’s grandfather with whom Shripati had been working, it was Anil’s family that had sheltered Kalyani until her father came and took her away. And it was Anil’s mother who told Premi the whole story” (139). Too full of “shame” about what had happened to her family to speak of it with anyone, Premi nonetheless responds to her nieces’ desire “to make sense of their situation” (139): Premi has an odd feeling of reliving the day, of bringing something out of the recesses of her memory, so clearly can she visualize the scene: Kalyani, the baby on her lap, luggage piled about her, a little girl playing about and a boy… the boy…. No, it can’t be a memory, how can it be? She was only a baby on Kalyani’s lap. It’s a picture she has created for herself through the years since she heard the story, a picture so vivid that each time she goes to the railway station she thinks she can point out the exact spot where it happened. (139)

Premi goes on to describe the event, explaining to the girls that, after both her brother and father disappeared, Kalyani sat with her two daughters in the train station until Anil’s grandfather came to take them back to his house. In response to the girls’ questions, Premi gives them the ages of the children at the time: Premi a baby, their “lost” brother, four, and Sumi, five (140). The emphasis placed on the children’s ages at this point in the conversation – an importance given greater weight by the girls’ notion that the little boy should have been able to speak and thus identify himself –

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should alert us to a significant fact that is never mentioned in the text. At the age of five, Sumi would not only have been able to speak, she might have been able – perhaps even been expected – to assist her mother with a little brother who “was very well grown physically” and difficult for his mother to “manage” (141). Premi confesses to harbouring a sense of guilt for the loss of her brother, as the reason her mother had given for her inattention at the moment of her son’s disappearance is that “The baby was crying” (141). It is left to the reader to imagine what amount of guilt a five-year-old female child might feel in relation to the loss of her younger brother under such circumstances. More significantly, though, Sumi was old enough and close enough in age to her brother that the loss she experienced that day – indeed, both losses – were significant and traumatic in ways that are very different from what Premi experienced. In other words, while both of them imbibe the shame felt by their mother and the anger of their father in response to this event, of the two girls, only Sumi would be able to remember, on a conscious level, the little boy who walked away from his family at a busy train station and the long, futile hours of waiting on a crowded platform for their father to return to claim his family. But Sumi’s earliest and most vivid memory, as we have seen, is not of her little brother’s disappearance or of the train station, but of her mother’s anguished screams outside the closed door to her father’s room, and Sumi’s sense of terror and denial: “I didn’t see it. I saw nothing. Nothing happened.” Reminding us so vividly of not only words, but actual events in The Dark Holds No Terrors, particularly the similar loss that Saru experiences in that novel, we should be alerted to an important aspect of childhood trauma: the child’s need to process grief through language. However, if we are to believe Premi about Kalyani’s own traumatized response to the events at the train station, and if we are to take seriously her claim that the ‘truth’ about her family includes “a mother who put her hand on your mouth so that you did not cry out” (18), then we can, perhaps, understand the circumstances under which Sumi was forced to grieve for the loss of a little brother. In one of those glimpses of a future after Sumi’s death, we learn that Kalyani does eventually tell Aru about the loss of her son, but “even then she will not be able to bring herself to speak of that act of public desertion, of those long hours on the station platform with her children, surrounded by curious strangers, as if that is a memory so painfully blotted out that to bring it back to life would be as painful as the process of childbirth” (144). The link drawn here between a

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painful birthing process and shameful disclosure not only evokes similar passages in The Dark Holds No Terrors and That Long Silence, it also reminds us of the importance, for a child’s successful passage through traumatic events, of maternal care and speech. Whether or not Sumi’s mother harbours any resentment toward her daughter for the loss of her only son (and there is absolutely no textual evidence of this), as is the case in The Dark Holds No Terrors, Kalyani’s shameful loss of both a son and a husband as the result of a single moment of inattention (or deliberate neglect – Sumi’s daughters raise this spectre) renders her a traumatized victim incapable of assisting in her child’s grieving process. In the face of a maternal anguish as intense as that described in her earliest childhood memory, what opportunity does Sumi have to express her own grief and fear? The tragic figure that Gopal recalls walking home from the play is, in the ambiguity of that passage, also “the other Sumi, the girl I saw flashing about her home […] asking us, her audience: Am I not doing this well? Am I not a good actress?” (86). Before pursuing this line of thought further, and connecting this unresolved trauma with Sumi’s inability to mourn the death of her marriage, it is important to be clear about when and where Sumi explicitly registers the loss of her younger brother. The first such instance is described in the scene where Premi tells her nieces about the incident, although it is unclear whether it is the omniscient narrator or Premi (or some combination of the two) who divulges the information: To Premi, the shame of [her brother’s disappearance] had mattered more than the knowing of what really happened. She could not, she could never speak of it to anyone. But Sumi had mentioned it to Gopal. Once. By this she had committed herself to him, to an intimacy that neither of them could ignore. (Gopal can still remember the day, the moment: Sumi flitting about his room, restless, touching things, finally sitting on the windowsill, gathering herself into an absolute stillness, saying, ‘we had a brother.’) And then, after her marriage, Sumi turned her back on the shadow in the family; but Premi, who had so much more desperately wanted to escape, walked right back into the family secret, the family history, with her marriage. (139)

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As Shashi Deshpande’s oeuvre suggests, however, one can never turn one’s back “on the shadow in the family.” Or, if one does, it will come back to surprise her with a force that is deadly, as I shall demonstrate in a moment. For now, I wish to return to an earlier passage in the text, one that I have cited earlier: the scene in which Sumi learns that her husband is leaving her, in which Sumi describes a memory of attending the circus, prompted by the much more ‘sanitized’ version of a circus scene that she is watching on television: She is lying full length on the sofa, watching a movie on T V , her eyes fixed unblinking on the screen as if she has never seen these things before: a circus. A clown in the centre of the arena, singing and dancing. And the spectators, in the manner of the spectators in any movie, gazing ahead in complete unison. Perhaps in a sense, it is true that she has not really seen this before. She had never been to the circus as a child; children don’t go, they are taken. And who could have taken them, Premi and her? In fact, the first (and the last) time she saw a circus was when Gopal and she had taken their daughters to one. The girls, four and five then, ha[d] been enthralled and Gopal’s enjoyment had been almost as childlike as theirs. But she had been appalled. She had hated all of it – the dust, the noise, the smell of the animals and their fears, almost as malodorous as the stench of their dung. It had made her sick. Even the acrobats had made her uneasy. She had sensed an enormous despair behind the bravado of their feats, a fear under the star-spangled gaiety of their costumes. (7)

Certain aspects of this scene, read retrospectively, should begin to take on added significance in relation to the issue of Saru’s unresolved mourning for the loss of her brother. First of all, we should note the denial of having seen such a performance before, a denial that is belied in her later admission that she had seen such a performance as an adult, but never as a child (just as she had not seen her mother weeping on the stairs?). We should also note the crowding and confusion of the scene described, much like a busy railway station; the gaze of the spectators, passive and helpless to intervene in the acrobats’ fate; finally, the smell of fear. All of this, again, witnessed not by Sumi and her sister Premi as children, for, after all, “who could have taken them” (or been trusted to take them to such a crowded and confusing place?); rather, two other

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children, aged four and five, the same ages as Sumi and her brother on the day of his disappearance. It is little wonder that Sumi has an “odd feeling that [Gopal] seems – disjointed? Uncoordinated?” (8) as the circus scene continues to play out in the background while he tells her that he is leaving her. The time, for both Gopal and Sumi, is truly “out of joint,” as each experiences, helplessly, I would argue, a repetition of a previous moment: Gopal’s abandonment of his sister and her family; for Sumi, the “walking away” of a significant figure in her life, not, as most critics would argue, her father, but her little brother, Madhav. Behind the “clown” face of Sumi, the make-up indeed inexpertly wiped off, lies an enormous and unspeakable despair. Underlining the notion that Gopal’s abandonment is a repetition of Sumi’s earlier loss is Aru’s response to learning, upon waking, that her father is gone. She recalls Once, years back… she had been separated from Gopal in a crowd. Gopal, frantically searching for her, had found her at exactly the same spot where she realized he was no longer with her. ‘I was not lost,’ she had said to him after their initial hysteria had subsided. ‘It was you who got lost.’ (10)

Similarly, Sumi is as much a lost child as is her brother: he has “lost” her, or left her behind, as much as she has lost him: both are, in effect, abandoned by their parents, alone in their confusion and their grief. Aru inadvertently draws the connection between Gopal’s abandonment of Sumi and this earlier loss even more clearly when, wondering about what to do about her “lost” father, she muses: “My father a missing person? Do we put him among the juvenile delinquents, the retarded children and adults?” (13). The “chalked lines” that mark out Saru’s destiny appear to lead to only one place: the compulsion to repeat that characterizes the death drive. It is not just Premi, as Gopal imagines, who “carries within her the desolate land of […] rejection” (217). Before concluding this chapter with an analysis of the moments leading to Sumi’s death, I would like to reunite the lovers in Deshpande’s novel for a final time, not, however, quite as Kalidasa reunites Shakuntala and Dushyanta in the last act of the play, in perfect understanding of the spell that has separated them. No such moment exists in A Matter of Time. What we are given, instead, in this cryptic and haunting novel, is another

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riddle, another crypt, in the form of an incomplete poem. Esther Rashkin describes the role that such intertextual artifacts play in literature: poetic entities (poems, narratives, epigraphs, letters) embedded within literary works may be reevaluated as a result of anasemic approaches to interpretation. A seemingly complete and self-sufficient poem inserted in the middle of a short story, for example, may be considered a symbol fragment that tacitly demands to be rejoined to its absent complement(s) inscribed within the tale. The process of reading in this context entails determining how the outlines or traces of the separate entities complement or inform one another so that pieces of the concealed trauma or drama that necessitated their separation can be reconstructed or conjectured.29

From this perspective, I would like to turn our attention to the poem that Sumi discovers lying on Gopal’s desk when she pays her first visit to him at his new lodgings. Over twenty pages after we learn, from Gopal’s point of view, about Sumi’s sudden, inexplicable departure from his room – he had left her, leafing through a book of poetry she has found on his desk, for a few moments to attend to a task, and she bolts from the room when he returns – we learn what it was that caused her to flee. Sumi is reminded of this moment when Aru innocently enquires about the relationship between her family and that of a young man to whom she has just been introduced – “what is Rohit to us?” (112): Sumi stands transfixed by the words, and the lines she had read in the book on Gopal’s table that day, suddenly erupt into her mind: What could my mother be to yours? What kin is my father to yours anyway? And how did you and I meet ever? The tears that she had controlled then, the tears she had disdained in Devaki’s house, suddenly threaten to claim her. She barely has time to get to her room before they burst out of her with an uncontrollable violence. They flow so copiously it’s as if there is a deep well inside her, a spring that has been tapped by the words of the poem. (112)

29

Rashkin, “Tools for a New Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism,” 51.

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What contributes to the cryptic nature of Sumi’s passionate response to this poem is that we cannot know whether she is responding to the fragment we are given of this well-known poem or to the last three lines, which are not reproduced in the text, and to which I shall return presently. The first four lines of the poem – the only lines duplicated in the novel – clearly set romantic relationships within the context of south Indian kinship affiliations, such as those that would sanction the marriage between a niece and her uncle (even though that alliance is at risk of producing a “retarded” son) and proscribe one between a widow and her husband’s brother (even though they are not biologically related). Thus, the poem reminds us that the crossed destinies of Gopal and Sumi are both compelled and foreclosed by the troubling secrets of their personal histories, secrets of origin that should disturb them, at a conscious level, far less than they apparently do. I have said from the outset that the question of incest haunts this novel, but it does so, on a symbolic and intertextual level, in complex ways. Each bearing a nescience – a parental crypt – Sumi and Gopal unconsciously carry their crises of legitimacy into their marriage. A “bastard of a Brahmin,” Gopal finds in Sumi and her family another, more legitimate intertext than that of Hamlet, one steeped in history and legends of noble ancestry: “After hearing Kalyani’s family history, he could never look at Sumi without seeing the subterranean stream of the past running under the clear runnels of her young girlhood; the honeycomb texture of her being was, for Gopal, soaked in the history of her family” (94), a history so well documented and so unlike his own aborted family romance. But even that history, he has to acknowledge, is written by fallible and self-interested family members, for whom “the flaws and inaccuracies [are] too minute to be noticed” (99). Gopal is too much of a realist – or a nihilist – to believe that historians record the truth. This is why, he says, he retracts his claims that a saint-poet could have written “erotic poems”: “People have a right to their own history,” he concludes, even while admitting to himself that he is “indulging in sophistry” (100). Unable to commit to any one ‘truth’ since the death of his parents and his sister’s erasure of that vital history, Gopal can seek only a temporary haven in Sumi’s family, a family whose story, he comes to recognize, is just as falsely constructed around the silences and omissions in its narratives as is the one his sister Sudha constructs for him after the death of his parents. Like his sister Sudha, in fact, Sumi is an

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expert in self-deception: the tragic, doomed clown whose painted face conceals a tragic past. What of Sumi? What draws her, fatally, to Gopal? We can find clues scattered throughout the text, starting with Sumi’s memory of her father’s over-protectiveness: Sumi remembers her father disapproving of “all her friends,” “Boys, especially”: “And then I found Gopal right here at home” (73; emphasis added). We are given yet another reminder of Shripati’s anxiety about losing any more children in the scene that depicts the final meeting between Sumi and Gopal, shortly before Sumi’s death. Poignantly, it is a moment at which the estranged couple wordlessly shares a ‘family’ memory. Sumi has announced that she must leave, and, over Gopal’s objection, she says: ‘Yes, it’s late. Baba will be worrying….’ Suddenly she stops. She remembers saying the same sentence when, as a girl, she had stealthily visited Gopal in his room. She can see from the look on Gopal’s face that he is thinking of it too, that they are, after a very long while, sharing a memory. They stare at each other in silence for a moment. Gopal is the first to begin laughing and she joins in. It is on this note of laughter that they part. They will not meet again. (224)

Laughter, in Deshpande’s novels, is always cryptic. Here, it presages Sumi’s premature death. But it also signals an irony: in choosing the boy who came to live in her back yard, a boy for whom her family is yet another substitute for the one he cannot even remember he had, Sumi has thought, perhaps, that she has chosen wisely, or at least safely: her father needn’t worry about her wandering too far away from the family to find a marriage partner. But what she does not understand, although she has been warned, is that Gopal is, like her brother (and like Kishore in The Binding Vine), prone to wandering. This, in fact, is what Sumi has come to tell Gopal on her final visit: that she recalls the conversation, before their marriage, in which Gopal had made her promise that “if either of us wanted to be free, the other would let go” (221). Sumi, at the time eighteen and in love, had not understood Gopal, at least consciously. However, like the house of her dreams that she draws obsessively, only to have it turn out, repeatedly, to be the House of Vishwas, the man that she chooses is just like her brother: he will walk out on her. There is no escaping the chalked

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lines of her destiny; there is no escaping the incestuous pull of the ancestral home. Is this why there can be no future for Sumi? Is this why she has to die just at the moment the future – a future far from the Big House – looks brightest for her? We are not done with Sumi yet, though, or with the poem that provokes such anguish in her – perhaps the only deep exhibition of grief that we ever see from her in the novel. The three lines of the poem that are omitted – the last three lines of this already very short poem – provide the clue to the poet’s identity, and in so doing, they may perhaps provide the clue to Sumi’s profound reaction. Here are those lines: But in love our hearts have mingled as red earth and pouring rain.

These lines, which we must, I believe, assume that Sumi has read in the text in front of her or at least knows, express sentiments that would undoubtedly touch her very deeply, to the point where to recall them would be too painful: the poet beautifully describes both the depth and transience of romantic love, such as she and Gopal have shared. The missing words of the poem also remind us of Gopal’s passionate exclamation to Sumi, early in their marriage, that there is no English word for the Sanskrit term “Sa-hriday,” as English is a “practical” language (23) and Sa-hriday “is an impossible concept” (24): Then, abruptly, he had pulled her close to himself and said, ‘Listen, can you hear? It’s two hearts beating. They can never beat in such unison that there’s only one sound.’ It was these unexpected quirks in Gopal that had first fascinated Sumi. Not for long, though; she had soon ceased to find them amusing or interesting. Nevertheless, she knows now that they were hints, telling her that it was always there in Gopal, the potential to walk out on her and their children. (24)

The omitted lines of the poem are, for Sumi, like the “fish-stinking ring” that Gopal describes upon seeing his wife for the first time after their separation: a painful talisman of recollection that has all the power of restoring the memory of love, but none of the magic required to reunite beings who are so alienated, not just from each other, but from themselves.

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But are the final lines of the poem omitted from Deshpande’s text simply because they bring such painful recollections to Sumi, or is there another reason? Is there another cryptomimetic clue buried in this fragment? As is the custom for anonymous poems written at the time (the Sangam period of Tamil literature), the author of this c. 2000-year-old poem is known only by its final, evocative words: “The poet of red earth and pouring rain,” or, in Tamil, Sembulapeyaneerar. The fact that Deshpande has omitted the very words that would allow us to identify the poet by his name should draw to our attention that there is yet another name concealed in Deshpande’s novel until almost the very last moment. In fact, it is revealed precisely before the moment of Sumi and Shripati’s death in a motor-scooter accident. Itself a repetition of an earlier scooter accident in which neither Sumi nor her daughter Aru is badly hurt, the second accident happens at a time when Sumi has just accepted a job in another city and is preparing to start a new life away from the ancestral home, independent of husband and parents. On a day before her departure, though, Sumi leaves the House of Vishwas on an errand. Finding her father standing “undecided and hesitant” at the gate to his property, Sumi offers him a ride to the bank. As they are pulling away from the house, Shripati calls Sumi by her real name – Sumitra – a name she hears, judging from her reaction, for the first time. In response to Sumi’s surprised reaction, Shripati then recalls her sister Premi’s full name and, finally, that of Madhav, the son whose naming ceremony has already been described, but whose name no one in the novel, including the narrator, has uttered (or recalled): “Premlata – that was my sister’s choice, I didn’t like it, but she wanted it. Madhav, now, was mine” (232). The shock of hearing her brother’s name, re-called, re-claimed (“Madhav […] was mine”), and spoken aloud possibly for the first time in many years by her father, causes Sumi to turn to look at him. In a moment of inattention, Sumi is distracted and sees the oncoming bus too late to steer out of its way. It is, I would argue, no coincidence that Sumi and Shripati meet their ‘fate’ in such a melodramatic way: at the very moment at which the phantom who has “ruled their lives” and “wreak[ed] havoc, from within the unconscious” is called into presence. As Jasbir Jain suggests “The accident ironically is caused by a reference to [Sumi’s] lost brother, Madhav. It is always at the moment of understanding that death has to come, when

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the ‘veil of darkness has lifted’.”30 Just at the moment Shripati seems ready to speak of the past, to reconnect with his family, he loses his own life, and, now, no longer “sustained by secreted words,” the phantom is let loose to do its work. But what work of magic does Madhav’s name perform in fulfilling Sumi and Shripati’s ‘destiny’? Certainly, to the surviving family, that work is unjust, obscure, and cryptic. Shripati’s only living child (or is she? – we don’t really know), Premi, in cleaning her dead father’s room, finds herself searching for something: “It is her father’s mind that Premi is trying to probe into and that became impossible the moment his skull cracked open, spilling the grey slithery mass onto the road” (243). In this abject description, Deshpande draws our attention to the impenetrable parental crypt, the biological finality of death, and both the fragility and absurdity of all patriarchal designs. In the aftermath of Sumi’s and Shripati’s death, Kalyani inherits the House of Vishwas – not as Shripati’s wife, but as Manorama and Velathrao’s daughter. As though the House itself has exacted revenge on her, Manorama’s scheme is finally, violently, thwarted: the house stays in the family as she had wanted, but it is a family, now, comprised entirely of women. Shripati is dead, and Gopal has perhaps now indeed “take[n] sanyas” (123): when we last glimpse him he is bearing Sumi’s ashes to the Alaknanda river, hoping that “this ritual may help him to exorcise his past of some ghosts” (245). Aru’s anguished promise to her grandmother, after learning of her mother’s and grandfather’s deaths – “Amma, I’m here, I’m your daughter, Amma. I’m your son” (233) – may be viewed as a gesture toward a future that will do less violence to its daughters. It is in this sense that the strange omniscience of the text – an omniscience that both conceals and reveals – allows us to see that Aru is “the heroine” of the novel, just as the ‘intrusive’ narrator suggests. Not because of her “youth” or her “beauty,” her “nobility” and “steadfastness,” but, rather, because Aru is trying to make sense of what is happening, her consciousness moving outside herself and reaching out to the others as well, embracing, in fact, the whole of what is happening. (185)

30

Jain, Gendered Realities, 153.

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However, “That time is waiting for her in the future…” (185), and, cryptically, the narrator suggests that there are stories about Aru’s family’s past and Aru’s future that this omniscient text will not tell. It is doubtful, given all that we have learned so far, and are about to learn, about Deshpande’s work, that Aru will ever embrace “the whole” of it. The truth is, Gopal tells us, this time unequivocally, “we are always giving the past a place in our lives” (100), “even this needlepoint of a moment, this now [which,] as you speak of it, […] is becoming the past” (75; emphasis added). And so the chakkar31 continues to catch Deshpande’s characters – and her readers – in its relentless motion. “We leave them there” (246).

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7

“healing in the words” — Deshpande’s Contract with the Dead in Small Remedies

Family secrets, blunders, tragedies, are safer locked into trunks, sealed into almirahs. Exhumation can only bring up hideous sights and ugly smells. Something stirs in the survivors, ancient memories and old wrongs send strange messages to the brain, driving humans berserk. The dead never give you the entire truth, anyway. Only partial truths will emerge.1 the revenant and the ghostly presence are not merely the worn-out conventions of the eighteenth-century gothic. Rather, the trope of the phantom suggests what, on a political and social level, Slavoj Zizek refers to as the “ideological apparatuses” of the return of the dead, a form of transgenerational haunting that is inherently political.2 The truth is that in the politics of a family one can see, in a microcosm, the politics of a nation.3

S

HASHI

D E S H P A N D E has called Small Remedies, published in 4

2000, her “most confident novel.” Chandra Holm echoes that

sentiment when she claims that “It is a book in which Shashi Deshpande surpasses herself as a writer, and underscores her place in the scene of international literature in English as a writer to be read, to be

1

Deshpande, Small Remedies, 227–28. Justin D. Edwards, Gothic Canada: Reading the Spectre of a National Literature (Edmonton: U of Alberta P , 2005): xxix 3 Deshpande, “On the Writing of a Novel,” 35. 4 Deshpande, cited in Bhalla, Shashi Deshpande, 75. 2

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respected.”5 Not only the most accomplished and narratively intricate of her novels to date, Small Remedies is also Deshpande’s most politically engaged work. As in both That Long Silence and A Matter of Time, the present narrative of the novel is set explicitly in a recognizable historical moment: most of the novel’s present action occurs in 1993–94, in the months immediately following the terrorist reprisals for the destruction of the Babri Masjid mosque. Indeed, the narrative is impelled by a specific event in Bombay: the 12 March 1993, terrorist bombings, in which the teen-aged son of first-person narrator Madhu Saptarishi is killed. A magazine writer before embracing motherhood as a full-time and allconsuming profession, the devastated Madhu is coaxed out of retirement and encouraged to take her mind off her loss by writing the biography of the aged and dying singer Savitribai Indorekar, the “Doyen of Hindustani music.”6 But while Madhu takes on the task of interviewing Savitribai and writing Bai’s biography first as a way of avoiding and then, inevitably, of beginning to come to terms with her life, including the events leading to her son’s death, she discovers that Bai has all but erased from her official biography important aspects of her own life story. For example, Bai remains obstinately silent about the existence of her own daughter, who has also been killed in the Bombay violence, and her daughter’s father, Ghulam Saab,7 a Muslim musician who played a significant role in Savitribai’s early success as a Hindustani singer. In conveying the fictional stories of these two women artists – singer and writer – the novel inevitably traverses a much wider landscape, a sweeping socio-historical context that embraces everything from the history of Hindustani music and the fall of the Vijayanagar empire to the Emergency and labour strikes and riots in Bombay. This context, I would argue, provides more than just “the background subtext”8 for the complex, 5

Chandra Holm, “Potent Remedies: Themes and Techniques in Shashi Deshpande’s Small Remedies,” in Studies in Indian Writing in English, vol. 2, ed. Rajeshwar Mittapalli & Pier Paolo Piciucco (New Delhi: Atlantic): 76. 6 Shashi Deshpande, Small Remedies (New Delhi: Penguin, 2000): 28. Further page references are in the main text. 7 His name is Ghulam Ahmed (35), but he is almost always referred to as Ghulam Saab. Savitribai is often referred to as, simply, Bai. Both terms (Saab and Bai) are honorific suffixes. 8 Jain, Gendered Realities, 258.

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and sometimes conflicted, interactions of very diverse characters: Madhu, an only child raised by her father and a male servant in a motherless nonpractising Hindu family; her childhood neighbours, the rising Hindustani singing star Savitribai and Ghulam Saab, Savitribai’s Muslim tabla player, adulterous lover, and father of Savitribai’s extremely unhappy child Munni; the Christian Goan physician, Joe, married to Madhu’s Communist, activist, and atheistic aunt Leela, who take Madhu into their home after her father’s death; Tony, Joe’s son, a Catholic who is increasingly drawn to observing Hindu rituals; Madhu’s husband Som, the son of a devout Sanskrit scholar; and Hasina, the granddaughter of Ghulam Saab and a trained and accomplished Hindustani singer in her own right. And this is just a partial list of what can only be described as a Dickensian,9 if not Rushdian, cast of characters in the novel. Noting a departure from the “smaller” canvas upon which Deshpande usually writes, Meenakshi Mukherjee comments that none of [Deshpande’s earlier novels] gathered up, as this new novel does, in one large sweep, the plurality, diversity and contradictions of our composite culture where an Anthony Gonsalves (the reference to “Amar Akbar Anthony” is deliberate), a Hamidabai and Joe can all be part of Madhu’s extended family, and the daughter of Ghulam Saab can opt, though not very easily, to get accepted as Shailaja Joshi.10

Yet, despite the “large sweep” of this novel, the tendency of many reviewers and critics has been to toe the conventional line: that Small Remedies is a ‘typical’ Deshpande novel about women’s struggles and the breaking of women’s silences. Amrita Bhalla only briefly acknowledges that “Deshpande portrays for the first time an issue of significant national concern, the schism between the Hindu and Muslim communities,”11 and even a critic like Nilufer Bharucha, who notes that Deshpande’s later fiction is increasingly experimental, intertexual, and philosophical, asserts

9

The adjective is chosen deliberately: a character in the novel, Joe, frequently cites Dickens in conversation; see my essay “‘Think of the Brontës:’ Domesticating the Exotic in Shashi Deshpande’s Small Remedies.” 10 Mukherjee, cited in Reddy, A Feminist Perspective on the Novels of Shashi Deshpande, 123–24. 11 Bhalla, Shashi Deshpande, 85.

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that “the personal, the woman, is still at the centre of all her texts and her concern with women is at the heart of her endeavours as a writer.”12 Only a few critics have focused sustained attention on the historical and political aspects of Small Remedies.13 Notably, in her essay on the novel, Shirley Chew probes the following questions: to what extent can we refrain from participating in the nation as political process and a site of struggle, and to what extent does inaction of the kind amount to colluding in a politics of identity such as the Shiv Sena represents, a politics which is driven by, and battens upon, nostalgia for fabricated versions of the past, and for exclusivist, ‘alternative’ worlds?14

In her essay, Chew incisively links the novel’s focus on personal recall and memory with a wider project, for Madhu, of understanding “the collective amnesia that had beset Bombay” in the days following the destruction of Babri Masjid. Noting that such a project could easily descend, itself, into a “nostalgic revisioning of ‘nation’,” Chew argues instead that the novel “resists a linear reading” and “requires us to read past Madhu’s silences, uncertainties, and evasions to the overriding realities of contemporary Bombay, such as the vested interests of the well-to-do, economic deprivation among a large section of the populace, and social injustice.”15 In other words, just as we saw in That Long Silence, Deshpande’s engagement with contemporary historical and political issues in India in Small Remedies is sophisticated and self-aware; we do not need to read these novels “contrapuntally” in order to discover their political salience, as Sebastian would suggest, but, rather, with an ear attuned to their own contrapuntal nature.

12

Bharucha, “Shashi Deshpande,” 111. Among others, see my essay “‘Healing in the words’: Shashi Deshpande’s Contract With the Dead in Small Remedies,” Journal for Studies in Literature 9 (Spring 2008): 7–19. Portions of this essay are reprinted here, with permission of the publisher. 14 Shirley Chew, “‘Cutting Across Time’: Memory, Narrative, and Identity in Shashi Deshpande’s Small Remedies,” in Alternative Indias: Writing, Nation and Communalism, ed. Peter Morey & Alex Tickell (Cross / Cultures 82; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2005): 72–73. 15 Chew, “‘Cutting Across Time’,” 81. 13

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Small Remedies is not the first Deshpande novel to engage at a profound level with the rising tide of nationalist sentiment and sectarian fundamentalism – on the part of both Hindus and Muslims – in contemporary India. As we have seen in my discussion of A Matter of Time, one of the manifold determinants of Gopal’s withdrawal from life is the angry and violent reaction of his students to Gopal’s attribution of erotic poems to a revered Hindu “saint-poet”: To connect these to the devotional poems of a saint-poet, to reveal that it was the same man who had written both, to replace the myth of the pure untarnished saint with the truth of a passionate human being who stumbled his way to sainthood – suddenly it seemed wrong. I have no right to do it, he had thought. People have a right to their own history. To deprive them of it is to take away their own idea of themselves. And yet, even when he had articulated this to himself, Gopal had known something that he could no longer ignore: that he was indulging in sophistry. ‘Their own history’ – yes, that is where the problem lies. Gopal knows, he has long realized, that we have a very complex relationship with the past. (100)

Not only is India’s history and Indians’ relationship to it very complex, as Gopal suggests, the pronominal shift in the above passage indicates the difficulty of finding a point of view from which to articulate that history: is it “their” history or “our” history? Who are “we”? And who has the right to record that history – or revise it? Without explicitly alluding to the Hindutva movement in A Matter of Time, Deshpande gestures toward the obstacles that such a fundamentalist project – and such sophistry as the Hamlet-like Gopal falls prey to – pose for any kind of sustained and honest excavation of the nation’s past. However, these important issues – a burgeoning religious fundamentalism in contemporary India and the purposeful, politically motivated attempts to revise India’s ethnic history – move to the very centre of the narrative labyrinth of Deshpande’s next novel, Small Remedies, even though the historical details are not spelled out in such a way as to underscore their importance. Deshpande’s subtle portrayal of history and politics in the novel might well be viewed within the context of what Jasbir Jain calls a “feminization” of India’s history, a project that Jain claims is characterized by the following:

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its inclusion of the marginalized voices, […] its freedom from the controlled vision of hegemony, […] its rejection of masculine categories. Politics (and history) are no longer limited to an exchange of rulers, but they include the victims and the exploited. This is the postcolonial imagination stepping outside the compulsion of colonialism and constructing a new reality out of their understanding of the past.16

Without fully conceding that such representations of history manifest or arise solely from a feminist agenda, I would nonetheless add to this list of attributes an understanding, such as Deshpande evinces, that human behaviour is often governed by factors that extend well beyond the rational and conscious – that groups of people and even nations can experience the disturbing effects of what Abraham and Torok call a crypt. Indeed, the central motif of personal and cultural amnesia in both A Matter of Time and Small Remedies suggests that there may be as much at stake for ethnic communities as there is for individuals in the psychological work of remembering and mourning. Deshpande’s broadening of focus from the personal to the overtly historical and political in A Matter of Time and Small Remedies, in other words, does not announce a departure from the persistent thematic preoccupations that I have traced from her earliest novels: for example, the psychological costs incurred by those who keep secrets (theirs or others) or who deliberately or inadvertently – sometimes magically – forget the past, and the equally high, and sometimes even deadly, cost of candour, of breaking one’s silence, of opening a crypt and speaking the ‘truth,’ whether that ‘truth’ is a broadly historical or a deeply personal one. Indeed, as is the case in A Matter of Time, where Gopal’s concern about being called a “bastard of a Brahmin” resonates on an extremely personal, as well as political level, historical and personal contexts can be so deeply imbricated that it is impossible to separate individual destiny from historical destiny: the lives of all of Deshpande’s characters are multiply informed and largely overdetermined. So we discover that, in Small Remedies, there is a startling personal revelation – not so much a breaking of silence as the involuntary rupturing of a crypt – that has preceded and most likely contributed to the death of 16

Jasbir Jain, “Post-Colonial Realities: Women Writing History,” in Interrogating Post-Colonialism: Theory, Text and Context, ed. Harish Trivedi & Meenakshi Mukherjee (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1996): 173.

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Adit in the Bombay terrorist attacks. It is not until Madhu is married and the mother of a teen-aged son that she has a dream that prompts her to recover the memory of a brief sexual act, when she was “nearly fifteen” (264), with a man who visited her house: a man who was a friend of her father, but, as Madhu later intuits, also the illegitimate son of her maternal grandfather. The instantaneous recovery of this deeply repressed memory, its narration deferred until late in the novel, has immediate and tragic effects: like the ring in Kalidasa’s play, its recovery “reverses chronologies,” “making visible what is invisible”; however, in an ironic inversion of the ring’s power to reunite a family, to “obliterate[s] distances, and fuse[s] what is ordinarily separate,”17 this act of recovery alientes Madhu from her husband and robs them both, ultimately, of their beloved son. I will return to this enigmatic and powerful moment later in the chapter. Suffice it to say, for now, that the uncanny circumstances surrounding the recovery of memory are revealed/concealed in a non-linear narrative structure that has the effect of disorienting the reader, forcing her to experience, along with Madhu, the unsettling effects of the crypt. As we have seen throughout this study, many of Deshpande’s trademark narrative techniques – those informed by a gothic poetics – are also those best suited to represent the ruptures provoked by trauma: for example, the disruption of chronological narrative; the gradual revelation of a number of stories simultaneously, at least one of which is typically retrieved from a distant or not so distant past and that has a direct bearing on the action – and difficulties – of the present; and the deferral of or circling around the narrative of highly significant or emotionally charged events that have occurred in the past: all devices that register “the difficulty the story has in getting itself told.”18 In Small Remedies, Deshpande deploys these narrative techniques to link personal trauma to national trauma, suggesting that the falsification, ignorance, or disregard of the past – whether institutionalized by the a totalitarian state (as in former East Germany) or practiced by parents and grandparents – is the breeding ground of the

17 18

Miller, “Kalidasa’s World and His Plays,”, 39–40. Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, 14.

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phantomatic return of shameful secrets on the level of individuals, families, the community, and possibly even entire nations.19

What the work of Abraham and Torok also demonstrates is that, buried along with shameful family/national secrets, there is always “an idyll, experienced with a valued object and yet for some reason unspeakable.”20 And as my discussion of The Dark Holds No Terrors indicates, it is the idyllic aspect of the secret that is more deeply encrypted than the painful trauma; the idyll, in fact, contributes to “the covert shift in the psyche”: Between the idyllic moment and its subsequent forgetting […], there was the metapsychological traumatism of a loss or, more precisely, the “loss” that resulted from a traumatism. This segment of an ever so painfully lived Reality – untellable and therefore inaccessible to the gradual, assimilative work of mourning – causes a genuinely covert shift in the entire psyche. The shift itself is covert since both the fact that the idyll was real and that it was later lost must be disguised and denied. This leads to the establishment of a sealed-off psychic place, a crypt in the ego.21

Abraham and Torok remind us that what is most painful to the traumatized subject (individual or group) and what makes mourning impossible in some cases is not just the difficulty of dealing with the loss of something or someone (like a ring, like a lover, like a son) but also the inability to acknowledge that the subject had something of value to lose. So it is that the ghostly traces of another, much larger story haltingly emerge in Small Remedies: the suppressed story of the inextricable historical and cultural links between Hindus and Muslims within India that cannot be erased, either by political partition or by extra-political acts of terrorism, but only by an act of magical incorporation. In the process of writing Savitribai’s biography, but especially in registering the stories that Bai will not tell, Madhu discovers that “It’s not just living children who need to be free; the dead clamour for release as well” (323). Madhu’s commission to write the story of the dying performer’s life becomes also a 19

Nicholas T. Rand, “Editor’s Note” to “Secrets and Posterity: The Theory of the Transgenerational Phantom,” in The Shell and the Kernel, ed. Nicolas Abraham & Maria Torok, tr. Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1994): 169. 20 Abraham & Torok, “‘The Lost Object – Me’,” 141. 21 “‘The Lost Object – Me’,” 141.

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project to recuperate an unspeakable past and lay her ghosts – and some of the ghosts of the nation – to rest. What is enacted in the novel is thus “a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations.”22 

There are ellipses in all stories, even in the narratives of our own lives. — Small Remedies (171)

Small Remedies opens with a fascinating prologue that I shall discuss later. But this is how the novel’s first chapter begins: I wake up to the sound of voices. Emerging from the drifting mists of early morning sleep, I slowly become aware that these are children’s voices. Singing. Young voices meeting in a slightly disharmonious whole. I can’t make out the words of the song or even what language it is in; they are still too far away for me to be able to get anything more out of it than a periodic rise and fall of sound. I lie back and let the distant music wash over me. The voices come closer. Yes, it is a Hindi song, a patriotic song. I think of Leela’s accounts of the ‘prabhat pheris’ of her youth: groups marching in the early morning, singing patriotic songs. But that was during the freedom struggle. Who’s interested in these songs now? (9)

In this opening passage, set in the fictional south Indian town of Bhavanipur23 where Madhu has travelled to escape a tragic past and to interview the famous Hindustani singer Savitribai, Deshpande foreshadows the major themes of the novel: its focus on music, language, and the lives of women, but also its concern with grief and memory and the voluntary and involuntary recuperation of the past. The disembodied voices of the children may seem innocent enough and, potentially, offer a “happy augury” (9) for the biographical project Madhu is about to begin; however, the reference to “prabhat pheris” is heavily loaded with significance, as Madhu herself intimates when she 22

Derrida, Spectres of Marx, xviii. While there is a real city named Bhavanipur in north India, it is quite clear from the context that the novel is set somewhere in Karnataka, a south Indian state. 23

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immediately associates this early morning children’s procession with similar processions during India’s “freedom struggle,” in which her Aunt Leela participated. But even as Madhu invokes a sense of nostalgia, not only for a beloved figure in her life but for a time of promise and hope for her country, she raises another spectre: who, indeed, is interested in these songs now? Why are the children singing these “patriotic” songs in 1993, decades after India’s Independence? Consistent with her refusal to give readers an “‘India-made-easy’ kind of picture,”24 what Deshpande does not tell us, but that some of her readers might know, is that the same prabhat pheris (or morning devotional procession) that helped to fuel the fight for Independence has also been used as a tool of the right-wing Hindu fundamentalist movement – Hindutva – to arouse Hindu pride and anti-Muslim sentiment. These children’s “disharmonious” voices, rising in 1993, in the wake of the destruction of Babri Masjid, are ominous, although the reader, like Madhu, may not recognize this until much later in the novel when communal sentiments threaten the peace even of sleepy Bhavanipur. Deshpande further emphasizes and foreshadows the potential for innocence to slide into violence when Madhu recalls the cruelty of playmates from her childhood and, in the novel’s first indirect allusion to the violence in Bombay, imagines how this cruelty might develop into something more malignant: Sharpening their knives, flexing their muscles, preparing themselves for the much more sophisticated, much more savage games of cruelty they will play as adults. Is this where they came from, those people who ran amok on the streets, hurting, maiming, killing? (36)

Moreover, as we shall see, the “savage games” that Madhu will later recall from childhood have their roots in religious intolerance. In other words, it is clear even from the opening words of the novel that Madhu can escape neither her memories of the past nor the horrific events set in motion at Ayodhya in 1992. These early passages, as I have already indicated, set the stage and the tone for much that is to come in the novel, including events that have already happened but whose narration will be deferred (the communal 24

Mukherjee, cited in Deshpande, “Where Do We Belong: Regional, National or International?,” in Writing from the Margin, 41.

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violence in Bombay that claims both Madhu’s son and Savitribai’s daughter), as well as events that are yet to occur in the novel (protests, in which Madhu finds herself a target, against a Muslim woman performing the punyatithi of Bai’s guru, Kashinath Buwa). Usha Bande is thus only partly correct when she argues that music “is at the core of the story and so is creative writing,” but then proceeds to assert: Art is beyond caste, class or religion; Savitribai comes from an orthodox Brahmin family; Gulam [sic] Saab and Hasina are Muslims, Hasina sings Akka Mahadevi’s Vachanas at the concert. At the altar of music they have but one faith – their music. It is politics that creates problems, not art; and Deshpande resists the fangs of politics. 25

While music is certainly an important thread in Small Remedies, it is a thread that vitally connects to issues of politics and representation, as the very early mention of prabhit pheris indicates. While it may be, indeed, that politics causes problems, not art, art and artists can and are used by politicians – politicians like Gandhi, but also like those in the Hindutva movement – to rouse nationalist sentiment and incite horrific crimes. Art, in other words, is no less implicated in national politics than are the children whose voices awaken Madhu on her first morning in Bhavanipur. Clearly, as Bande goes on to say, events unfolding in India in 1992–93 in the aftermath of the destruction of Babri Masjid are of central concern in this novel, even though Deshpande does not burden the text with pages of exposition and specific dates; in fact, the year 1993 is mentioned only once,26 and the events surrounding the reprisal bombings in Bombay that claim Adit’s and Munni’s lives are described within six pages and not until 300 pages into the novel. Yet these events hover over all of the present action of the novel, as Madhu, inconsolable over the death of her son, confesses:

25 Usha Bande, “Resistance and Reconciliation: Shashi Deshpande’s A Matter of Time and Small Remedies,” in Writing Difference: The Novels of Shashi Deshpande, ed. Chanchala K. Naik (Delhi: Pencraft International, 2005): 200. 26 The year is mentioned along with the date, 12 March. Adit and Munni (aka Meenakshi, aka Shailaja Joshi) are killed in the bombings that marked the third distinct round of retaliations, thought to be incited by Muslim extremists, for the destruction of Babri Masjid.

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No, there’s no comfort, no comfort anywhere. I knew it from the beginning, so that when they came and spoke to me of Time and its healing, of Som and his need for me, of our need to think of what we had had and not of what we had lost, I turned my back on them. Nothing can help. The day when our son died changed us forever. The bomb that killed him defined us for all time, shaped us into different beings. Each moment of our lives is now imbued with the fact of his death, with the fact of how he died. (113)

The emphasis in this paragraph is as much on the manner of Adit’s death as on the fact of it; “us” and “we” refer to Madhu and her husband Som, but the public, violent, and communal nature of Adit’s death gestures toward a much wider community of mourners. As Jasbir Jain comments, “This is where the personal spills over into public life, this is where power relationships and violence come together in an unholy nexus.”27 Nor is it a coincidence that the full story of those violent days in Bombay emerges in the novel only after Madhu has experienced, first-hand, a traumatic repetition of the same hate-fuelled violence. As a result of this (gothic) narrative strategy, the potential for and the effects of sectarian violence bracket and inflect all of the events in the novel, powerfully bringing the issue of communal strife onto an intimate, personal level. Moreover, in the character of Savitribai Indorekar, a Brahmin woman who transgresses multiple taboos – abandoning her husband in order to become a professional singer of Hindustani music, living in a commonlaw relationship with her Muslim tabla player Ghulam Saab, and bearing his child out of wedlock – Deshpande gives us not only a compelling personal story, but also a compelling political allegory. Madhu’s frustration with the gaping holes in Bai’s story – Bai’s complete elision of Ghulam Saab and their daughter Munni in the story that she tells her biographer – is a frustration shared by the reader, and should be considered an invitation to dig a little deeper even than Madhu, a character who can relate Bai’s silence about her dead daughter only to Madhu’s own difficulty in coming to terms with the sudden, irrevocable loss of her son. In what I will argue is the highly politicized context of the novel, Bai’s odd ‘forgetfulness,’ along with Madhu’s insistence that, in the biography of the singer that she writes, “the daughter she denies, the daughter whose exis-

27

Jain, Gendered Realities, 259.

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tence she has obliterated” will “be part of her life again” (168) is highly significant. In spite of their erasure from Bai’s official story, Madhu knows about Ghulam Saab and Munni through a past connection with the singer. When Madhu is a child, Bai and her small family live for a brief time in the house next door to Madhu’s in the town of Neemgaon. Madhu and Munni, close in age, become playmates, forging a fairly brief, intense, and vexed relationship that ends abruptly when Munni horrifies Madhu by revealing to her a ‘secret’ about Madhu’s widowed father: that he “goes to a woman at night” (139). Slightly younger and much more naive about sexuality than her friend, Madhu is simply unable to process this adult truth – in particular, the imaginative detail that Munni supplies – and the revelation proves to be the last straw in the already strained relationship.28 The departure of Savitribai and her family from Neemgaon shortly after this event merely formalizes the breach in the girls’ friendship. Madhu learns later that, shortly after leaving Neemgaon, the unconventional family disperses: Bai continues her meteoric rise as a singer without Ghulam Saab; Munni is returned to her mother’s husband’s family in Pune; and Ghulam Saab returns to his own wife and children. Madhu does not encounter her childhood friend again until years later when she meets a woman on a bus whom she firmly believes to be Munni, but who insists her name is Shailaja Joshi and claims not to recognize Madhu. It is precisely because of the past connection with Bai that Madhu has been chosen for the task of writing the singer’s biography. But Bai, like the adult Munni, seems not to recognize – or chooses not to acknowledge – the connection, and Madhu, somewhat perversely, never mentions it either. Under these odd circumstances, Madhu finds it impossible to challenge Bai’s omission of her daughter from the singer’s official story: [Bai’s] obduracy tempts me to say to her bluntly, ‘I’m Munni’s friend, your daughter’s friend.’ It makes me want to put a knife to her skin, to see her jump. Often Bai reminds me of Munni herself, flaunting a secret, tantalizing me with hints, refusing to go on, saying, ‘No, I won’t tell you.’ And I think – Bai knows what she’s doing, she’s mocking me, she’s daring me to speak of Munni; it’s the mis28

Madhu’s refusal to hear the truth about her father is echoed later in the novel by Som’s refusal to accept that Madhu had had a sexual encounter before marriage, a point I shall discuss later.

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chievousness, the provocative brattishness of the old. Even more often I wonder what kind of a woman are you, denying your own child? Only the lowest, the meanest kind of creature could do that. (78)

Madhu implicates herself in the final statement; she had also turned her back on Munni in the past and she has attempted to forget Adit as a way to lessen her own pain. But Madhu finds that she cannot forget Adit or Munni and what happened to them on 12 March 1993. Bai’s silence with regard to her daughter, both while Munni is alive and after she is dead, is an entirely different matter, and Bai maintains that silence – about Munni and about Ghulam Saab – until and beyond the ending of the novel, where the narrator leaves her comatose and near death. Yet, Madhu is sure that, in spite of Bai’s refusal to speak of her, the Munni Madhu feels she knew as a child “would never let go, she would haunt her mother, claim her right” (116). Perhaps without her prior knowledge of Bai’s family, the biography of the singer would be “easy [for Madhu] to write”: “I have only to put things in in a sequential order, as if Time is the only connecting factor. A straight line on which Bai has been steadily moving, a deliberate progress through events” (163). However, not only does Madhu realize that “we don’t live our lives this way. […] We see our lives through memory and memories are fractured, fragmented, almost always cutting across time” (165), she also finds it impossible to contemplate leaving Munni and Ghulam Saab out of Bai’s official biography. As Bijay Danta notes, “Madhu’s biography […] is a cross between biography and [Bai’s] autobiography.”29 Madhu therefore faces a dilemma: how to write Bai’s story without presenting a false account of her life. In other words, as the ambiguous pronoun reference pointedly suggests, Madhu must grapple with how to tell Bai’s story without telling her own, something she finds, like Urmi in The Binding Vine, impossible to do, no matter whose secrets she has to reveal or whose crypts she needs to open. Madhu’s dilemma is represented metaphorically in her description of the route(s) she takes to enter Bai’s house:

29

Bijay Danta, “‘Something Happened’: Writing, Repetition and Recovery in Deshpande’s Small Remedies, in Writing Difference: The Novels of Shashi Deshpande, ed. Chanchala K. Naik (Delhi: Pencraft International, 2005): 212.

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There are three ways of approaching Bai’s house and I’ve tried all of them. There’s the main approach, along the road and through the non-existent front gate […]. There’s another, the shortest route, which involves entering from the back of the house and going past a disused well and the dilapidated remains of a row of rooms, which were once the servants’ quarters. The tiles have fallen off the roof, leaving the rooms open to the skies, but the doors are still secured by locks. There’s a third way, the one I now regularly take, stepping over the sagging barbed wire and going through the mango grove to the right of the house. Here the undergrowth has been cleaned by whoever it was had gathered the mango crop at the end of the summer. The grass is growing back, but even as it grows, it carries the impress of my feet, and I can see the faint outline of the path I followed the previous day. I walk carefully in my own steps and each day the path becomes more clear, more distinct. (71–72)

Chandra Holm notes the palimpsestic nature of this description, in which “the writing can never be wholly erased.”30 But the description also evokes the idea of a labyrinth: rooms that are “open to the skies,” “locked doors,” “non-existent” gates. And while the description implies, metaphorically, that Madhu’s path toward Bai and the mystery of Bai’s story grows clearer, more distinct every day, as though the pieces of the story begin to fall into place, Madhu never discovers the reason or reasons for Bai’s leaky memory. In fact, Madhu dismisses the most obvious possible reason for Bai’s failure to remember – a stroke that has impaired her physically but, apparently, not mentally – and chooses to believe, instead, that Bai’s omissions are “deliberate”: If I think of Munni so often, can Bai have forgotten her? Is it possible to forget? Never, not unless it is the disease that has conferred the boon of forgetfulness on her. The cells that stored memories of Munni dead, the memories lost, consigned to oblivion. But something tells me this is not the truth. I’ve been here, with Bai, long enough to know that. Bai’s forgetting, I think, is deliberate. She has drawn a line through Munni’s and Ghulam Saab’s names and erased them from her life. This is something she did long back, when she began her journey to success and fame. Perhaps she thought that to attain these things, this denial of her lover and daughter was necessary.

30

Holm, “Potent Remedies,” 75.

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I imagine that the denial also made it possible for her to live with herself. (154)

The problem that Madhu faces, in other words, is not a puzzle, but a riddle. And, sphinx-like, Bai remains silent about the riddle’s answer. Faced with such obdurate silence and her own reluctance to introduce the subject of Ghulam Saab and Munni, Madhu can only speculate upon or “imagine” Bai’s motivations for these acts of erasure and denial. As Madhu muses (rather cryptically, since Bai is still alive), “It is not the dead but the living who have to unravel the knots” (226). While Madhu’s pronouncements about Bai are almost always couched in speculative terms – “Perhaps,” and “I imagine” – some critics of the novel, such as Siddhartha Sharma, tend to resist the ambiguities of the text and to be more assertive in their claims: Savitribai eliminates the existence of her daughter from her life to keep her good name and identity intact. She is guilt-ridden and is now ashamed of her past indiscretions and wants to wipe off the memory of such acts from her mind.31

Such an observation overlooks the central principles of the novel and, indeed, of most of Deshpande’s work: the overdetermined and therefore indeterminant nature of identity and the existential isolation of the individual. Madhu continually asks herself, “What is the truth about Bai? Why did she leave her home, and that, with a Muslim lover? A step so great that even today it would require enormous courage? […] Was it truly love? Or a way out of a situation she could no longer endure? Did she use the man for her own ends? Or was she seduced by him?” (166). Later in the novel, Madhu speculates that “For Bai to develop a relationship with another man, a tabla player, a Muslim – this must have been not only unimaginable, but the height of criminality” (220). According to Madhu, Bai is a congerie of contradictions: a woman who, “as unaware of trendy feminism as she is of political correctness,” “speaks of herself as a Brahmin in a way that assumes her superiority on this account alone” (167), yet one who acknowledges that “it became a curse, my being a Brahmin woman. My belonging to a respectable family” (130). So could it be a 31

Siddhartha Sharma, Shashi Deshpande’s Novels: A Feminist Study (New Delhi: Atlantic, 2005): 68.

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Brahminical compunction – perhaps a late reversion to her faith – that causes Bai to turn her back on a relationship with a Muslim man, as well as the child of this relationship? Perhaps, yet Madhu also knows that Bai has never considered herself a devout Hindu: she has, for example, never dared to sing the sacred bhajan. This idea proves to be another dead-end for Madhu in her search for the ‘truth’ about Bai. Madhu’s growing confusion about Bai’s character and motivations for expunging not just Ghulam Saab, but their daughter Munni, from her life is summed up in the following: Why, when [Savitribai] had the courage to walk out on her marriage and family, is she so frightened of revealing the existence of her child? She gave that child the name ‘Indorekar’ – the name she adopted as a singer (from her mother’s home town Indore) – not compromising either her maiden name or her married one. Meenakshi Indorekar. Marking her out as her child alone, not the child of her marriage, not the child of her lover. This surely is a statement I cannot ignore? But Munni hankered for the name her mother had left behind, she yearned for the conventional life Bai had found so stultifying. […] When I bring Munni back into Bai’s life, when I try to explain her rejection of her daughter, I will be saying this is how it was. This is why it happened. Whereas, the truth is that we don’t always know why we do things. There aren’t always clear-cut reasons for actions, rarely such definite moments which we can pinpoint. (168–69)

As Madhu implies, and as most of Deshpande’s novels demonstrate, the ‘truth’ can be evasive. In the face of Bai’s refusal to “open her mouth,” Madhu admits that she “will have to find my reasons for her rejction of her daughter. Find? No. I have to invent reasons. Fiction, then, it seems, is inevitable” (169). And so even the narrative of a rejecting mother that Madhu initially says she will write undergoes revision, as Madhu tries to see things from Munni’s point of view and wonders whether it was not Munni who rejected Bai, rather than the other way round: But Munni wanted respectability. And therefore she rejected everything associated with her mother – music, genius, ambition, freedom. Was it Munni who denied her mother then, Munni who turned her back on her mother? I am confused. It’s like turning the hourglass over; it’s the same sand, but now running the other way.

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What is it like to deny your mother? […] Munni closed herself against her mother, against everything she was or stood for, and chose an ordinary life. (225)

As speculation leads to (provisional) certainty, Madhu entirely re-casts the relationship between Munni and her mother. But in this uncanny mirroring of mother and daughter, caught in a mutual embrace of denial reminiscent of Saru’s relationship with her mother in The Dark Holds No Terrors, where is the lover/father, Ghulam Saab? What is his role in the drama? Before turning to Ghulam Saab, however, I want to discover why the girl Madhu knew in Neemgaon as Munni or Meenakshi would want to disavow not just her mother, not just her mother’s lover and the man who claims to be her father, but her father’s religion and both of the names she has been given as a child. Munni/Meenakshi/Shalaija is a girl with too many names, too many fathers, too many identities. In spite of her efforts to be as different from her mother as possible – even as a child downplaying her own femininity, rejecting her mother’s glamorous image – she is just as cryptic and sphinx-like as Bai; she is, indeed, often presented in terms that precisely mirror her mother’s behaviour. For example, when Madhu’s father overhears Munni casually singing a film song in a “sweet light voice,” he begs her to sing again for him, but she refuses, and Madhu recalls, significantly, that “her mouth was sealed” (135), just as Bai refuses to “open her mouth” on the subject of her daughter and Ghulam Saab. Struggling to understand her own relationship with Munni, Madhu reflects that she and Bai’s daughter must have been drawn together as children not only because their houses stood in close proximity but because both girls came from unorthodox families: Madhu’s father “was an oddity in Neemgaon,” a man respected by the community in his role as physician, but aloof in his demeanour and in his non-conformist lifestyle; and Munni’s “family, with her singer mother, absent father and another man – a Muslim – sharing the home, was obviously shocking” (138). But while Madhu claims to be quite comfortable in a home consisting only of “two rather taciturn men” (79), a father and a male servant, Munni is obviously deeply troubled about her background and her current family situation. For example, Munni melodramatically an-

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nounces to Madhu that she has been kidnapped from the Pune home of her Brahmin father (her mother’s legal husband) by her mother’s tabla player, and that she cannot return home because her ‘real’ father would kill her mother if he saw her again (64). Munni vehemently and repeatedly denies that Ghulam Saab is her father in spite of what Madhu can see, especially later in life, is a striking family resemblance. Munni insists upon being called Meenakshi, rather than the more Persian / Arabic-sounding name Munni. Munni is, in fact, so insistent that her real father is a Brahmin lawyer in Pune that she almost convinces her younger playmate of the truth of her claims. Indeed, were it not for Munni’s obvious facial resemblance to Ghulam Saab, a resemblance about the eyes that Munni attempts, without success, to disguise, Madhu might have even been convinced of, or at least remained in doubt about, Munni’s fabrications, just as she is led into confusion by Munni about Ghulam Saab’s character. Not only does Munni insist that Ghulam Saab is not her father, she repeatedly tells Madhu that her mother’s tabla player abuses her physically, at one point showing Madhu a scar that looks, to Madhu, suspiciously like a mosquito bite. Munni warns Madhu not to report the abuse to anyone, however, because Ghulam Saab will “‘whip me’” (65). In spite of such alarming reports, Madhu’s own observations tell her that Ghulam Saab is a “kind” man (32), and she finds it difficult to credit Munni’s claims. In fact, when she sees them together, “Munni and her kidnapper, he seems affectionate and loving” and she can see “no cruelty anywhere”: On the contrary, it’s Munni’s mother who rarely speaks to Munni and when she does her voice is sharp, like a knife. I saw her slap Munni once, I’ve heard her scolding her. Yet Munni insists it’s the man who is her enemy. ‘You don’t know,’ she says, ‘you don’t know him, you don’t know how clever he is, how he can pretend.’ I stare hard at him when we meet, so hard that he asks me, ‘What is it, Madhu? Have I got two noses suddenly? Or …’ he rubs his hand over his face, clowning. I know, ‘maybe I’ve got four eyes, huh?’ (65)

Madhu wonders if it is “possible for people to hide things so well, for them to pretend to be what they are not. […] Like the villains in a Hindi movie who proclaim their evil nature in their looks, their clothes, their mannerisms, their talk, their harsh mocking laughter. If they don’t reveal

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it openly, how will we know? How can we guard ourselves against them?” (65–66). Munni’s repeated and irrational denials of her relationship with Ghulam Saab confuse and disturb Madhu, who desperately wishes to maintain Munni as a friend, but the other children in Neemgaon are less charitable toward Munni, and they directly challenge her stories: ‘If your name is Meenakshi, why does your father have a Muslim name?’ ‘My father doesn’t have a Muslim name. My father’s name is Sadashivrao.’ ‘No it’s not. It’s Ghulam Ahmed.’ ‘My father is Sadashivrao, he’s in Pune.’ (35)

The children’s initial curiousity about Munni, which Madhu views as quite natural and understandable (35), escalates into increasingly cruel and bigoted taunting, as these ‘innocents’ “sharpen their knives” on Munni’s desperation and fear, “impervious to human grief” (36): What’s your name? What’s your father’s name? Where is your father? Who’s the man who lives with your mother? And, like Innokenty’s32 questions to his interrogators, Munni’s answers too were ignored by her tormenters. Her replies – my father is in Pune, my father is a lawyer, my name is Meenakshi – were brushed aside as if they were of no consequence. Then there were the comments: Look, she’s wearing new clothes. That’s for Id, isn’t it? Ayya, she’s stinking of meat. Did you eat biryani? Munni, however, never wavered in her defiance, in her stubborn adherence to her own truth, her bravado concealing, I think of it now, her terror, her distress and her grief. (77)

Munni/Meenakshi’s repeated references to her “Brahmin” father and her insistence on an identifiably Hindu name seem to fuel the other children’s astute awareness that the way to inflict “terror, […] distress and […] grief” upon this exotic creature is to taunt her about her father’s 32

Innokenty is a character accused of treason in Stalinist Russia in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel The First Circle.

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religion. The scandal, for them, if only because apparently for Munni herself, is not that her parents are unmarried musicians, but that she is the meat-eating, Id-observing daughter of a Muslim and is therefore not one of them, not one of the predominantly Hindu community members of Neemgaon. Madhu concludes the above passage by once again commenting on the curious mirroring of mother and daughter: “It occurs to me that like her daughter, Bai too is into denial” (77). If that is so – if the daughter’s denial of her Muslim father is a mirror image of the mother’s denial of both her Muslim lover and the daughter that is the product of that union – then I would suggest the possibility that one of the crypts in Small Remedies is Muslim-ness itself – or, to be more precise, the “good” Muslim buried within the majority Hindu body politic of India. As Parama Roy explains, noting the significant role that Muslim actors have played in forging the Indian (Hindu) cultural imaginary, The good Muslim […] is not just a phobic object, to be responded to with punitive laws and pogroms and other forms of bigotry: s/he is also, and at the same time, the object of love and identification. Above all, s/he is a figure of unhappy intimacy who, despite manifold repressions and conversions, returns repeatedly and inauspiciously to haunt the wholeness of an Indian (Hindu) psyche/polity. (Post)colonial Hindu/Indian identity must simultaneously disavow and be consumed with the intimate enemies that it can scarcely distinguish from itself. 33

Confused, as a child, about what to think of Ghulam Saab – what to believe about him – Madhu, as we have seen, asks an age-old and yet entirely contemporary and urgent question: “If they don’t reveal it openly, how will we know [who they are]? How can we guard ourselves against them?” (65–66). In registering Madhu’s paranoid response to Munni’s dramatic (and most likely false) allegations of abuse at the hands of Ghulam Saab and histrionic denials of her own religious background, Deshpande surely invites a cryptomimetic reading of the figure of the Muslim in contemporary India. Such a reading is reinforced when, years later, long after the cruel echoes of the taunting children’s voices should have faded, Madhu be33

Parama Roy, Indian Traffic: Identities in Colonial and Postcolonial India (New Delhi: Vistaar, 1998): 172–73.

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lieves that she sees the adult Munni on a bus in Bombay. At first, Madhu almost fails to recognize the woman, who looks like “any other middleclass Bombay housewife”: “The disguise was almost complete – except for the eyes that let her down”: ‘You’re Munni,’ I said abruptly, startled into recognition. She looked at me, I could swear there was recognition there, before the face became blank and inscrutable. ‘My name is Shailaja – Shailaja Joshi.’ The name was uttered slowly, clearly, her hand going to her mangalsutra as she spoke. Was it a habitual gesture? Or was she reassuring herself that she was indeed that Shailaja Joshi the black beads had transformed her into? A slight tremor in the hand seemed like a quiver of doubt. Am I Shailaja Joshi? Or Meenakshi Indorekar? Or Munni? (76)

What exactly is it about Munni, though, that is hidden behind her “disguise”? What aspect of her identity is not consistent with the picture Munni is trying to present? From Madhu’s description, it is clear that it is her ‘Muslim-ness’, her relationship to Ghulam Saab. Threatened with shameful exposure, this twice-removed avatar of the Muslim girl called Munni34 clutches at the magic talisman that proves her identity as both a Hindu and a respectably married woman. Even Munni’s obituary, which gives her name as “‘Shailaja Joshi – only daughter of Savitribai Indorekar’” (225), captures and reifies this pure, untainted Hindu identity, swallowing one of the ‘truths’ of Munni’s origins – her Muslim father – whole. Both Munni and Bai attempt to erase from their lives not only each other but, in a move that perhaps necessitates the latter estrangement, the man – and their association with his religion – they wish to disavow, whether consciously or unconsciously, whether motivated by outside forces or by forces within. As Madhu notes, though, Ghulam Saab continues to haunt the texts of their lives, in the photographs that Bai shows her, from which her tabla player cannot, either aesthetically or ethically, be effaced, and in the family resemblance that Munni cannot hide behind a mangalsutra and which can only be, finally and ironically, destroyed in an explosion intended (by extremist members of the Muslim 34

Shalaija and Meenakshi are both incarnations of the Hindu goddess Parvati.

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community that Munni has always sought to disavow) to terrorize those who share with her the Hindu religion she has embraced instead. 

I want to believe that Bai’s was a love story. — Small Remedies (175) I once interviewed Madanlal Pahwa, one of the assassins of Gandhi and a hardboiled Hindu nationalist, when he was quite old. It transpired that ultimately his most memorable years were his childhood spent in a Pakpattan in the Montgomery district in West Punjab, which had Baba Fareed’s mazar. There was a religious fair every year to which he would go to listen to the qawwalis being sung. He called himself a kattar Hindu but his most nostalgic memories revolved around that mazar, the fair and qawwalis. This tells you something. We Indians are accustomed to living with multiple selves and multiple moral ledgers. He was a Hindutvawalla and his language came from there, but his memories came from somewhere else. — Ashis Nandi (with Soma Chaudhury), “Head Hunting”

In calling Ghulam Saab the “good” Muslim whose presence must be disavowed by those who claim a ‘pure’ Hindu identity, I am, of course, attuned to more than just Munni’s story. Just as Madhu is stumped by Bai’s sphinx-like silence about her sphinx-like daughter, she is perplexed by the singer’s silence about the man whom, according to Ghulam Saab’s granddaughter, Hasina, was a major factor in Bai’s early career, paving the way for Bai’s success in the male-dominated world of professional music. But even more than the professional relationship, Madhu is curious about what she assumes must have been the sexual passion between the singer and her tabla player that produced the tormented Munni. Madhu does not doubt for a moment that Ghulam Saab loved Bai – not only has she seen his adoring gaze in the photos that Bai shows her, she has seen the couple together when they lived next to her in Neemgaon: But this is not enough material for me to create a love story. In any case, this is not a love story that ended on the note ‘and they lived happily ever after.’ For they did not – not ever after anyway. He went back to his family some time after they left Neemgaon. (177)

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Once again, Madhu portrays her struggle in the form of a paradox or a riddle: I would like to write about their love, a love that transcended all barriers, I would be glad to make Bai the heroine of a passionate, beautiful story. It is possible. What else but love could make a woman of her class, a married woman, take on a lover and leave her home with him? […] And yet there’s the other Bai I see as well, a calculating, ambitious woman, using the man for her own ends, abandoning him finally when her need for him is over. Was this how it was? True, Bai is a worldly woman, but when she sings, she transcends her own worldiness. Why not then in love as well? She had a child by the man before she left her husband’s home. What else but passion could have led to the conceiving of a child? But let me not forget that she abandoned that child when she left home with her lover. I’m suddenly halted by the thought. Could a woman who did that be capable of great love? (176)

What kind of mother “abandons” her only child, albeit to a family that her child claims, falsely, to be her own? What kind of a “love story” ends in renunciation and elision of the lover? Although Sakuntala is not specifically mentioned in Small Remedies, these questions remind us that Kalidasa’s play was just such a love story. And so it is to that text, and my earlier interpretation of it through the theories of Abraham and Torok, that we must turn. And while there is no ‘magic ring’ that can pry open the crypt of memory and reunite these two estranged lovers and their child, there is, in another story that the novel eventually tells, a kind of restoration and a kind of reunion. Underlying the enigma of Bai’s silence about Ghulam Saab, I would argue, is a deeper secret, one that the text – one that Deshpande’s narrator, I believe – constantly points to, yet never fully reveals: the vital role that Muslim musicians have played in the history of Hindustani music, a debt that cannot be overtly acknowledged or celebrated in a heightened atmosphere of communal tension. According to the theories of Abraham and Torok, what makes mourning difficult, and sometimes impossible, is not the trauma of loss per se, but the refusal to acknowledge that one had something of value to lose. At one point, Madhu suggests that Bai’s forgetting appears to be a form of “indifference”; what Abraham and Torok

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demonstrate is that such apparent indifference may well be the result of “endocryptic identification”: Altogether different [from ‘melancholic’ incorporation] is the fate of those who personally benefitted from an unutterable favor. Not being able to put their loss into words, or to communicate it to others and resign themselves through grief, they choose to deny everything – the loss as well as the love. There is no alternative but to deny everything, shut everything up in themselves, the pleasure and the suffering. The variety of such cases is infinite. There are those who, at the time of the loss, suffered a disappointment in their object of love, in its sincerity or value. Their crypt is under double lock and, due to a tragic split, they desperately try to destroy what is dearest to them. These people are deprived of even the hope of ever being acknowledged.35

In Savitribai’s inexplicable “indifference,” the reasons for which Madhu’s text searches but never definitively deduces, we can, perhaps, discover the love story – what Abraham and Torok might call the ‘idyll’ – for which Madhu has been looking. But it is not just the love story between two people – a singer and her tabla player – it is, metonymically, the forgotten love story, or ‘idyll’,36 of an entire nation. I ask the questions again: What kind of mother ‘abandons’ her only child, albeit to a family that her child claims, falsely, to be her own? What kind of a ‘love-story’ ends in renunciation and elision of the lover? The novel, of course, cannot answer these questions, but it does gesture, if only elliptically, toward a way out of the impasse, a shattering of the crypt, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, by Bai herself. During her visits to the singer, Madhu comes to learn about the other occupants of and regular visitors to the house, who, aside from several servants, are Hindustani musicians and singers, students of Bai, and Bai’s protégé, Hasina. Before learning her name, Madhu assumes from her appearance – her bare forehead and her “perfect Marathi” (59) – that Hasina is a Hindu widow. What she eventually learns, to her astonishment, is that not only is Hasina Muslim, she is Ghulam Saab’s granddaughter. Initially, nothing in 35

Abraham & Torok, “‘The Lost Object – Me’,” 154. In using the word ‘idyll’ in this context, I want to be careful not to appear naive or nostalgic about centuries-old communal divisions within India. I hope that the reader will understand the limited cultural and textual context within which I am making this claim. 36

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the way that Bai treats Hasina indicates this relationship; in fact, Bai seems to treat Hasina as little more than a personal servant, and she disparages what, to Madhu, is the girl’s obvious talent as a singer. However, after Bai suffers another life-threatening stroke, Hasina’s grief and consternation are obvious, suggesting that her connection to Bai is far more intimate than Madhu had previously imagined. But Madhu does not make the connection between Hasina and Ghulam Saab until Hasina enlists Madhu to help her feed the helpless singer, telling Madhu wryly, ‘Baijii wouldn’t take any food from my hands. It began with her first stroke. Suddenly, overnight, she became an orthodox Brahmin. […] My grandfather once told me that she hated the rules and conventions of orthodoxy, that she never observed any of them herself.’ ‘Your grandfather?’ It’s Ghulam Saab. She is Ghulam Saab’s granddaughter. Of course. I wonder now how I hadn’t guessed it earlier. Those eyes, how is it I didn’t notice them – so like his and Munni’s? (243).

This moment of sudden recognition not only links Hasina to Munni in a chain of substitution, but also reminds us of Bai’s deep ambivalence about the “phobic” figure of the Muslim who is also, at the same time, an “object of love and identification”: in other words, the “intimate enemy.” Once aware of Hasina’s identity, Madhu learns a great deal from the young woman about Bai’s tabla player, the “good Muslim,” who lived next door to her in Neemgaon. Hasina confirms what Madhu had always suspected: Ghulam Saab adored his daughter, Munni, and fell into a deep well of depression after Munni was sent back to Bai’s husband’s family. In fact, much to his wife’s consternation, Hasina tells Madhu, Ghulam Saab often called Hasina, his favourite granddaughter, Munni (277). Unlike Munni, however, Hasina has embraced fully the legacy of both Savitribai and Ghulam Saab, and she, in turn, has been embraced fully by both of them as their protégé. In what amounts to a virtual return of the repressed, as well as a subtle homage to the role that Ghulam Saab played in her life and in her career, Bai, who will not take food from her Muslim student’s hands, surprisingly chooses Hasina to sing the punyatithi37 in Bhavani temple on the very important death anniversary of Bai’s guru. It is perhaps in this indirect way that Bai pays her unfathomable and 37

Anniversary of a great being’s death.

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“unutterable” debt to her Muslim lover and demonstrates that, in spite of the long separation, theirs may have been a love-story, after all. Whatever the reasons for her choice, Bai’s selection of Hasina to sing in the temple is vigorously challenged in the heightened political atmosphere of India in 1993, leading to the novel’s dramatic conclusion and bringing its concerns about communal violence full circle. Madhu is commissioned to write an article about the upcoming event, but when she and her cousin Hari travel to the temple to preview the venue, they are ambushed by thugs – most likely political “outsiders” (297) hired to stop a Muslim woman from singing in a Hindu temple. These thugs, in an interesting and telling echo of Madhu’s earlier assumptions about Hasina’s identity, have possibly mistaken Madhu, dressed in a salwar kameez,38 for Hasina. In an act of collective resistance to political manipulation and bullying, however, the organizers of the event refuse to cancel the concert or replace Hasina with a Hindu singer. Within this context, Madhu’s article takes on a new significance: “‘Write the article’,” Madhu is urged. “‘Once people know what this programme means to us in Bhavanipur, once people read about how many Muslims have sung in this temple, it’ll be different’” (309). Nothing more is said explicitly about the history of Muslims’ singing in Bhavani temple. What goes unexplained in the text – and is left either to the reader’s prior knowledge or subsequent research – is that the entire tradition of Hindustani music, particularly that of the Gwalior Gharana, the gharana or family of Bai’s pundit, has been shaped by Muslim musicians, many of whom were converted from Hinduism or the descendants of converted Hindus.39 Shirley Chew notes that one of the most important members of this gharana, Mujan Tansen, “‘often visited Hindu temples to pray and to chant the Vedic verses,’ and, in so doing, opened the way for 38 Ironically, as someone points out, Hasina typically wears saris: “Oh well, you know the sterotypes we live with. She’s a Muslim, therefore she would be wearing a salwar kameez” (296). 39 “It is well known that until relatively recent times the majority of Hindustani musicians were Muslims and that Sufis played a vital role in Indian Islam and in the development and maintenance of Hindustani music […] riaz may be viewed as corresponding to zikr invocational practices in Islam, the primary means by which the novice celebrates his/her level of consciousness”; Robert Simms, “Some Thoughts on the Meaning of Riaz in Hindustani Music,” Bansuri 11 (1994): 7.

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other Muslim musicians ‘to partake in, and create, Hindu religious music’.”40 This information, perhaps, is what Madhu might have mentioned in her article. This, in part, is what she might have written in Bai’s biography, restoring Ghulam Saab to his rightful place as co-creator of Bai’s success. Madhu might have written, in both her article and the biography, that the fanatics who destroyed the Babri Masjid mosque and the anonymous bombers who killed Muslims and Hindus alike in the terrorist reprisals had forgotten their history lessons, had, indeed, succumbed to collective amnesia and the logic of the crypt. Instead, Deshpande lets her readers and critics make these connections, engaging us fully in the search for the truths that are so elusive in this novel. Once we do start to make these connections, other moments in the novel come into clearer focus. I have already mentioned the children’s prabhat pheris described in the opening pages of the novel, a description that chills the reader only in retrospect. Later in the novel, however, Madhu describes an exchange between her cousin Hari and a friend who has just returned from the ruins of Hampi, the site of the last stronghold of the Vijayanagar empire, destroyed in c. 1565 by Muslim invaders from the north:41 ‘I couldn’t bear to see it,’ the friend said. ‘And there were busloads of children being brought to see it. […] Do they need to see this hatred and destruction? Should they see what is done in the name of religion?’

Hari, unlike Gopal in A Matter of Time, is unequivocal in his response: We need to know our history. We can’t turn our backs on it. We have to know the truth. And what is the truth about the end of the Vijayanagar empire? It wasn’t only religion, was it? There were political imperatives. (106)

40 Shirley Chew, “‘Cutting Across Time’,” 79; internal quotations from Reginald & Jamila Mussey, The Music of India, 1993. 41 The watch-towers at Hampi “have elements from both Hindu and Islamic vocabulary” (Nangia, “Death of an Empire: The Ruins of Hampi”). Again, Deshpande points to, but refuses to spell out, the rich historical imbrication of Hindu and Islamic culture. Hampi also figures in the novel as a speculum of the contested and desecrated ruins at Babri Masjid.

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Madhu, who up to this point has not even begun to face the demons of her own past, is not so sure. She thinks, but does not say aloud: No, Hari, you’re wrong, we don’t learn from history, we never do. Look at our story – the same mistakes over and over again. The same stupidity, the same cruelty. The truth is, we don’t want to learn from our past. History can offer us nothing. That it teaches us something is a lie invented for God-knows-what-reason. The truth is, we want to forget. Which is why we have cultivated a vast collective amnesia. In our individual lives too. We remember the wrongs done to us, but we forget our sins, we dye them with the colour of innocence, of good intentions. To remember is to make living impossible. And therefore it is that Som and I prefer to be apart. To see Som is to remember. In his face, in his eyes, I see my own grief, my guilt, my anger. In his silence I hear my own questions that ricochet off the soft walls of my mind, leaving sharp points of piercing pain. We’re like the twins, mirror images reflecting each other’s physical selves, each other’s souls. No, better to be apart, better to forget, better to be like Bai. I’ve been looking at the fact of Bai’s silence about Munni, turning it around, seeing sometimes a disease-induced amnesia, at other times a deliberate cruel forgetting. But perhaps it’s neither, maybe it’s just indifference that has made forgetting possible. Indifference is, after all, the best armour you can wear. If I don’t care, I can’t be hurt. (106-107)

With a distinct echo of the story of Kunti and his armour that was so significant to the maternal crypt in The Binding Vine, Deshpande clearly links personal memory and grief to that of a nation in crisis, suggesting that the psychological effects of endocryptic identification and cryptic incorporation can extend through generations and disrupt the politics of an entire nation: in other words, there is “a form of transgenerational haunting that is inherently political.”42 Trapped in the emotional paralysis that the trauma of Adit’s death precipitates, Madhu, like Bai, initially chooses indifference as a means of protecting herself from her own pain: “If I don’t care, I can’t be hurt.” It is not until late in the novel that the physical, politically motivated attack on Madhu allows her, finally, to narrate the trauma of her personal loss and to confront her own capacity for cryptic forgetfulness. In an ambiguous 42

Edwards, Gothic Canada, xxix.

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passage late in the novel, Madhu haltingly relates to Hari the horrible days after her son’s disappearance, before learning of – if not yet assimilating – the terrorist bombing that took his life: I can’t go on, I have to stop. Hari has listened to me in silence. When I pause, he waits patiently. When the silence stretches, he makes a small movement. I restrain him with a gesture and continue with what I have to say. I tell him about how they haunt me, those last three days of his life. I can’t come to terms with my ignorance of those days. (305)

The “ignorance” that “haunts” Madhu, I would suggest, encompasses more than just her lack of knowledge about Adit’s fate; it is also ignorance of the political turmoil and potential for communal violence that have surrounded her, but to which she had been, like many others, not only in India but elsewhere in the world, blind or indifferent. It is only through experiencing, first-hand, the kind of violence that resulted in Adit’s death that Madhu is fully awakened to the political realities that the safe bourgeois environment that she enjoyed with her husband and son had sheltered her from seeing. Like Jaya in That Long Silence, Madhu is forced to realize just how vulnerable even the middle-class body is to the turmoil of the nation. Deshpande is not known for providing happy endings to her novels. There is however, something quite hopeful about the closing pages of Small Remedies. Hasina sings at the punyatithi without incident; her performance is judged a complete success. She exhibits more talent than her teacher, Bai, and she even performs a sacred bhajan, something Bai, a Brahmin, had always refused to do. A Muslim performing this particular bhajan “composed centuries ago by a woman, a Hindu woman, whose entire life was a statement of her faith” (319) creates a murmur, but not a disturbance, in the temple crowd: “These people know this song, it is in their language, the poet and her words are a part of their lives. [...] Hasina has prepared well, her pronunciation is perfect, and so too, I see, is her understanding of the words. ‘I saw a dream, I saw a dream,’ she sings” (319). Dreams – and nightmares – are, of course, another trademark of Deshpande’s fiction. What is implied in Small Remedies is that we cannot wake from the nightmare of history until we remember it, reconstruct its absences and motivated silences, and use its lessons to guide us into the future. Moreover, we need to dream about what a possible future might

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look like, and such a future can be achieved only through what Abraham and Torok describe as “introjection”: “Since language acts and makes up for absence by representing, by giving figurative shape to presence, it can only be comprehended or shared in a ‘community of empty mouths’.”43 In the depiction of Hasina’s successful performance, Deshpande has countered the trauma of communal violence with the creation of “another memory, one that is collective, a memory of words and names and no longer a memory of things, a memory of signs and no longer of effects.”44 From this perspective, it is interesting to see another sign of Madhu’s healing in the last few pages of the novel: This is my last day in Bhavanipur. Lying in bed, waiting for the day to break, I remember my first morning here when I woke up in a strange house to the thought of living with two absolute strangers. I think of the voices I heard that morning, voices raised in a choric harmony that woke me out of my uneasy, troubled sleep. I never heard them again, I don’t know who they were, why they went past this road and what they were singing. I will never know now and I am no longer curious, either. Some mysteries have to remain unsolved, some answers will never come. (322)

There is one important variation in this passage, if we compare it to the earlier one. In the novel’s opening paragraph, Madhu describes the voices as “disharmonious”; however, in the passage above from the novel’s final pages, the voices are raised in “choric harmony.” But while the novel appears to end on a relatively positive note politically, it is much less clear whether Madhu’s personal demons can be exorcized, and this doubt, in turn, casts a shadow over the rest of the novel: “some mysteries have to remain unsolved, some answers can never come.” Like many of Deshpande’s novels (The Dark Holds No Terrors, That Long Silence, and The Binding Vine come immediately to mind), Small Remedies ends just prior to the reunion of a wife with a partner who has been ‘off-stage’ through most of the novel. Madhu and Som have

43

Abraham & Torok, “Mourning or Melancholia,” 128. Deepak Mehta & Roma Chatterji, “Boundaries, Names, Alterities: A Case Study of a ‘Communal Riot’ in Dharavi, Bombay,” in Remaking a World: Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery, ed. Veena Das, Arthur Kleinman, Margaret Lock, Mamphela Ramphele, & Pamela Reynolds Berkeley: U of California P , 2001): 227. 44

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been estranged at least since the death of their son, Aditya, but, as we learn only late in the novel, this estrangement began before, and possibly led to, Adit’s death in the Bombay attacks. Underlying this marital estrangement and the horror of Adit’s death is the shattering of yet another transgenerational crypt: in a manner entirely consistent with Deshpande’s previous novels, the revelation of secrets, the breaking of silence, the telling of the ‘truth’ – about national history or about personal history – is always an ambivalent operation, as capable of producing catastrophe, alienation, and inconsolable grief as it is of healing divisions. 

Knowledge is always the inseparable twin of pain and suffering. — Small Remedies (226) ‘Be a Harishchandra then,’ […] ‘tell the truth and damn everything else.’ — Small Remedies (255)

I have already described and analyzed the opening words of Part One of the novel; however, Small Remedies begins with a Prologue that, like the opening of That Long Silence, is abrupt and unsettling: This is Som’s story. Or rather, Joe’s story as related to us by Som. To me, the two men, narrator and object, are equally part of the story; to remember is to think of both of them. Looking back now, from this point of time, it is clear to me that the story was not so much told to us, as offered to us by Som. It was his tribute to Joe. (1)

What is the reader to make of these opening words? Who is Som? Who is Joe? What is their relationship to each other and to the narrator? To what does the pronoun “This” refer? Why the equivocations surrounding the provenance of “Som’s story”? I would like to suggest that the radical ambiguity introduced by Deshpande’s grammatical constructions in the first few sentences – the vague pronoun reference, the use of the genitive, the reversing of subject and object – invites us to consider a number of interpretations, including the possibility that the entire narrative that follows in Small Remedies is one intended for a specific interlocutor: Madhu’s husband, Som. This – the

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novel – is a story intended for Som. And, just as Som’s story belongs, as well, to Joe, and is “offered to us,” so is Madhu’s story one that belongs to someone else and is offered to Som. Not, however, as tribute, but as expiation and explanation. If such a possibility is to be entertained, what might the anecdote itself tell us about why Madhu needs Som to hear this story, why she needs to offer it to him, and what it is she needs to tell him? In the remainder of this chapter, I would like to explore some possible answers to these questions, and, finally, to suggest that there is a dual and conflicting impulse with regard to the breaking of silence in this novel, as there is in Deshpande’s fiction as a whole, beginning with her early genre excursions and extending to the publication of her most recent novels – Moving On (2004) and In the Country of Deceit (2008). It is this ambivalence and also the overdetermination or ‘excess’ in Deshpande’s novels that consistently disturbs the realist and conventional surface of all of Deshpande’s work and vitiates any attempt to see her novels as positivistically or programmatically feminist, in the sense of a belief that restoring women’s voices – ending “that long silence” – will inevitably lead to positive change in women’s lives. What makes Deshpande’s work gothic, rather than realist, is precisely the way in which the crypt and transgenerational haunting operate to undermine the surface narrative: The idea of a secret plot from the past that structures a contemporary narrative […] suggests an excess in narrative, a level of narration that doubles or contests – and thus problematises – the conventions of a surface narrative pattern: for example, the pattern of the traditional ‘heroine’s text’ – the text that ends in marriage or death.45

Re-reading the Prologue with these ideas in mind, I would like to focus attention, again, not on its obvious content, an anecdote about a beloved figure in Som and Madhu’s life, but on Madhu’s ‘inappropriate’ and disruptive response to that story, a response that draws our attention to the crypt. Som tells this story “only a few months after Joe’s death” (1) to an intimate group of fellow mourners – his wife, Madhu; Joe’s son, Tony; Tony’s girl-friend and future wife, Rekha; and Chandru, a friend of Som and Madhu and, in later years, Bai’s physician. Joe had been a significant 45

Susanne Becker, Gothic Forms, 11.

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figure to all of them. For Madhu, Joe was her Aunt Leela’s husband, a man who generously welcomed the fifteen-year-old Madhu into their home after the death of her father and instilled in her a life-long love of literature, particularly of the work of Dickens and the Brontë sisters. As a physician, Joe had been Som’s and Chandru’s teacher and mentor. In fact, the story Som tells is about a party in honour of Joe’s retirement from teaching. The immediate effect of this story, which captures Joe’s energy, optimism, and eternal innocence, is to “conjure up the man, recreate him through words” (1) and to replace the pain of his loss with the joy of his remembrance. It is, in other words, the beginning of the healing process for this small group of friends. After Som has delivered the punch-line to his (Joe’s) story, however, the line is greeted not by the raucous laughter that Som expects, but by an uncomfortable silence, a silence that is finally broken by the expected laughter, followed immediately by Madhu’s recitation of a line from T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral: “In the life of one man, never the same time returns” (3). This sombre sentiment reduces the gathering again to silence, the word “never” striking them all as an ominous reminder of their loss: “the laughter ceased and amusement vanished from the room. My words were like a drop of black ink in a glass of clear water, staining it, darkening it. Suddenly the mood changed” (3). It is not until Joe’s son Tony playfully rattles off the next line of Eliot’s play – “onlythefoolfixed inhisfollythinkshecanturnthewheelwhichturnshim” – and identifies the source (4) that the earlier mood of happy remembrance is restored. Full of regret that she has spoken the words and ruined the party’s mood, Madhu is relieved: “Tony knew what he was doing. He spoke at that moment, he said what he did, on purpose. He saw the abyss, he wanted to get away from it, he wanted to draw back from that fearful emptiness” (4). It is at precisely this point – the point at which Madhu destroys the joyful mood that Som has intended to create – that Madhu confesses, “When I think of this story – and I do so often – I remember not only Joe, but Som too, and his pleasure in reviving those moments of happiness” (4). The anecdote that Som tells, as well as Madhu’s response to it, has obvious thematic implications for a novel that narrates a woman’s painful recovery from grief and her impulse to recover from that loss by reviving the dead and forgotten through storytelling. But, as Madhu indicates, the lines she recites from Murder in the Cathedral tell her “of the totality of loss, the irrevocability of it” (5), despite the “small remedies” that we

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employ to “keep disaster at bay, to stave off the nemesis of a jealous god” (81). As such, these sentiments cannot perform a legitimately healing function in the grieving process; rather, they express an ‘abyss’-mal truth that Madhu holds and yet feels she cannot freely express without risking a kind of social isolation. Madhu describes the effect of such a breaking of silence – the opening of a crypt to reveal its contents – in Western or Biblical terms: The moment of knowledge. And I, the Eve, offering it to the three males there. Adam must have looked at Eve the way the three males looked at me at that moment. The apple of knowledge set against the illusion of Paradise. Who needs it? And why do you bring it to us? (5)

When Madhu suggests the possibility that “something outside me […] propelled me into saying that line, a force, a factor over which I had no control” and that this something was “A kind of nudge, a warning of the shadow waiting for us in the future” (5), what, exactly, does she mean? Is she referring – only – to the shadow cast by Adit’s death? If so, why the emphasis on the involuntary breaking of silence and to the negative response of “three males,” who are, after all, not the only other members of this intimate group? Both the gendered reference and Deshpande’s use of a Biblical intertext in the above passage intimate that the “knowledge” that Madhu offers to this party of mourners is not just knowledge about death and its finality, but also about ‘irrecoverability’ of another kind: the loss of sexual innocence. As such, this anecdote – or, more precisely, Madhu’s inappropriate and involuntary response to the anecdote that Som tells – is a kind of “warning” about another “shadow waiting for [Madhu and Som] in the future” – Madhu’s confession to Som that she had sexual intercourse with another man many years prior to their marriage. It is, after all, Som’s reaction to this “knowledge” that leads to the rift in their relationship and sets in motion the events that, indirectly, lead to an even greater catastrophe: Adit’s death. What makes the unfolding of these subsequent events in the novel even more significant to my study – and what compels me to suggest that the novel is “Som’s story,” in the sense that it is a story told to and for Som – is that Madhu has not deliberately kept her prior sexual history a secret from Som; rather, she herself does not recall this sexual act virtually until her moment of involuntary confession, years after the event has happened,

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to Som. As Saru’s father asks Saru, in reference to her husband Manu’s behaviour in The Dark Holds No Terrors, is such forgetfulness “possible”? And, if so, what mechanism allows for such a possibility? In telling Som the story of a woman who seems to have forgotten both her daughter and her Muslim lover – and in restoring those figures in an uncensored biography of Savitribai – is Madhu attempting to teach Som a lesson from/of the crypt? I have already briefly described the secret that Madhu confesses to Som and the circumstances surrounding this revelation. However, these circumstances need to be explored more fully, and they also need to be contextualized within Madhu’s life and the history of Madhu’s relationship with Som and their son, Aditya. In many ways, and in spite of her own untraditional upbringing, Madhu appears to be the epitome of the ‘traditional’ romance heroine who finds fulfilment, ultimately, in marriage and motherhood. The relationship between Som and Madhu before Madhu’s confession is consistently described in positive terms. Freed by her orphaned status and her unconventional guardians from parental pressures to marry at all, let alone to marry someone not of her choosing, Madhu meets Som through her self-proclaimed ‘brother’, Tony, when she is living independently, supporting herself on her salary as a journalist. Som and Madhu become friends before they realize that they are in love and decide to marry. It is only after marriage, Madhu says, that she discovers sexual passion: After marriage, passion entered my life as well. It was in my little room in Hamidbhai’s flat, our home now, Som’s and mine after marriage, it was on that narrow bed that I discovered what passion was. Fireworks and big bangs, the world turning cartwheels, giving me unexpected glimpses of beauty and light. (182)

“Certain” (181) of Som’s feelings for her and secure in their relationship, Madhu confesses that the “tears, agony, the distress, the turmoil that I hear about” in relation to romantic love are “not for me” (182). Instead, it is implied, Som and Madhu’s marriage is built on a sense of mutual trust and respect that blossoms into sexual desire. It is not until their son Aditya is born that the motherless Madhu, to whom “motherhood is an unknown world” (182), understands what it is like to feel fully vulnerable:

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[…] I am wholly unprepared for what happens to me when I become a mother. Motherhood takes over my life, it makes me over into an entirely different person. The in-control-of-herself Madhu is lost, gone for ever. It’s my baby’s dependence that changes me; my place in the universe is marked out now. After the uncertainty, the indefiniteness of everything, of things whirling off, away from me, here is something a hundred per cent steadfast. Yes, that’s it – steadfast. It is I who am providing the certainty, the central pole of a whirling universe for this small human being, and at the same time, it is he who is keeping me there, making me into this stable figure. (183)

Whether or not Madhu’s decision to stop working is prompted by a sense of her own maternal deprivation as a child, she chooses motherhood over her career, leaving behind a very successful job as a journalist for a major Bombay magazine. Madhu’s commitment to motherhood is, in her own words, an “obsession” (188): she worries excessively over her son’s health, and her own experience with the early death of near relatives makes her panicky about what might happen to herself and Som, leaving Adit without parents. The only marital discord that Madhu describes in the early years of their marriage stems from Som’s frequent impatience with Madhu’s protectiveness and concern over Adit. They quarrel, but these are “fierce quarrels that die down just as quickly; neither of us is capable of carrying on a prolonged cold war” (184). In other words, Som and Madhu appear to have a solid marriage, and, while Madhu’s (self-confessed) over-protectiveness and, later in Adit’s life, over-intrusiveness as a mother cause some dissension, nothing in the novel prepares the reader for the seemingly unbridgeable gulf that opens between them. Adit’s death, of course, as does the death of any child, contributes to this alienation, but it is important to note that it is Som’s extreme reaction to Madhu’s confession about a prior sexual relationship that initiates it. What upsets “the pattern of the traditional ‘heroine’s text’” in Small Remedies is not Adit’s death but the revelation of a terrible secret, the involuntary yawning of a crypt when Som awakens Madhu from a nightmare, and she tries to “share” it with him, this “thing I’d just discovered myself” (260): There was this sack, a gunny sack, its mouth fastened with a jute string, like a bag of grains. I opened the sack, it took me some time, but I untied the knot and opened it. And there was a face looking at me, a man’s face, his mouth open, tongue hanging out, weals round

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the neck. Marks of a rope. And even as I stared in horror at the face, the face came alive, the eyes opened, they looked at me, they saw me …. (261)

Som attempts to comfort Madhu, but the dream is, for her, too vivid, too real: “‘I know him, I know the man, Som. He was my father’s friend, he committed suicide, he hanged himself’” (261). Madhu finds that she cannot stop there and is compelled to unburden herself fully: ‘He killed himself, he killed himself because of me. He hanged himself because of me.’ ‘What!’ ‘He slept with me, I was only fifteen then. He – I don’t think he meant it, but it – happened. And that’s why he – that’s why he died. He killed himself because of what he did to me.’ (262)

What terrifies Madhu about her nightmare is the fact of the “man’s death” and her own feelings of guilt, but “it’s the single act of sex that Som holds on to, it’s this fact that he can’t let go of. […] Purity, chastity, an intact hymen – these are the things Som is thinking of, these are the truths that matter” (262). Unable to believe that “there is nothing more to tell” (263), Som badgers Madhu for the “truth”: as we learn later in the novel, the raging conflict between his parents – and, significantly, their inability to tell him what has caused it – drives Adit away from home. It is during these weeks of marital discord that the streets of Bombay become inflamed with violence, and Som and Madhu learn that their son, wandering the streets in confusion, has been one of its victims. While the effects of Madhu’s confession are obvious and have been sufficiently analyzed by critics, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the fascinating way in which Madhu recovers the memory of her first sexual encounter with a man. So well camouflaged is the secret of this man’s identity, too, that it seems to have eluded critics. For example, Amrita Bhalla mentions that Madhu is “assaulted when she was 15 years old by her father’s artist friend.”46 Jasbir Jain calls the man the “young friend”47 of Madhu’s father. Bijay Danta describes “a sexual encounter

46 47

Bhalla, Shashi Deshpande, 84. Jain, Gendered Realities,, 120.

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that [Madhu] had with Dalvi, a friend of her father.”48 Although Danta perceptively links Madhu’s husband’s reaction to this revelation with that of Quentin Compson in The Sound and the Fury – “Father I have committed incest Father I have” – none of these very astute critics comments on the epiphanic, intuitive – again, I am tempted to say magical – connection that Madhu suddenly makes between three seemingly unrelated events: seeing a painting of her father’s mistress by an artist who “committed suicide” (238); remembering a story she has heard from her Aunt Leela about the illegitimate son of Madhu’s maternal grandfather, “a sculptor or something like that” (236) who “hanged himself” (237); and, finally, experiencing a nightmare that she believes to be about the death of this man and that causes her to recall the day he came to her to break the news that her father was dying, the day she lost her virginity to him at the age of fifteen. Even Shirley Chew, who notes that the irruption of Madhu’s “buried memory” arises from a “collision” among “a name, a story, a painting,” calls this man simply “a family friend.”49 Perhaps these critics are misled by Madhu herself, who, in her confession to Som, calls this man precisely that: her father’s “friend” (261). Still, the fact that this man is also Madhu’s half-uncle, the illegitimate son of a maternal grandfather that she never knew, must be considered significant, if only for the fact that it is one of the vital pieces of information that contribute to her recovery of the memory of the “incident”: this incident is lost, forgotten – until the day I see the painting [of Madhu’s father’s mistress] in Rekha’s gallery. In a single moment, the facts come together, there is a spark, a flash of fire that illuminates everything for me, so that I know that the woman in the painting is the woman I saw in Babu’s room that day, I know the painter is the man who was my father’s friend. I also know that he was the child that Leela spoke of, the child her father had had by another woman. ‘He was a sculptor or something like that,’ Leela had said, ‘he died young, he committed suicide, he hanged himself.’ (269)

48 Bijay Danta, “‘Something Happened’,” 208; symptomatic of the enigma of this man’s identity, Danta confuses Madhu’s co-worker, the lecherous Dalvi, with the “friend of her father,” who is, in fact, never named in the text. 49 Shirley Chew, “‘Cutting Across Time’,” 77.

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In the previous chapter, I cautioned against imposing Western definitions of incest on south Indian texts. In emphasizing, here, the familial relation between Madhu and the man to whom she lost her virginity, I do not intend such an imposition. However, knowledge about this family connection can help us, ultimately, to understand the strange mechanism that has allowed Madhu not just to forget this “incident,” but, as she confesses to Som, to lose it: “[…] I did not speak of this incident to him, not because I wanted to conceal it from him, but because I had lost it, I had misplaced it in the chaos of my life after my father’s death. Memory denied it, put it away” (269). Traumatized by news of the terminal nature of her father’s illness and the impending loss of her only living parent – the only living relative she knows, to this point in her life – Madhu responds, ‘inappropriately’, but driven by grief and the need for human contact, by having consensual sex with a man she barely knows, but to whom she is, unbeknownst to her, intimately related. As we have seen in my discussion of That Long Silence, psychoanalytic theory helps us to understand this kind of ‘manic’ sexual behaviour. Jaya’s response to seeing Kamat’s dead body is to return home and initiate sex with her husband, Mohan. The young and inexperienced Madhu reacts to the knowledge of death in a similar way, but her denial of that response is far more profound than Jaya’s: it is a denial, in fact, that buries the “incident” so quickly that Madhu’s psyche does not even grasp its existence. Abraham and Torok describe this process as “a regression to magic [that] does not match the ego’s conformation”: In consequence, this fleeting fulfillment is struck with explicit condemnation and immediate repression. The ensuing amnesia concerns the concrete context of the moment in which the regression and the orgasm occurred.50

Just as Dushyanta’s memory of Shakuntala after the loss of the ring of recollection is almost completely erased, Madhu’s memory of this event is entirely “misplaced.” Like Dushyanta, Madhu has only faint intimations of its existence – “occasional dreams, light, like wisps of cotton floss, scarcely touching me. […] a feather-touch on my skin, when Som and I made love” (269) – until the “fish-stinking” ring is placed in her hands. What can account for such a complete loss of memory? 50

Abraham & Torok, “The Illness of Mourning,” 117.

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Of course, the trauma of losing a father, her only parent, contributes to this odd forgetfulness: Madhu says that “My father’s death has blotted out everything else” (269). But I would suggest that there are additional mechanisms at work that allow Madhu to forget such an important event in her life. Abraham and Torok’s theory of transgenerational haunting tells us that the “child whose parents have secrets” carries within him or herself a crypt – a “nescience,” an “unknown knowledge.” In a passage that I quoted earlier, in Chapter 1 of this study, Abraham and Torok argue that “To have a fantasy of incorporation is to have no other choice but to perpetuate a clandestine pleasure by transforming it, after it has been lost, into an intrapsychic secret”: “every time an incorporation is uncovered, it can be attributed to the undisclosable grief that befalls an ego already partitioned on account of a previous objectal [sic] experience tainted with shame.”51 Could it be that Madhu – who has described her childhood as fulfilled and complete, in spite of the absence of a mother or any of her maternal or paternal relatives, in spite of only the guiding presence of “two rather taciturn men” for the first fifteen years of her life – could it be that Madhu, like so many of Deshpande’s characters, has “an ego already partitioned” on account of a “previous […] experience tainted with shame”? Could it be that Madhu’s parents had secrets, and could it be that these secrets have erected an empty crypt, or tomb, into which Madhu’s first sexual experience silently disappears? There is, in fact, an abundance of evidence for my hypothesis in this overdetermined text. Let us begin, for example, with the man who brings the news to Madhu of her father’s death. The description “family friend” often used by critics not only fails to describe the biological relationship between Madhu and this man, it also quite misrepresents the situation: if we are to believe Madhu’s Aunt Leela, this man is anything but a “family friend.” He is, on the contrary, the ‘skeleton in the cupboard’ who has brought shame upon Madhu’s mother’s family, but whom, according to Leela, Madhu’s mother later befriended, against the wishes of her family. When Madhu recounts the day she slept with this man, she describes him not as a family friend, but as her father’s friend; but clearly, at this time, she does not know that she is related to this man, that he is her mother’s half-brother:

51

Abraham & Torok, “Mourning or Melancholia,” 131.

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It’s one of my father’s friends, but not one of the ‘Kakas.’ This man is different. A taciturn man who lives alone in a single room, he’s a rare visitor. I don’t know him as well as I do my other father’s friends, but I know he’s a welcome visitor, that my father likes him, he admires him. He’s a painter, he did a picture of me as a child which still hangs in my father’s bedroom. (266; emphasis added)

It is not, of course, surprising that Madhu does not know about the familial relationship. Madhu knows virtually nothing about her mother, who dies of tuberculosis shortly after Madhu’s birth. Madhu describes her as “a blank space through my childhood” (171): I know nothing of mothers, anyway, because not only am I motherless, my mother is not even an absence, a tabula rasa on which I can write what I want. The only picture of hers we have at home shows her as a girl, with two thick plaits, holding a trophy in her hands – scarcely a mother figure. The only story I heard about her is the one told to me by my father when I was in bed with a temperature. (101)

Nor does Madhu, as a child, know anything of her mother’s family. She learns about and meets her mother’s sister, Leela, only after her father’s death. She knows so little about her mother’s family, in fact, that she is surprised to learn that the man who offers her a place to stay in Bhavinpur is the grandson of one of her mother’s sisters. Madhu’s father’s unaccountable silence about Madhu’s mother, and Madhu’s own seeming lack of curiousity about her, produce conditions ripe for the creation of a crypt: an unknown knowledge. Drawn powerfully to the man who brings her news of her father’s impending death, Madhu is drawn unconsciously to a kind of womb-like, maternal protection; without knowing it, she is also drawn to her own mother’s half-brother. But while Madhu is not aware of this relationship, the man who attempts to comfort her and then responds to her physical desire – there is nothing in the description of this scene that suggests that he “assaults” her, as Amrita Bhalla claims – surely must be. Is it, at least in part, this knowledge that leads to his suicide? As “ignorant” as she is about her mother and her mother’s family, Madhu also eventually realizes that she knew very little about the man who raised her: “That I know so little about my mother is natural. But my ignorance about my father, my sole parent for fifteen years, surprises me now” (172). One of the things that her father keeps secret from her is, as I have already mentioned, his mistress, and I will return to her shortly.

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However, Madhu learns something else about her father from her Aunt Leela, something that disturbs her, she claims, even more than having learned earlier, from Munni, about her father’s mistress: it was Leela who told me the most astonishing fact about [my father] – that he had been married earlier, before he met my mother. My mother was his second wife. His first marriage had been as brief as his second one, that wife dying in childbirth. The child also died. For some reason, this knowledge was hard to assimilate, more difficult to accept than the fact of his having a mistress. (172) […] It was his having had a wife before he met my mother, it was the child he had before me – these were the things that disturbed me. (173)

The multiple silences and evasions of Madhu’s father, revealed only gradually through the novel, should prompt us to reconsider the relationship between father and daughter, a relationship that Madhu, horrified upon learning from Munni that her father “goes to a woman at night” (139), describes as follows: Ours was a relationship built, not on information, but on trust. Munni tried to dislodge me from this paradise by offering me the knowledge of my father’s mistress. But I thrust this knowledge away from me. It had no place in our life together. Child that I was, I had the wisdom to know that you don’t need to know everything about a person. (175)

I have highlighted those aspects of the above passage that echo words in the novel’s Prologue, in which Madhu spoils the mood of gentle remembrance with her “inappropriate” reminder of the finality of death. She describes this offering as “The apple of knowledge set against the illusion of Paradise” (5). Perhaps, as Madhu suggests, one does not need to know “everything” about a person – either a parent or a spouse – but Madhu’s well-intentioned father’s “taciturn” silence about so many things that Madhu should have known, and even, indeed, needed to know, has left her vulnerable to the ‘phantom’ of the crypt, a transgenerational phantom that emerges with brutal force in a single, astonishing moment of recognition: And then suddenly I’m brought to a halt before [a painting]. I stand still, I can’t move. There’s something familiar about this painting. It’s

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a woman, a tall statuesque woman in a nine-yard sari, faintly reminiscent of Ravi Varma’s Damayanta. […] I’ve seen her, I’ve seen this woman: the tall figure, the filmy sari through which the tall columns of her legs are visible, they’re familiar, as is the expression. I’ve seen her this way, wild, confused. But where? When? I look at the title. ‘The Mistress.’ ‘Your father goes to a woman at night, he sleeps with her, you know that?’ Munni’s words. But how … this painting can’t have anything to do with my father … who could have…? I go to the catalogue and look up the name of the painter, I read the words ‘He died young, he committed suicide…’ And in a second I make all the connections and I know who the man was and why he died. Our lives changed in that moment. (237–38)

Just as it is no coincidence that one of the elements that contributes to Madhu’s belated recollection is Leela’s story about an illegitimate cousin, it is also significant that it is this man’s painting of a woman whom Madhu recognizes as her father’s mistress that puts the ring of recollection in her hands, coming back “like a curse to destroy” (237) her family. Som is as ill prepared for Madhu’s confession about illicit sexuality as Madhu was when she learned about her father’s secret mistress or about his previous family. The consequence of her confession to Som is dramatic and life-altering, as Madhu indicates, but it is perhaps not surprising. After the startling revelation of her nightmare, she is no longer the “straightforward” girl Som “thought he had married” (229). Like Gopal in A Matter of Time, Som is permanently changed by the revelation of a (sexual) secret that should matter far less than it does. In spite of Madhu’s claim to the contrary above – “I had the wisdom [as a child] to know that you don’t need to know everything about a person” – the story that Madhu tells Som, the story that she offers him in Small Remedies, is an adult story about needing to know, about needing to remember and to confront personal and collective history, no matter how painful this knowledge is. Madhu tortures herself with the thought that, if she had not told Som about her first sexual experience – something which she says, in any event, would have been impossible (228) – she and Som and Adit would have carried on as before in blissful ignorance. Adit would not have run

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away; he might not have died in the terrorist attack. But, as all of Deshpande’s novels show us, such an idyll is always at risk when parents keep secrets from their spouses and their children. In Small Remedies, in fact, we get our most potent and poignant image of the uncanny effects of transgenerational haunting. Madhu describes how her obsession with motherhood carried on long after Adit no longer required her constant vigilance and care. As Adit grows older, she feels as though she is being shut out of his life: “he becomes evasive” (186) and Madhu senses a “hard adamantine core” (187) in her son. Som tells Madhu to “let him go” (187), that this distancing is a “natural” part of growing up. Madhu cannot let go, however; she becomes increasingly anxious about what her son might be hiding from her behind the closed door of his bedroom. Ironically, however, Adit’s disappearance and death give Madhu an opportunity to discover his “secrets.” She describes entering her son’s room for the first time after his death: I went in, looking for traces of a secret life. What was in there that he didn’t want me to see? Drugs? Porn magazines? Dirty books? Letters from girls? Pictures of girls? But there was nothing in the room that was any reason for not letting me in. Nothing, except for a half-smoked packet of cigarettes. It didn’t reassure me. It told me something that went past all the defences I had erected round myself, a dagger that went straight into my heart. Adit had nothing to hide. It was his own self he had been guarding from me, his own self he had been protecting from my possessive, grasping hands. (188)

What better description could we have for the transgenerational crypt? Worried that she will find “dirty” secrets about her son, instead Madhu encounters an empty room, partitioned off from the probing eyes of a secretive parent: a crypt always already empty – prepared and waiting for the phantom. Like so many of the children in Deshpande’s novels, Adit is haunted by a parental secret to which he does not have access, but which he carries inside himself, undigested, indigestible. At one point in the novel, Madhu muses, “maybe a baby carries memories of the dark months in its watery home, a load of memories of earlier lifetimes – how do we know?” (153). In Adit’s case, it is his mother’s repressed memories, in the

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form of empty crypt, that he carries, and this “unknown knowledge,” or nescience, proves fatal. I have argued that the kind of “knowledge” that Madhu offers her husband and her friends in the Prologue to the novel – knowledge about the finality of death and the impossibility of a return to innocence (sexual knowledge) – casts a shadow over the more positive political trajectory of the novel. While Madhu knows that she and Som must put their differences aside, face the past, and begin the process, together, of mourning for their son, she also knows that “In the life of one man, never the same time returns.” Without Adit, and with the knowledge of Madhu’s sexual past, their lives will be forever altered. This “knowledge of loss by a mother,” as Tabish Khair argues, and as I have taken pains to point out, is “a hugely political act in its discursive affinities,”52 not just in terms of contemporary events in India, but, according to Khair, also in terms of a particular notion of what “knowledge” means in the Indian context. Calling Deshpande’s novel “intricately paced, beautifully written and unpretentiously significant,”53 Khair argues that Deshpande ultimately rejects the Judaeo-Christian equation in which “Knowledge brings about the loss of paradise for Adam and Eve.”54 He goes on to describe, in a manner entirely consistent with my discussion of Kalidasa’s Sakuntala, the relationship between knowledge and ‘recollection’ in Small Remedies. Moving knowledge from the purportedly objective world to the dialectical realm of memories, [Deshpande] speaks of “the possibility of retrieval.” Memory, she notes, is capricious and unreliable for it is subjective and prone to selective or inadvertent erasures. But, as her novel demonstrates, it is also something that springs out of the material world out there: it is not just imaginary. It is in this sense that memory offers the possibility of retrieval. With memory stepping in between the material world and the subjective consciousness, knowledge ceases to be something that one can weep over and becomes something whose loss is never total. In other words, while there is no fixed,

52

Tabish Khair, “The Knowledge of Loss, the Loss of Knowledge,” in Unhinging Hinglish: The Languages and Politics of Fiction in English from the Indian Subcontinent, ed. Nanette Hale & Tabish Khair (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2001): 140. 53 Tabish Khair, “The Knowledge of Loss, the Loss of Knowledge,” 140. 54 Khair, “The Knowledge of Loss, the Loss of Knowledge,” 143.

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unalterable Knowledge, knowledge exists as something that has to be recovered again and again. But it has to be recovered – it can only be recovered – in the changing world of material things and physical beings.55

As all of Deshpande’s novels indicate, such recoveries are not ends in themselves but, rather, the means by which individuals can escape paralysis and move forward with their lives. Moreover, Khair echoes Abraham and Torok when he notes that “The act of retrieving [knowledge] is primarily social”56 – in other words (Abraham and Torok’s, to be exact), it requires a community of “empty mouths.” Negotiating between the Judaeo-Christian concept of knowledge and alienation to which the Prologue refers and Hindu concepts of return and renewal (and choosing, characteristically, neither), Deshpande presents a world in which “it is nothing less than a miracle” that “so many of us [survive] our loss, our grief.”57 The “small remedies” of the novel’s title are just that: the daily gestures that make life bearable, in spite of the knowledge of inevitable death: […] what blessing can contend against our mortality? Mustard seeds to protects us from evil, blessings to confer long life – nothing works. And yet we go on. Simple remedies? No, they’re desperate remedies and we go on with them because, in truth, there is nothing else. (315)

With the recognition of this knowledge, however bleak, Small Remedies ends where it begins: with an invocation to the past and a celebration of the healing power of memory. Madhu remembers a day not long after her father’s death, when Joe, the absent figure of the novel’s Prologue, takes her with him down to the sea: The rain had let up for a while, but the sky was brooding, heavy with more rain, and the sea, its thirst unappeased as yet, seemed to be reaching up for it. A silent figure was walking along the shore, looking steadily down, as if searching intently for something, uncaring of the waves which dashed against his legs and climbed up to his knees. All three of us, inhabiting the same solitude, linked by the same silence.

55

Khair, “The Knowledge of Loss, the Loss of Knowledge,” 141. “The Knowledge of Loss, the Loss of Knowledge,” 143. 57 Deshpande, Small Remedies, 315. 56

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Joe suddenly spoke then, saying to me, ‘It hasn’t gone anywhere, your life with your father. It’s all still there. Some kind of an understanding came to me then, an understanding that came to me from the glory of the sea and the clouds, from Joe’s presence beside me, even from the silent man absorbed in his own solitude. And I, sore with the pain of my father’s death, with the disruption of my entire life, had felt a kind of healing in the words. (324)

Resurrecting two dead men in the sublime description above, Deshpande represents perfectly the relationships among existential aloneness, intense and yet transient interpersonal connection, and not just the persistence, but the active recovery and cultivation, of memory that inform the major themes of her novels and form the core of this study. Small Remedies is Som’s story, but it is also Joe’s and Madhu’s father’s, just as much as it is Bai’s and Munni’s and Adit’s. If “It’s all still there” – if, as Tabish Khair suggests, “loss is never total” – then we all must learn, like Deshpande and her characters, to “live with ghosts” and acknowledge their power to heal, as well as to destroy.

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Coda — “Still it moves”1

You need to know your parents.2 He or she is dead. Yet a tiny something survives, emerges from its hiding place. From under the veil, he or she lets me catch a glimpse, hear a whisper of some continuing faint movement or noise. There is a murmur, a ventriloquy, rising from the tomb in which he or she or someone else, either a contemporary or an ancestor, was buried alive, sequestered, with their desires cut out, deprived of both life and death; and above all, something has been left unsettled.3

I

N A S T U D Y that claims to be an exploration not just of the silences in Shashi Deshpande’s novels, but the unexpected and cryptic effects of breaking those silences, I am all too aware of my own omissions with respect to many elements of her work. I have said nothing, for example, about the pervasive theme of re-naming (another kind of cryptic narrative) – and resistance to re-naming – in many of the novels; I have said not as much as I had really intended about some of Deshpande’s most memorable characters, particularly Joe and Leela in Small Remedies; I have barely scraped the surface of the complex intertextuality that characterizes all of Deshpande’s writing. Most egregious of all, perhaps, I might be accused of paying insufficient attention to the feminist aspects of Deshpande’s novels.

1

Shashi Deshpande, Moving On (New Delhi: Penguin, 2004): 10. Further page references are in the main text. 2 Deshpande, Moving On, 21. 3 Maria Torok, “Theoretica: An Alternative to Theory,” in The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, ed. Nicolas Abraham & Maria Torok, tr. Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1994): 254.

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If anything, in adopting Abraham and Torok’s psychoanalytic model and shifting attention to the the transgenerational effects of secrecy and disclosure, the approach I have taken may be seen, at times, to be antagonistic to a feminist approach, in that it places a heavy – and what some might consider an unfair – burden upon the mother or mother-figure in Deshpande’s work. After all, it is the mother who, according to Abraham and Torok’s theory, bears the greatest responsibility for the normative development of her children: The transition from a mouth filled with the breast to a mouth filled with words occurs by virtue of the intervening experiences of the empty mouth. Learning to fill the emptiness of the mouth with words is the initial model for introjection. However, without the constant assistance of a mother endowed with language, introjection could not take place. Not unlike the permanence of Descartes’s God, the mother’s constancy is the guarantor of the meaning of words. Once this guarantee has been acquired, and only then, can words replace the other’s presence and also give rise to fresh introjections.4

I have noted the powerful, “God”-like qualities that Abraham and Torok ascribe to the mother in a number of Deshpande’s novels, beginning with her early detective fiction and fully expressed in an early novel like The Dark Holds No Terrors. Either through their overbearing presence, their preference for a male child, their complete absence, or their neglect, particularly of their daughters, mothers have been shown to play a significant, and usually negative, role in the psychic development of most of Deshpande’s female protagonists, distorting their vision of themselves and often thwarting their attempts to move on in their lives. In this, Deshpande goes much further by way of an indictment of motherhood than even her ur-text. In Kalidasa’s play, while the nymph Menaka callously abandons her baby girl in the forest, she ultimately redeems herself by rescuing Shakuntala in her hour of desperate need at Dushyanta’s court. Sadly, there are very few such eleventh-hour rescues – or even reconciliations between mothers and daughters– in Deshpande’s novels. Shalmalee Palekar, in her critique of Deshpande as a feminist, notes that Deshpande’s “protagonists are sometimes extremely critical of other women and often perpetuate conventional patriarchal attitudes to them,” 4

Abraham & Torok, “Mourning or Melancholia,”127–28.

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and that “This is specially seen in case [sic] of Deshpande’s mother characters.” Palekar goes on to ask why conservative Indian women are so manifestly hostile to one another, especially in relationships where they could, through mutual bonding, achieve so much (see Nabar and Nandy). Part of that answer may be that the traditional mother, because of her confinement within the house and her inability to develop and grow except in home-andchild related roles ends up ‘surrendering to the traditional clap-trap about mother as goddess’ (Nabar, 1995: 185).5

Fathers in Deshpande’s fiction, on the other hand, says Palekar, are portrayed as less “conventional” in their outlook: in some ways like Kalidasa’s risi, Kanva, who approves of Shakuntala’s unsupervised choice of a husband, they “can afford to be relatively progressive and liberal precisely because they take for granted their privileged position in the domestic hierarchy.”6 Palekar’s observations about Deshpande’s work are both accurate and astute, but they lean, in my view, toward sociological observations (viz. her reference to Vrinda Nabar’s excellent sociological study Caste as Woman) that contain a whiff of didacticism: why can’t the women in Deshpande’s novels (and in India) pull together to create a more egalitarian society? Why do so many of Deshpande’s mothers insist that their daughters conform to the compliant stereotypes of Sita, of Sarita, of the ever-patient Shakuntala? Why do some of Deshpande’s female protagonists stay in less than ideal marital situations, instead of walking away from them, forging entirely independent lives? Not only does such an approach overlook the fact that some of the women in Deshpande’s novels do break free of traditional structures (often at a punishing social cost), it also fails to recognize that the central theme of most of Deshpande’s modernist and gothic novels is precisely the deeply rooted psychological legacy of those internalized patriarchal structures. As Deshpande has said so forcefully, and I repeat here, “To walk out, or away, is to carry the old self with oneself.”7 In this image of a

5

Palekar, “Gender, Feminism and Postcoloniality,” 62. “Gender, Feminism and Postcoloniality,” 63. 7 Deshpande, “Writing From the Margin,” in Writing from the Margin, 159. 6

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haunted self – a self unconsciously driven by an impulse to repeat the patterns of the past, even while attempting to escape them – Deshpande may reveal herself to be a feminist of the “old-fashioned” or “conservative” kind, as Palekar and Mrinalini Sebastian would argue. However, Deshpande’s remark also points to a recognition of the psychological difficulty of a woman’s moving forward, or moving on, in a society in which, according to Palekar “[patriarchal] constructs have the weight of centuries-old religious and cultural sanctions.”8 It has been my contention throughout this book that all of Deshpande’s work explores the idea that we are most vulnerable to the oppressive power of the past at the very moment when we turn our backs on it. That so many of Deshpande’s damaged female protagonists completely (consciously) reject the legacies of their mothers, yet, as mothers, continue to struggle with their own relationships to their children, is indicative of just how oppressive, deepseated, and enduring that legacy can be, particularly when its effects are repressed, when both shame and guilt are entombed in a transgenerational crypt, inaccessible to conscious memory. How is one able to move on when burdened with a paralyzing nescience – a secret that is not even one’s own? In tracing the pervasive themes of secrecy and transgenerational haunting in Deshpande’s novels, my aim has not been to endorse a psychoanalytic project that seeks to blame mothers for their children’s neuroses, but to shed some light on the way that women in the society Deshpande depicts bear an incommensurate burden vis-à-vis maintaining family honour and respectability. As I have also tried to demonstrate in this study, it is not only the female characters in Deshpande’s novels who are haunted by the past and by the secret shame of their parents. Many of Deshpande’s male characters, such as Manohar in The Dark Holds No Terrors, Mohan in That Long Silence, Kishore in The Binding Vine, and, in particular, Gopal in A Matter of Time, also suffer from the corrupting emanations from the crypt. The silence of these men is, indeed, often even more profound and unbreakable than that of the female protagonists in Deshpande’s novels. And while male silence is at times depicted as an oppressive force (as is Sripati’s punitive silence in A Matter of Time), its source is often similarly rooted in an oppressive patriarchal system that does as much damage to men as it does to women – that damages men precisely because it oppres8

Palekar, “Gender, Feminism and Postcoloniality,” 58.

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ses women. Moreover, while it is true, as Palekar indicates, that fathers in Deshpande’s novels appear to be much more benign than mothers, their very passivity and silence contribute significantly as well to the psychological damage inflicted upon children: as we have seen in many of those novels, but particularly in Small Remedies, a father’s “taciturn” nature can have devastating consequences for his children. If anything, the approach I have taken here illuminates the crippling effects of patriarchal structures on both mothers and fathers in Deshpande’s novels. I would like to conclude this study of Deshpande’s work with a brief consideration of her 2004 novel Moving On, in which a father’s voice moves to the foreground of the narrative. Not surprisingly, however, given the gothic nature of all of Deshpande’s novels, this male voice, that of the narrator’s dead father (“Baba”), arises, unsettlingly, from the crypt, in the form of a diary discovered by the daughter, Manjari (Jiji). The novel, in fact, opens with an entry from this diary, dated over a year before Baba’s death, but after he has received the news that he is dying of lung cancer. In anticipation of his death, which, as a physician, he knows is inevitable and imminent, Baba leaves his only surviving daughter a written record of his life that is an attempt to sort out the events of his past, but that is also a confession of his failures – as a son, a husband, and a father – and an attempt to account for his actions and expiate his guilt. Interspersed with the diary entries in the novel are Jiji’s reactions to what she is reading (and learning about her parents and herself in the process), as well as her first-person account of events occurring in the months following her father’s death, as she attempts to put his house, and her life, in order. As in other Deshpande novels, there has been an estrangement between father and daughter, and this estrangement stems from a traumatic event in the past that has driven a wedge between the generations. Again, the details of this trauma are not related until almost the ending of the novel, when Jiji finally tells her cousin Raja the entire story, or at least all that she knows, of the circumstances surrounding her younger sister’s death. The ‘secret’ that Jiji reveals to Raja (and, for the first time, the reader) is that Sachi, whom she has raised as her own daughter, is the biological child of her younger sister, Malu, who died shortly after childbirth, and Jiji’s husband, Shyam, who committed suicide after it is discovered that he is the baby’s father. These events have long since shattered the picture

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of the “happy family”9 that Jiji recalls from her youth: her mother was unable to forgive Jiji for marrying Shyam (against her wishes) and for bringing “evil” into their home. Like Saru’s father in The Dark Holds No Terrors, Jiji’s Baba had been unable to oppose his wife and defend his surviving daughter from her mother’s accusations. Baba’s diary explores both the regret that he feels for having let Jiji down and the loyalty toward his late, beloved wife that forced him to take her side at that time. The present narrative of the novel opens after Baba’s death, with Jiji’s discovery and reading of his diary. Having raised both her and Shyam’s son, Anand, and her sister’s daughter, Sachi, entirely on her own, Jiji is now alone in her father’s house, facing a crossroads: she is contemplating several job possibilities; her cousin, childhood friend, and neighbour Raja, a widower, has proposed marriage to her; unscrupulous land-sharks and paid thugs are pressuring her to sell her father’s house, which, in latetwentieth-century Bombay, has become “Prime property” (140); and Jiji’s ‘daughter’ Sacha is deeply troubled upon learning that her grandfather has willed his house entirely to her. Unaware of her own origins, the always difficult Sacha cannot understand why her ‘mother’ and brother do not share the inheritance with her. Nandini Lal notes the way in which Moving On revisits familiar Deshpande themes: in a sense, Moving On appears to have not moved on. The plot-pegs don’t vary – Jiji’s return to the ancestral home is like Indu’s in Roots and Shadows, her growing apart from her sister Malu recalls that other sister Premi in A Matter Of Time, her discovery of her Baba through his diary recalls Urmi reading her dead mom-in-law’s poetry in The Binding Vine, the haunting nature of troubled relations and memories and learning truths recall That Long Silence, and so on. Deshpande Déjà vu could well have set in here too. Bucking at what-will-theneighbours-say traditions. Long-held family spats and secrets unravelled. Trapped women standing their ground. It could have set in. But it doesn’t.10

Uncannily familiar and yet certainly not the same as her previous novels, Moving On does “move on,” but it does so, as Lal suggests, through a 9

Shashi Deshpande, Moving On, 104. Further page references are in the main text. Nandini Lal, “Middle-Class Minutae,” The Hindu (9 September 2004), online.

10

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retrospective trajectory, gathering plot-threads and situations from previous novels and revisiting essential themes. Much more introspective and discursively philosophical than her previous three novels and the one that follows it – In the Country of Deceit – Moving On also returns to, refines, and distils Deshpande’s exploration of the existential ideas that informed one of her earliest novels, If I Die Today. Just as that flawed mystery novel uses the device of a dying man to test the limits of honest human connection, Moving On begins with a man unsentimentally contemplating his own death and attempting to deal honestly with his past as a means of making peace not only with himself but also with his descendants – his daughter and grandchildren. What feels like a contrived exercise in existential thought in the earlier mystery novel, however, becomes a serious and organic exploration of the paradoxical mysteries of human existence and connection in the later one. Proving to be the successful ‘mystery’ novel that Deshpande despaired she would never write, Moving On truly tests existential ideas about the finitude of life, and the way that death gives meaning to existence, a “recurring motif” in Deshpande’s novels in which, according to Chandra Holm, “death [is] a factor which finally liberates.”11 More pertinent to the conclusion of my study, however, is the way that Deshpande continues to use and to refine the tropes of secrecy and transgenerational haunting to explore the lives of her characters. Chanchala K. Naik argues that The experiential becomes the touchstone above and beyond other things where the existential is not a compelling motif but facilitates reflections on life in that others’ secrets are discovered complicating one’s own opinions about them and also continually revising oneself, one’s perspective. Thus a process of reconstruction and deconstruction continues in the novel in a narrative flow that is convoluted as well as linear.12

11 Chandra Holm, “A Writer of Substance,” interview with Shashi Deshpande, Indian Review of Books 9.8 (16 May–June 15, 2000): 6. 12 Chanchala K. Naik, “Moving On: In Search of Individual Autonomy and SelfRealization,” in Writing Difference: The Novels of Shashi Deshpande, ed. Chanchala K. Naik (Delhi: Pencraft International): 218.

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As Naik also notes, the contrapuntal, first-person voice of Jiji and the written texts of her parents allow for an even more expansive transgenerational perspective on family conflict, and it is in this way that Deshpande moves on to a self-reflexive understanding of the mechanisms of transgenerational haunting, if not a solution to the problems that it creates. In fact, I would argue, the ending of Moving On is far less conclusive, far more open-ended and “unsettled,” than any that precede – or follow – it. Ironically, one of the ways in which Deshpande moves on in this novel is to shift away from the protagonist-as-writer strategy that she has employed in novels such as That Long Silence, The Binding Vine, A Matter of Time (to a degree), and Small Remedies. Lacking a formal education, Jiji is, in the first instance, a reader, rather than a writer. The writers in Jiji’s family are her anatomist/physician father, who comes to both literature and autobiographical writing late in life, and her mother, Vasu (or, as her daughters call her, “Mai”). Similar to Jaya in That Long Silence, Mai is portrayed as a woman who achieves success by writing popular fiction, mostly for women’s magazines (122–23). Rarely taken seriously as a writer in spite of, or perhaps owing to, her enormous popularity with women readers, Mai publishes a transgressive and violent short story, “Blackout,” that she has likely written in response to an important critic’s dismissal of her writing as too safe and predictable. Recoiling from the backlash against this story, in which a Muslim woman who has suffered repeated abuse at the hands of her husband takes an indirect – but brutal – kind of revenge on him, Mai stops writing for publication: “Mai knew the potency of words, which is why she stopped speaking, writing” (105). And so it is at least partly through her dead parents’ words – their stories, recalled by herself and revealed in their own words – that Jiji seeks to discover the ‘truth’ about herself and about the life she has led, an unsettled, nomadic life that her father has disapprovingly labelled “ramshackle” (46). But, if “Baba and Mai were a book [Jiji had] read a million times,” they are also “figures [she] had created for [her] own purposes” that “[she] had had to discard when [she] grew up” (21). Central to the process of emotional recovery for Jiji is a re-evaluation of her relationship with her mother, a woman whom she describes, in consistently paradoxical terms, as “always a little remote even when she was in the midst of family,” but someone who “wrote of family togetherness” (125); a romance writer who “[knew] nothing of love” (99); a wife who was incapable of returning her husband’s physical passion; and a mother who

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would not – or could not – accept or understand her eldest daughter’s desperate need for love, either maternal or sexual. What Jiji discovers or realizes, ultimately, is that “Blackout” was not, after all, her mother’s final story, that she, Jiji, remains a character in “the most skilfully and carefully plotted story of them all”: A story that remains in the darkness in which it was conceived, all the characters in it dead except one. I’m the only survivor, still living out her story, imprisoned within it, sometimes it seems to me, forever. (127)

The “story” to which Jiji refers, we learn much later in the novel, is the ‘plot’ constructed by her mother, and shared only with her daughters, her husband, her brother, and her sister-in-law, to hide the scandalous circumstances of Malu’s pregnancy. Within a day of learning that her unmarried daughter is pregnant, and desperate to avoid any scandal, Mai concocted a story, which she must have plotted all night. She told us the roles we had to play in this script of hers. Her determination made it impossible for us to question her, to resist, or suggest any alternative plan. (317)

The role assigned to Jiji in this story is that of accompanying her mother and her sister into hiding; she is to await the birth of her sister’s baby and then to take Malu’s child after it is born and, with her husband Shyam, to raise it as her own. Already alienated from her husband by prolonged absences (Shyam’s work as a cinematographer does not pay enough to properly house Jiji and their infant son, Anand), Jiji is now even further distanced from him by the role she is forced to play. Moreover, she is confused and distraught by her sister’s accusation that Shyam raped her, a charge that Shyam denies. When Malu dies, painfully and horribly, shortly after giving birth and Shyam commits suicide, Jiji realizes the futility of her mother’s rapidly “concocted” plan: . . . I have no idea how the story was supposed to go after the baby’s birth. For things suddenly went out of control, the strings were jerked out of Mai’s hands and the puppets began to dance to an unknown tune. (320)

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Jiji fulfils her role in the plot by raising Sachi as her own daughter, but she cuts herself and the children almost completely off from her parents. Like Saru in The Dark Holds No Terrors, Jiji feels disproportionately guilty regarding her past actions, but it is a guilt she feels she shares with her mother: I did not want to see [my mother] because seeing her was like going back to the scene of the crime, the crime both of us had committed. I often thought of us as murderers; I thought we had murdered both Malu and Shyam. Sometimes I thought of myself as the First Murderer and Mai as the Second Murderer, sometimes it was the other way round. (32)

In casting herself not as a victim of her mother’s plot to hide her sister’s pregnancy, but as a “helpless” co-conspirator in not just one, but two murders, Jiji, like Saru, confesses to crimes she has not actually committed and for which she feels she has not been fully punished or forgiven. Doomed to walk the “chalked lines” drawn for her by her mother and to atone for surviving when her sister did not, Jiji, again like Saru, lives a kind of detached “two-in-one” existence. As in The Dark Holds No Terrors, the startling and dramatic (one might even say: melodramatic) events surrounding the family’s catastrophe, although they are hinted at much earlier, are not related until the final pages of the novel, when Jiji unburdens herself to her cousin Raja. And she does so at this time only because Raja has discovered that Jiji has been having – indeed, had initiated – a sexual relationship with her boarder, a young man who may have been hired to spy on Jiji for the unscrupulous business interests that want to purchase her house. Raja, who has been trying to convince Jiji that a marriage between them would be sensible and economical and good for their children, is shocked by Jiji’s behaviour and what seems to him to be her choice of loveless, virtually anonymous, sex over a respectable marriage proposal. Clearly, though, given all that we have already seen in Deshpande’s novels, and in view of the fact that Jiji offers the story of the family’s catastrophe to Raja as some kind of an explanation for her actions, there is a direct relationship between her mother’s control of Jiji’s actions – her puppetry and ventriloquism – and Jiji’s ‘irrational’ choice. Having had passion denied her by a passionless mother, betrayed by her sister and her husband, abandoned by her father, Jiji is compelled by

Coda – “Still it moves”

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287

forces that she only barely understands to satisfy her body’s needs without forming any further attachment: she extracts from her boarder/lover the promise that he will not speak during sex; that he will not come to her, unbidden; that, in other words, there will be nothing, beyond the act, between them. Jiji confesses to herself that, even as she feels the shame of her actions, “something inside me has been stilled” (232) after each sexual act. Jiji’s actions are ruled by a ‘phantom’, a parental secret that she has been compelled to keep and that has effectively redefined and encrypted her sexual desire. While Raja may never fully understand the reasons for Jiji’s actions, the two do reconcile with one another by the novel’s conclusion. It is possible that they may even marry: in this sense, Jiji – and perhaps Deshpande – could be seen to be moving on. After all, it is rare for one of her novels to end with the heroine contemplating marriage, not only facing a future with the past laid to rest, but doing so with a man who may be able to forgive an unorthodox sexual history. Jiji has told Raja everything – he knows the truth about her affair with her boarder, he knows about Shyam and Malu, about the circumstances of Sachi’s birth, and Jiji’s role in the conspiracy to keep her mother’s secret. Yet, there is something ‘unsettled’ and unsettling about the conclusion of this novel. As Jiji herself says, If I ever thought of speaking of the past, I thought I would be talking to Sachi. For some reason, I’ve had this feeling of owing Sachi something, of having to tell her about the things I’ve kept so carefully secreted within me. I’ve seen myself hacking my way through a forest, cutting down trees, clearing a path, finally getting to the point where I could stand and say, ‘Look, there it is, there is your past.’ But these journeys have always been imaginary. It’s never been possible to speak, it’s never been the right time. Now it is Raja I’m speaking to, and it should be easier. But it’s not […]. (314)

Deshpande comes very close in Moving On to embracing the “pattern of the traditional ‘heroine’s text’ – the text that ends in marriage or death,” but she swerves from this path by introducing a “level of narration that doubles or contests – and thus problematises – the conventions of a surface narrative pattern.”13 By neglecting to tell Sachi of her origins, refusing “to open a Pandora’s box, letting out a crowd of dark and con13

Susanne Becker, Gothic Forms, 11.

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fusing events,” and, indeed, by confessing that “There is no need for me to do any such thing” (48), Jiji seems to be dooming her sister’s daughter to an “unsettled” life, not unlike her own. Moreover, Jiji herself will be doomed forever to hold her breath when someone says, unsettlingly, as her uncle once has, that “Sachi looks just like [her] mother” (332). Jiji’s actions not only fly in the face of her own repeated pronouncement (and the surface theme of the text), “You need to know your parents” (21, 31), but also her father’s and Raja’s conviction that Sachi should know – indeed, needs to know – the truth about her parentage. Perhaps Jiji herself knows that the Pandora’s box cannot remain closed forever. Just as Jiji’s discovery, as a child, of the termites teeming behind the family portraits in her parents’ home seemed to her to foreshadow the tragedies that would befall her family (81–82), in the novel’s closing pages, Jiji confesses that she believes one of her children will “create trouble.” She wonders whether she should warn Raja “about my fear of disaster, of failure, of hurting each other” (341). Indeed, Sachi has already proven herself to be troublesome: she is intelligent, defiant, and mercurial, and she has, among other things, pestered her ‘mother’ for information about her and Anand’s father. Jiji has grudgingly and painfully complied, telling her ‘daughter’ a carefully censored story about the family past: after all, “who would sprinkle a jasmine with scalding water”? The startling truth remains for Sachi to discover: that it is her mother she needs to know, not her father. That moment of discovery lies outside the text; meanwhile, we as Deshpande’s readers know that Sachi carries the undigested truth within her, that she bears an unknown knowledge, a nescience – the ring of recollection. Whether Sachi and her secrets will resurface in Deshpande’s fiction – as Come Up and Be Dead’s Devyani is resurrected in Deshpande’s 2009 novel, In the Country of Deceit – is an ancient story that is yet to be told: Eppur si muove. Still it moves. (Baba’s Diary)

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Seshadri, Vijayalakshmi. The New Woman in Indian-English Women Writers Since the 1970s (Delhi: B.R. Publishing Corporation, 1995). Sharma, R.S. “The Question of Indianness,” in Indian Writing in English – The Last Decade, ed. Rajul Bhargava (Jaipur & New Delhi: Rawat, 2002): 205–18. Sharma, Siddhartha. Shashi Deshpande’s Novels: A Feminist Study (New Delhi: Atlantic, 2005). Shukla, Manjari. “Roots and Shadows: A Small-Scale Forsyte Saga” (1998), in The Fiction of Shashi Deshpande, ed. Pathak, 97–106. Simms, Robert. “Some Thoughts on the Meaning of Riaz in Hindustani Music,” Bansuri 11 (1994): 6–14. Singh, Awadhesh K. “Reading into If I Die Today” (1998), in The Fiction of Shashi Deshpande, ed. Pathak, 58–64. Singh, Jyoti. Indian Women Novelists: A Feminist Psychoanalytical Study (Jaipur: Rawat, 2007). Smith, Andrew, & William Hughes, ed. Empire and the Gothic: The Politics of Genre (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Sona-Sharma, Kavitri. “Women’s Lib, Indian Style,” Tribune (25 June 2000), http: //www.tribuneindia.com/2000/20000625/spectrum/books.htm#4 (accessed 7 August 2007). Thapar, Romila. Sakuntala: Texts, Readings, Histories (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1999). Torok, Maria. “The Illness of Mourning and the Fantasy of the Exquisite Corpse” (1994), in The Shell and the Kernel, ed. & tr. Abraham & Torok, 107–24. ——. “Theoretica: An Alternative to Theory” (1994), in The Shell and the Kernel, ed. & tr. Abraham & Torok, 253–56. Trivedi, Darshana. “Chak ravyuha: A Study of Shashi Deshpande’s The Binding Vine,” in Indian Women Novelists in English, ed. Jaydispinh Dodiya (New Delhi: Sarup & Sons, 2006): 75–80. Varma, Rashmi. “UnCivil Lines: Engendering Citizenship in the Postcolonial City,” N W S A Journal 10 (1998): 32–55. Viswanath, Gita. “In Conversation with Shashi Deshpande (3 June 2003) ” (2005), in Writing Difference, ed. Naik, 228–36. Viswanatha, Vanamala. “A Woman’s World … All the Way!” (interview with Shashi Deshpande) (1998), in The Fiction of Shashi Deshpande, ed. Pathak, 232–37. Williams, Anne. Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1995).

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Index

abandonment, 18, 58, 129, 159, 160, 179, 181, 190, 196, 202, 205, 208, 211, 216, 220 Abhijnana-sakuntala (Kalidasa), xxxviii, 5 abjection, 71, 72, 73, 80, 88, 90, 98, 131, 132, 136, 137, 160, 226 abortion, 137, 138, 139 Abraham, Nicolas, & Maria Torok, xxxviii, xl, 1, 4, 5, 15, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 31, 36, 54, 81, 85, 88, 89, 93, 94, 99, 100, 109, 143, 145, 172, 174, 180, 196, 197, 198, 203, 209, 212, 234, 236, 252, 253, 259, 268, 269, 275, 277, 278 Absalom, Absalom! (Faulkner), 190 absence, contrasted with loss, 17 affiliation, 29, 146, 194, 195 Ahmad, Aijaz, xxviii, xxxiv alienation, 16, 17, 27, 32, 59, 65, 66, 111, 113, 116, 122, 144, 145, 175, 188, 193, 224, 260, 265, 275, 285 allegorical mode, xxix, xxx ancestral home, 30, 33, 61, 63, 74, 118, 139, 188, 189, 224, 225, 282 anti-realism, 34 Appadurai, Arjun, xxxiv Appiah, Anthony Kwame, xxxiv Atrey, Mukta, xxiii Austen, Jane, xxxiii, xxxiv, xli; Northanger Abbey 46 autobiography, xviii, xxxii, 109, 127, 149, 156, 162, 230, 284 Ayodhya massacre, 238

Babri Masjid mosque, 238, 239 Bagavadh-Gita, xli Bande, Usha, 239 baroque, 3, 4 Beauvoir, Simone de, xxiv, xxxv, xli, 110

Becker, Susanne, 34, 35, 261, 287 Behera, Guru Charan, 120, 123 Beloved (Morrison), 190 Bhagavad-Gita, 51, 67, 140 Bhagvat Purana, 73 Bhalla, Amrita, xv, xvii, xxiv, 149, 161, 163, 164, 229, 231, 266, 270 Bharucha, Nilufer, 33, 231, 232 Bharwani, Shakuntala, xx Binding Vine, The (Deshpande), xix, xxv, xxvii, xxxii, xxxix, xl, 3, 17, 30, 40, 47, 116, 141, 143–83, 185, 187, 203, 223, 242, 257, 259, 280, 282, 284

Bombay, 118, 129, 130, 131, 148, 230, 232, 235, 238, 239, 240, 250, 259, 260, 265, 266, 282 Booker Prize, xx Brahminism, xxv, 7, 10, 39, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 69, 112, 122, 125, 133, 139, 195, 206, 208, 210, 222, 234, 239, 240, 244, 245, 247, 248, 254, 258 Brontë sisters, xvi, xviii, xxxiv, 30, 122, 147, 231, 262; Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre xix, 40; Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights 40 Burton, Antoinette, 190

298

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Cain and Abel myth, 79 Camus, Albert, xxxv, xli, 110, 195, 207; The Outsider 52 Castricano, Jodey, xli, 19, 198 Catholicism, 231 Chakladar, Arnab, xix, xxiii, xxvii, 3, 4 Chakravyuha, 182 Chatterji, Arindam, 79, 82, 83, 84, 89, 91

Chatterji, Roma, 259 Chekhov, Anton, 41 Chew, Shirley, 232, 255, 267 Christie, Agatha, 44, 45, 46, 56 Cixous, Hélène, xlii, 140 Coetzee, J.M., xxxi Come Up and Be Dead (Deshpande), xiii, xxxix, 39, 40–42, 45, 47, 71, 76, 288

Commonwealth Writer’s Prize, xxxi communalism, xxxiv Conrad, Joseph, “The Secret Sharer” 26

crime fiction, 30, 53 critical reputation, of Deshpande See: reputation, critical crossword puzzle, as trope, 124, 125, 126, 128, 173, 174, 176 crypt, as trope, xxxviii, xxxix, xl, xli, xlii, 5, 13, 15, 22, 23, 24, 27, 28, 36, 37, 54, 66, 72, 85, 86, 87, 90, 93, 94, 99, 104, 105, 115, 116, 120, 122, 129, 134, 135, 137, 139, 140, 141, 145, 149, 153, 154, 157, 160, 162, 163, 171, 172, 173, 176, 177, 181, 182, 187,며188, 197, 198, 199, 200, 203, 210, 211, 212, 220, 221, 222, 223, 226, 234, 235, 236, 242, 246, 249, 252, 253, 256, 257, 260, 261, 263, 264, 265, 269, 270, 271, 273, 274, 277, 280, 281

cryptomimeticism, xxxviii, xxxix, 1, 27, 110, 163, 188, 193, 196, 204, 214, 225, 249 cryptonymy, 24, 26

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D’Cruz, Doreen, 87, 88 Danta, Bijay, 242, 266, 267 Dark Holds No Terrors, The (Deshpande), xxvi, xxxix, 5, 39, 40, 47, 55, 70, 71–107, 113–16, 130, 151, 173, 217, 218, 236, 246, 259, 264, 278, 280, 282, 286 Dasan, A.S., xxvi, xxvii De, Aditi, xxvii, 9 Dear Reader” (Deshpande), xxxiv, xlii death, 1, 23, 25, 31, 35, 39, 40, 41, 43, 45, 47, 50, 51, 53, 56, 58, 59, 60, 61, 64, 65, 66, 70, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 96, 97, 99, 100, 103, 104, 105, 107, 119, 122, 124, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 143, 144, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 164, 165, 166, 170, 171, 173, 174, 175, 177, 178, 179, 182, 190, 196, 203, 204, 205, 207, 208, 209, 210, 212, 213, 214, 217, 218, 220, 222, 223, 225, 226, 229, 230, 231, 234, 236, 239, 240, 242, 243, 244, 245, 254, 257, 258, 260, 261, 262, 263, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272, 273, 274, 275, 276, 277, 281, 282, 283, 284, 285, 287 Derrida, Jacques, xv, xxxviii, xli, 1, 4, 53, 109, 198, 237 Desai, Anita, xxxvi; The Inheritance of Loss xx Desai, Kiran, xii, xx Deshpande, Anita, W O R K S : The Binding Vine xix, xxv, xxvii, xxxii, xxxix, xl, 3, 17, 30, 40, 47, 116, 141, 143–83, 185, 187, 203, 223, 242, 257, 259, 280, 282, 284; Come Up and Be Dead (xiii, xxxix, 39, 40–42, 45, 47, 71, 76, 288; The Dark Holds No Terrors xxvi, xxxix, 5, 39, 40, 47, 55, 70, 71–107, 113–16, 130, 151, 173, 217, 218, 236, 246, 259, 264, 278, 280, 282, 286; “Dear Reader” xxxiv, xlii;

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299

Index

“The Enemy Within” 52; “The Hornet’s Nest” 9; If I Die Today xxxix, 39, 41, 42–46, 47, 49, 50, 51, 53, 55, 56, 65, 111, 145, 283; “In First Person” 46, 56; In the Country of Deceit xii, 261, 283, 288; “The Last Frontier” 40, 46, 53; A Matter of Time xviii, xx, xxvii, xxxv, xxxix, xl, 1, 3, 4, 8, 9, 17, 30, 31, 33, 34, 40, 47, 115, 144, 185–227, 230, 233, 234, 239, 256, 272, 280, 284; Moving On 17, 47, 66, 115, 116, 144, 261, 277, 281– 88; “On the Writing of a Novel” 56; Roots and Shadows xxxix, 8, 39, 40, 47, 54–70, 74, 120, 133, 134, 282; Small Remedies xv, xxxv, xxxix, xl, xlii, 40, 47, 66, 109, 122, 144, 152, 185, 187, 229–76, 277, 281, 284; That Long Silence xx, xxvii, xxxv, xxxix, xl, 17, 40, 47, 51, 109–16, 117, 118, 120, 124–41, 147, 148, 163, 168, 174, 185, 218, 230, 232, 258, 259, 260, 268, 280, 282, 284; “Where Do We Belong: Regional, National or International?” xxxiii, 238; Writing from the Margin xv, xxv, xxvi, xxxiii, xxxiv, xlii, 9, 40, 46, 52, 53, 56, 74, 238, 279; “Writing From the Margin” xxvi, 74, 279 Deshpande, Anita, T H E M E S : abandonment; abjection; affiliation; alienation; ancestral home; Brahminism; disinheritance; dispossession; dreams; family; gender; ghosts; grief; haunting; Hinduism; individuation; inheritance; inheritance laws; irrationality; Islam and Muslims; lower/middle classes; marriage and marital relations; memory; nightmare; patriarchy; recollection; rejection; sadism; secrecy; violence; the unspeakable; women Deshpande, Anita, S E E A L S O : — narrative events and processes:

abortion; death; mourning; murder; rape; shame; silence; terror; transgenerationalism; trauma — narrative tropes: crossword puzzle; crypt; great divide; ring of recollection; skeleton in the cupboard; umbilical cord; womb — narrative features: anti-realism; autobiography; detective fiction; doublings; enigma; excess; firstperson narration; free indirect discourse; horror novel; indeterminacy; intertextuality; labyrinthine narrative structure; mirroring; modernism; mystery novel; overdetermination; omniscient narrator; stream of consciousness; third-person narration — generic elements associated with Deshpande: crime fiction; existentialism; feminism; gothic; horror; melodrama; mystery; red herrings detective fiction, xvi, xix, xxxix, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 79, 198, 278

Dickens, Charles, xvi, xxxiii, xxxiv, xli, 231, 262; Our Mutual Friend 40 disinheritance, 75 dispossession, 89, 125, 179, 180 doublings, 34, 90 dreams, xi, xxxviii, xl, xli, 19, 31, 32, 56, 57, 58, 61, 64, 82, 98, 105, 123, 124, 125, 126, 128, 132, 146, 176, 190, 196, 208, 210, 223, 235, 258, 266, 268

Eliot, T.S., 26; Murder in the Cathedral 262

“Enemy Within, The” (Deshpande), 52 enigma, 3, 4, 26, 28, 131, 203, 212, 235 Eve’s Weekly, 40, 42 excess, 3, 19, 34, 35, 261 existentialism, 16, 56, 110, 207

300

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“Fall of the House of Usher, The” (Poe), 26, 34, 190, 192 False Self (Winnicott), 82, 83, 87 family, xix, xxv, xxvii, xxxii, xxxvi, xxxix, 1, 3, 4, 17, 18, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 31, 32, 33, 36, 39, 44, 49, 52, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 73, 74, 75, 76, 79, 82, 85, 90, 92, 94, 102, 105, 111, 112, 113, 115, 118, 121, 122, 124, 125, 128, 130, 137, 145, 147, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 160, 161, 162, 163, 165, 166, 167, 169, 170, 171, 177, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 202, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 210, 211, 213, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 226, 227, 229, 231, 235, 236, 239, 241, 242, 244, 245, 246, 250, 251, 252, 253, 254, 255, 267, 268, 269, 270, 272, 280, 282, 284, 286, 288 Faulkner, William, xviii, xxxvi, xxxvii, xli, 35; Absalom, Absalom!, 190; The Sound and the Fury 267 Femina (Indian women's magazine), xxiv feminism, and Deshpande, xiii, xvi, xvii, xxii, xxiv, xxv, xxvi, xxvii, xxix, xxx, xxxi, xxxvii, 3, 4, 16, 35, 42, 52, 62, 71, 110, 112, 116, 117, 131, 132, 134, 146, 147, 153, 159, 164, 171, 234, 244, 261, 277, 278, 280 Feminist Press (CUNY), xxvii, 153 Ferenczi, Sándor, 20 Fire (dir. Deepa Mehta), xxv First Circle, The (Solzhenitsyn), 248 first-person narration, xxxii, xxxv, 39, 40, 41, 58, 72, 120, 144, 147, 149, 187, 230, 281, 284 Forsyte Saga, The (Galsworthy), 57 Frank, Frederick S., 30 free indirect discourse, xxxv, 188 Freud, Sigmund, xxxviii, 5, 19, 20, 24, 25, 26, 32, 36, 43, 48, 49, 76, 162, 194, 196, 197, 203, 209; das

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Unheimliche 26, 32, 48, 49; the uncanny xxi, xxxviii, xlii, 4, 22, 26, 27, 30, 32, 33, 34, 40, 49, 54, 71, 80, 86, 88, 93, 105, 122, 145, 162, 172, 192, 196, 235, 246, 273 See also: psychoanalysis Galsworthy, John, The Forsyte Saga, The 57 Gandhi, Rajiv, 186 Gaskell, Mrs, xxxiv Gass, William, 120 gender, 8, 91, 109, 110, 112, 132, 134, 139, 141, 144 Ghosh, Amitav, 30, 110 ghosts, xvi, xlii, 4, 30, 51, 60, 61, 70, 91, 104, 107, 118, 119, 185, 188, 198, 199, 226, 237, 276 God of Small Things, The (Roy), xx, xxiii Goethe, 7 gothic, xi, xvi, xviii, xxxiv, xxxvii, xxxviii, xxxix, 2, 3, 4, 19, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 39, 40, 44, 47, 54, 55, 56, 107, 135, 188, 189, 190, 194, 214, 229, 235, 240, 261, 279, 281 great divide, as gender trope, 143, 144, 146, 182 Greer, Germaine, 110 grief, 22, 23, 62, 81, 87, 93, 99, 149, 150, 151, 152, 154, 157, 161, 170, 172, 173, 179, 186, 200, 207, 208, 214, 217, 218, 220, 224, 237, 248, 253, 254, 257, 260, 262, 268, 269, 275 grotesque, the, 4, 81 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 25, 26, 27, 40, 105, 203, 209, 210, 211, 222, 233 Hardy, Thomas, xxxiv haunting, xvi, xviii, xxxviii, xxxix, xl, xlii, 1, 4, 5, 19, 24, 26, 28, 30, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 39, 40, 47, 51, 53, 56, 58, 60, 63, 66, 70, 71, 74, 78, 83, 86, 89, 93, 115, 116, 118, 119, 143, 150, 171,



Index 186, 187, 188, 190, 196, 207, 212, 213, 215, 220, 222, 229, 257, 258, 261, 269, 273, 280, 282, 283, 284

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, The House of Seven Gables 190 Heimliche, das (Freud), 26, 32, 48, 49 Henry VIII (Shakespeare), 189 Hindu mythology, xxv Hinduism, xxv, xl, 7, 83, 111, 112, 186, 191, 206, 231, 233, 238, 245, 248, 249, 250, 251, 253, 255, 256, 258, 275

Hindutva movement, 233, 239 Holm, Chandra, 109, 229, 230, 243, 283

“The Hornet’s Nest” (Deshpande), 9 horror novel, 71, 117 horror, 30, 76, 82, 90, 106, 117, 120, 135, 150, 210, 238, 239 House of Seven Gables, The (Hawthorne), 190 Huggan, Graham, xxi hysteria, 86, 97, 220 identitarianism, xxx, xxxi, xxxiv If I Die Today (Deshpande), xxxix, 39, 41, 42–46, 47, 49, 50, 51, 53, 55, 56, 65, 111, 145, 283 “In First Person” (Deshpande), 46, 56 In the Country of Deceit (Deshpande), xii, 261, 283, 288 indeterminacy, 35 individuation, 20, 85 inheritance laws, 3 Inheritance of Loss, The (Desai), xx inheritance, 3, 4, 67, 68, 70, 155, 185, 190, 237, 282 intertextuality, 4, 8, 79, 187, 195, 196, 199, 209, 210, 211, 221, 222, 263, 277 introjection, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 81, 86, 94, 103, 135, 136, 194, 259, 278 irrationality, 11, 33, 34, 87, 248, 286 Islam and Muslims, xl, 118, 230, 231, 238, 239, 240, 244, 245, 246, 248,

301 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256, 258, 264, 284

Ja, Subash K., xxxii Jain, Jasbir, xvi, xvii, xviii, xxiii, xxxiii, 47, 48, 49, 51, 52, 66, 107, 109, 110, 114, 126, 129, 159, 165, 166, 168, 170, 176, 178, 185, 195, 204, 210, 211, 225, 226, 230, 233, 234, 240, 266 James, Henry, “The Jolly Corner” 26 James, P.D., 44, 46 Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë), xix, 40 Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer, 30 “The Jolly Corner” (James), 26 Jong, Erica, xxiv, 110 Joyce, James, xxxvi Kalidasa, xxxviii, 5–16, 17, 18, 19, 22, 28, 31, 32, 55, 66, 67, 115, 148, 152, 153, 156, 188, 198, 199, 200, 220, 235, 252, 274, 278, 279, Sakuntala, 4, 5–16, 19, 66, 152, 199, 252, 274; = Abhijnana-sakuntala, xxxviii, 5 Karanth, Shivram, xxxiii Kennedy, Robert, 154 Khair, Tabish, 33, 110, 122, 274–76 Kierkegaard, Søren, xli, 189, 207 Kimbahune, R.S., xxiii, xxxii Kirpal, Viney, xxiii, 65 labyrinthine narrative structure, xxxvi, xl, 2, 29, 36, 120, 182, 190 Lacan, Jacques, 17, 19, 20, 25 LaCapra, Dominick, 17 Lal, Nandini, 282 “The Last Frontier” (Deshpande), 40, 46, 53 Lee, Harper, 41 lower class, xxv, xxix, 129, 132, 133, 146, 165 magical realism, xxxv, xxxvi Mahabharata, xi, xli, 5, 8, 9, 10, 13, 119, 182, 195, 205

302

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Majumdar, Saikat, xxxvi marriage, xxv, xxvi, 5, 8, 10, 30, 35, 42, 50, 59, 60, 61, 63, 64, 66, 68, 69, 74, 82, 89, 104, 106, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 117, 119, 120, 121, 122, 125, 126, 127, 128, 132, 135, 139, 143, 148, 154, 156, 158, 166, 168, 174, 177, 178, 181, 191, 193, 195, 200, 204, 205, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 218, 222, 223, 224, 241, 245, 261, 263, 264, 265, 271, 282, 286, 287 Matter of Time, A (Deshpande), xviii, xx, xxvii, xxxv, xxxix, xl, 1, 3, 4, 8, 9, 17, 30, 31, 33, 34, 40, 47, 115, 144, 185–227, 230, 233, 234, 239, 256, 272, 280, 284 Mehta, Deepa, dir. Fire xxv Mehta, Deepak, 259 melodrama, 3, 34, 41, 154, 175, 189, 214, 225, 286 memory, xiii, xxxii, xxxv, xxxvi, xxxix, xl, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 35, 65, 66, 72, 74, 78, 79, 90, 91, 92, 94, 101, 102, 103, 121, 152, 153, 156, 158, 181, 199, 208, 211, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 223, 224, 232, 235, 237, 242, 243, 244, 252,며257, 259, 266, 267, 268, 274, 275, 276, 280 middle class, xviii, xxv, xxix, xxxi, xxxii, 8, 44, 83, 112, 113, 114, 117, 119, 122, 124, 127, 128, 129, 130, 140, 146, 147, 163, 164, 168, 188, 250, 258 Miller, Barbara Stoler, 10, 11, 12, 14, 18, 19, 67, 235 mirroring, 30, 88, 90, 246, 249 Mirrorwork (ed. Rushdie & West), xx, xxi Mittapalli, Rajeshwar, 125, 230 Modern Languages Association International Bibliography, xxiii modernism, xxxv, xxxvi, xxxvii, xl, 2, 35, 122, 279 Mohanty, Chandra, xvi, 195 More, Thomas, 39



Morrison, Toni, xviii, xli; Beloved 190 mourning, 22, 27, 67, 75, 94, 99, 107, 136, 152, 160, 172, 173, 181, 186, 208, 219, 234, 236, 252, 274 Moving On (Deshpande), 17, 47, 66, 115, 116, 144, 261, 277, 281–88 Mukherjee, Meenakshi, 3, 31, 35, 187, 231, 234, 238 Mumbai, see Bombay, 118 Murder in the Cathedral (Eliot), 262 murder, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 50, 51, 76, 79, 81, 85, 86, 89, 96, 171, 286

Murthy, U.R. Anantha, xi Myles, Anita, xviii mystery novel, xxxix, 45, 46, 49, 51, 53, 283 mystery, xxxvii, xxxix, 9, 37, 39, 40, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 51, 53, 54, 55, 56, 66, 71, 79, 86, 111, 145, 148, 149, 161, 171, 178, 196, 198, 209, 211, 243, 283 Nabar, Vrinda, 52, 111, 279 Naik, Chanchala K., 115, 283 Naipaul, V.S., 110 Nandi, Ashis, 251 Nangia, Ashish, 256 Narayan, R.K., 110 narrative structure, xxxvi, xl, 28, 67, 120, 235 narrative style, xvi, xx, xxxv, 2, 40 nationalism, xxx, xxxiv, 29, 186, 233, 239, 251 nativism, xxxiv Ng, Andrew Hock Soon, 29 nightmare, xxxviii, xl, 32, 47, 61, 62, 72, 73, 80, 96, 98, 104, 105, 119, 123, 124, 125, 126, 190, 210, 212, 258, 265, 266, 267, 272 Northanger Abbey (Jane Austen), 46 Oedipus (Sophocles), 16 Oedipus complex, 19



303

Index

omniscient narrator, 188, 214, 218 “On the Writing of a Novel” (Deshpande), 56 Our Mutual Friend (Dickens), 40 Outsider, The (Camus), 52 overdetermination, 34, 35, 90, 134, 194, 261

Palekar, Shalmalee, xxiv, xxv, 55, 56, 113, 141, 144, 145, 147, 164, 278, 279, 280, 281 palimpsest, 35, 243 Palkar, Sarla, 117 Pandey, K.M., 146, 169 Paranjape, Makarand, xxii Parker, Emma, xxxv parochialism, xiii, xxii, xxvii, xxx, xxxiv, xxxv, 29, 55 Pathak, R.S., 45, 118, 202, 206, 207 patriarchy, xxv, 4, 71, 83, 134, 141, 160, 167, 190, 191, 192, 193, 196, 226, 278, 279, 280, 281 philosophy, xvi, xli, 2, 4, 109, 110 Piciucco, Pier Paolo, 30, 125, 230 Poe, Edgar Allan “The Fall of the House of Usher” 26, 34, 190, 192 postcolonial critics, xvii, xxviii, xxix postcolonialism, xi, xiii, xvii, xxii, xxvii, xxviii, xxix, xxxi, xxxiv, xxxvii, 29, 30, 147 postmodernism, xxxvi, 2 poststructuralism, xviii, xxxi, xxxviii psychoanalysis, xviii, xxxviii, 1, 5, 17, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 36, 53, 54, 79, 82, 85, 86, 105, 135, 136, 194, 209, 268, 277, 278, 280

Punter, David, 29 Radcliffe, Ann, 44 Radhakrishnan, R., xxx Rajan, Chandra, 10 Ramayana, xli Rand, Nicholas, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 36, 172, 236, 277

Rani, K. Suneetha, 62, 63 Rao, Raja, 110 rape, 73, 104, 143, 146, 147, 149, 153, 157, 158, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 176, 185, 285 Rashkin, Esther, 19, 25, 26, 27, 54, 85, 86, 109, 221 Ray, Satyajit, 41 realism, xvi, xviii, xxv, xxx, xxxi, xxxv, xxxvi, xxxvii, xxxviii, xl, 2, 3, 4, 30, 34, 35, 40, 56, 60, 135, 189, 222, 261 reception, critical, of Deshpande, xvi, xix, xxi, xxii, xxiii, xxiv, xxx, xxxv, xlii, 2, 7, 12, 14, 39, 71, 74, 116, 129, 146, 158, 201, 218 recollection, 11, 23, 27, 36, 73, 84, 91, 94, 96, 100, 119, 175, 215, 224, 272, 274

red herrings, 3, 4, 35, 45 Reddy, Y. Sunita, xxxii, 117, 164, 206, 214, 231 regionalism, xxxiv, 2, 29 rejection, 6, 7, 11, 59, 83, 87, 113, 154, 181, 192, 220, 234, 245 Ricciardi, Alessia, 17 ring of recollection, as trope, xxxviii, 1, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 22, 40, 55, 67, 101, 115, 148, 153, 188, 197, 198, 200, 211, 224, 235, 236, 252, 268, 272, 288 Riquelme, Jean–Paul, xxxvii, 34 Roots and Shadows (Deshpande), xxxix, 8, 39, 40, 47, 54–70, 74, 120, 133, 134, 282 Roy, Arundhati, xviii, 30; The God of Small Things xx, xxiii Roy, Parama, 249 Royle, Nicholas, 53, 109 Rushdie, Salman, xii, xx, xxi, xxiii, xxiv, xxx, xxxiv, 30, 110, 231 sadism, 113, 114, 117 Sahgal, Nayantara, xi, xxxvi, 185 Sahitya Akademi Award, xx, 116

304

THE RING OF RECOLLECTION

Sakuntala (Kalidasa), 4, 5–16, 19, 66, 152, 199, 252, 274 See also: Shakuntala Sarker, Sonita, 153, 158, 159, 163, 176 Sarma, Parag Moni, 57 Sartre, Jean–Paul, xxxv, xli Saussure, Ferdinand de, 5 Sebastian, Mrinalini, xvii, xviii, xix, xxii, xxiv, xxvii, xxviii, xxix, xxx, xxxi, xxxii, xxxiii, xxxvii, 124, 125, 129, 134, 141, 146, 147, 232, 280 ‘second class literature’, xxii, xxix, xxxii, xxxiii secrecy, xxxviii, xxxix, xl, xli, xlii, 1, 2, 4, 10, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 32, 35, 36, 37, 41, 42, 43, 44, 48, 49, 50, 51, 53, 54, 55, 61, 62, 65, 71, 72, 86, 93, 95, 99, 104, 105, 106, 107, 109, 113, 114, 115, 135, 136, 137, 143, 145, 149, 160, 183, 185, 188, 190, 194, 196, 197, 198, 199, 203, 205, 210, 211, 214, 218, 222, 229, 234, 236, 241, 242, 252, 260, 261, 263, 264, 265, 266, 269, 270, 272, 273, 278, 280, 281, 282, 283, 287, 288

“The Secret Sharer” (Conrad), 26 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 19, 29, 31, 32, 36, 107, 190, 235 See also: haunting self-loathing, 90 Sengupta, S., 118 Seshadri, Vijayalakshmi, 59, 65 Shakespeare, William, 7, 26; Hamlet 25, 26, 27, 40, 105, 203, 209, 210, 211, 222, 233; Henry VIII 189 Shakuntala (Kalidasa), xxxix, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 18, 55, 66, 67, 84, 90, 101, 106, 113, 149, 152, 164, 199, 220, 268, 278, 279 shame, xxxviii, xxxix, 15, 17, 23, 49, 86, 87, 88, 92, 94, 104, 113, 114, 118, 125, 127, 132, 136, 137, 138, 139, 151, 171, 183, 193, 194, 210, 211, 216, 217, 218, 236, 250, 269, 280, 287



Sharma, R. Siddhartha, 244 Shukla, Manjari, 56, 57, 68, 69 silence, xxxix, 13, 14, 17, 18, 19, 23, 36, 44, 52, 53, 65, 78, 86, 89, 99, 103, 104, 106, 117, 126, 131, 137, 139, 147, 149, 151, 153, 154, 159, 169, 171, 193, 203, 205, 210, 215, 223, 234, 240, 242, 244, 251, 252, 257, 258, 260, 261, 262, 263, 270, 271, 275, 280 Simms, Robert, 255 Singh, Awadhesh K., 44, 45, 47, 49 Singh, Jyoti, 89 skeleton in the cupboard, 86, 87, 269 Small Remedies (Deshpande), xv, xxxv, xxxix, xl, xlii, 40, 47, 66, 109, 122, 144, 152, 185, 187, 229–76, 277, 281, 284

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, The First Circle 248 Sophocles, Oedipus 16 Sound and the Fury, The (Faulkner), 267

south India, xxxv, xxxvi, 2, 30, 186, 188, 195, 196, 222, 237, 268 Sriranga (father of Deshpande), xxii, xxxiii stream of consciousness, xxxv, 36, 73 Stri Jati (caste of women), 146 Symons, Julian, 43 Tagore, Rabindranath, xxxiii, xxxiv, 7, 8, 12, 13 terror, xxxix, 33, 34, 39, 48, 55, 72, 73, 83, 117, 130, 190, 217, 248, 251 Thapar, Romila, 7, 8, 12, 14 That Long Silence (Deshpande), xx, xxvii, xxxv, xxxix, xl, 17, 40, 47, 51, 109–16, 117, 118, 120, 124–41, 147, 148, 163, 168, 174, 185, 218, 230, 232, 258, 259, 260, 268, 280, 282, 284

theatricality, 84 third-person narration, 72, 84, 86, 88, 187, 201 Tolstoy, Leo, xxxiv

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305

Index

Torok, Maria, xxxviii, xl, 1, 4, 5, 15, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27, 28, 31, 36, 54, 81, 85, 88, 89, 93, 94, 99, 100, 103, 109, 135, 136, 145, 172, 180, 196, 197, 198, 203, 209, 234, 236, 252, 253, 259, 268, 269, 275, 277, 278 transgenerationalism, xxiv, xxxviii, xxxix, 5, 18, 24, 26, 27, 28, 36, 57, 59, 68, 89, 105, 124, 139, 182, 186, 188, 191, 197, 229, 257, 260, 261, 269, 271, 273, 278, 280, 283, 284 — See also: haunting trauma, xxviii, xxxix, xl, 10, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 36, 55, 72, 75, 80, 89, 91, 95, 96, 99, 109, 125, 136, 160, 162, 163, 172, 179, 180, 187, 194, 214, 216, 217, 218, 221, 235, 236, 240, 252, 257, 259, 269, 281 umbilical cord, as trope, 89, 173 uncanny, the (Freud), xxi, xxxviii, xlii, 4, 22, 26, 27, 30, 32, 33, 34, 40, 49, 54, 71, 80, 86, 88, 93, 105, 122, 145, 162, 172, 192, 196, 235, 246, 273 Unheimliche, das (Freud), 26 unspeakable, the, 3, 4, 25, 71, 94, 125, 196, 220, 236, 237 Varma, Rashmi, 129, 130, 133, 272 ventriloquism, 84 violence, xxxviii, xl, 4, 18, 32, 40, 45, 47, 48, 73, 92, 93, 94, 112, 113, 131,



132, 141, 163, 167, 169, 187, 210, 221, 226, 230, 233, 238, 239, 240, 255, 258, 259, 266, 284 Vishnu Purana, 79

Viswanath, Gita, xxxv, xxxvi West, Elizabeth, xx “Where Do We Belong: Regional, National or International?” (Deshpande), xxxiii, 238 Williams, Anne, 28, 29, 189, 194 Winnicott, D.W., 82, 83, 84, 85 womb, as trope, 13, 33, 105, 173, 182, 270

women, in Deshpande’s fiction, xvi, xvii, xviii, xxii, xxiv, xxv, xxvi, xxvii, xxix, xxxii, xxxix, xl, 2, 9, 10, 17, 40, 46, 52, 53, 54, 59, 62, 63, 71, 88, 109, 110, 111, 112, 116, 117, 124, 126, 127, 129, 134, 138, 139, 140, 141, 143, 144, 146, 147, 152, 153, 159, 161, 162, 163, 164, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 176, 178, 181, 186, 193, 215, 226, 230, 231, 232, 237, 261, 278, 279, 280, 281, 282, 284 Woolf, Virginia, xxxvi Writing from the Margin (Deshpande), xv, xxv, xxvi, xxxiii, xxxiv, xlii, 9, 40, 46, 52, 53, 56, 74, 238, 279 “Writing From the Margin” (Deshpande), xxvi, 74, 279 Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë), 40